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Unlocking Her Past

Rose Eleazer Cuffee Samuels is on a quest to understand the story of her Shinnecock family -- what it meant 300 years ago and what it means today

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

The woman's relatives fill the history book, page after page of black-and-white photos. Dark-eyed people staring into the camera -- weathered barns, old houses and grassy fields behind them.

The fading pictures have the aura of photographs found in a long forgotten time capsule, perhaps one dedicated to a people who disappeared and whose histories were never written. Old white-haired people, young people, babies, most simply dressed and others handsomely turned out for the photographer.

They are Shinnecock Indians, descendants of the first people to live along the South Fork. In a sense, they are history's survivors, frozen in a time and a place the instant the photographer snapped the shutter. Click! There's old white-haired Wickham Cuffee, a man who hunted whales from small boats and who could talk about how it felt to bury a harpoon into a whale's back, sitting on the back porch of his house. Some of his neighbors thought he looked like George Washington. Click! There's Warren Cuffee, wearing his Civil War uniform years after the fighting stopped, a man who could talk about men dying on the battlefield. The photograph has ghostlike qualities, maybe because it was taken just before he drowned on a stranded ship called the Circassian. Click! There are generations of Eleazers on their front steps, at special events, in church clothes and buckskins and feathered headdresses.

The woman knows well these photographs of the past because they are images of her relatives. She knows the stories of the whale hunter and the Civil War veteran; she knows Warren Cuffee's name is chipped onto the stone of a memorial to the Shinnecock men who drowned on the Circassian, a memorial that sits in a patch of grass on the reservation in Southampton. She looks at these photographs, she studies them, because she yearns to make sense of their lives, and their histories.

Her name is Rose Eleazer Cuffee Samuels. She is 61 years old, and lives in Bellport. Her father was born on the Shinnecock reservation and walked away from it when he was a young boy and never returned to live there -- a choice made so that the boy might have a better future, but one that reverberates in her life today.

"Eleazer and Cuffee are very old Shinnecock names," she says in a soft, graceful voice. "My father's name was Paul Eleazer. His mother was Nettie Cuffee. He left the reservation to find work. He was a quiet man, but sometimes he'd talk about the reservation. He never forgot the place. But he felt Shinnecock no matter where he was on Long Island. He did not have to be on the reservation to be Shinnecock." Samuels has never lived on the reservation, and at this stage of her life she feels more Shinnecock than any time in her life. She grew up in Patchogue, lived for 20 years in California, and returned to Long Island to dig deep into her family's remarkable history. She has studied the life of her great-great-great grandfather, an 18th-Century Shinnecock Protestant minister named Paul Cuffee, frequently visiting the forlorn patch of woods by the railroad tracks in Hampton Bays where he is buried, his gravestone marked off by a rotting wooden fence.

Alone, she stands at the gravesite and listens to his spirit talk to her. She is on a quest to learn everything she can about her people, her family, and the history of the first inhabitants of Long Island. It is her journey.

"I don't know where, exactly, I will end up," she says. "But I have a mission to complete."

The journey of Rose Eleazer Cuffee Samuels has not been without rough spots. Since early in the summer, she has been living in a homeless shelter in Bellport -- this descendant of Long Island's first people has no place of her own, and has been told by Shinnecock trustees that she cannot live on the reservation. Her life at this moment in her journey seems to be a metaphor for the very people she is descended from -- a people made homeless by the Island's first Europeans, who pushed the Indians off their land in exchange for items such as pots, pans, cloth, alcohol, even dogs.

Her family members -- the people in the photographs, her father, her mother, who was born on the Poospatuck reservation in Mastic, her father's Shinnecock brothers, her own brothers -- never got to tell their stories. If their history had not been written by outsiders they would hardly have one. Today, some of her relatives live on the Shinnecock reservation, but she knows that Indian history is not confined to a set place within formal boundaries, because all of Long Island was once Indian land. Their stories go beyond those boundaries -- her father told her this when she was a child. Maybe because of her own circumstances, she believes he was right.

"I want to tell these stories so people on Long Island can know the truth, the way it was and not the way they think it was," she says.

* * *

The Indian people who lived on the fat peninsula of the South Fork were part of a huge family called the Algonquians that stretched up and down the East Coast. They were an interconnected people who lived similar lives, yet spoke far different languages that are today considered extinct. The speakers of any Algonquian language, once spoken from Maine to Florida, can today can be counted on two hands.

The first Indians arrived thousands of years ago to a Long Island fresh from the grinding and thawing of a huge glacier. The land was new, literally, and the people had to invent new lives in a newly constructed world. Over the centuries, the Indians evolved into a people who lived off the land and the ocean.

But their location would be their undoing. From coastal Canada to modern-day North Carolina, the Algonquians were the first people along the eastern seaboard to see European explorers, and the first people to see settlers arrive in small groups to "buy" their land and build villages and towns. They were the first to be exposed to European diseases that reduced their numbers, in some cases, by more than 90 percent, the first to lose their culture, their language, their religion. It would be a century before Indian groups just 100 miles to the west felt the same convulsions. To the Indians, the effects of the diseases were catastrophic; to the English, the deaths of huge numbers of Indians by diseases were a sign that God had cleared title to the land for the new arrivals.

The English who arrived on Long Island knew it was a special place. They described it glowingly, claimed it was so filled with plants and trees that its perfume could be smelled at sea long before land was sighted. It was not long after these first Europeans arrived that they met the people they were to call the Shinnecock.

Gaynell Stone writes in her massive book "The Shinnecock Indians: A Culture History," that a European who met the Shinnecock Indians in 1627, the year after the Dutch bought Manhattan Island, described their home like this: "...In some places it is from 3 to 4 miles broad, and it has several creeks and bays, where many savages dwell who support themselves by planting maize and making sewan (wampum), and who are called Souwenox or Sinnecox." By the early 1700s, the word "Shinnecock" began to appear in records.

To the east were bands the English called Montauketts, who were accomplished whalers. North of both groups lived a people the English called the Corchaugs, of whom today there isn't a living member. But their intricately carved arrowheads and spear points turn up in plowed farm fields as if to remind people that they once lived here. The three groups were interrelated, spoke a similar language, and traded freely amongst themselves and with Algonquian people who lived along the southern New England coastline, traveling from place to place in huge dugout canoes carved from oak trees.

As Stone writes, the English, after their arrival in Southampton, began "predetermined, sequential steps ... to secure title to Indian lands and to control the Indian population." The English coveted what the Shinnecock had lived on for thousands of years -- fertile farmland and woods thick with tall trees.

As the transformation from Indian land to an English community took place, relations between the two groups predictably soured. Some English houses were set on fire by the Shinnecock as a protest against land seizures and laws that applied to only them; this led to penalties being assessed against the Shinnecock. The Indians had no money to pay fines, but they had land, so the English seized more and more of it.