This is the history of the lost Siwanoy tribe.

When Capt. Daniel Patrick landed at Monakewego -- Greenwich Point -- on July 16, 1640, the settlement numbered more than 1,000.

The sachem, or chief, of the Siwanoy tribe was named Ponus. He was a very influential chief among the various Connecticut tribes. "He was a large man. But he was not the smartest of the tribe. In fact, the oral history tells us that he was actually a pretty dull blade. His presence was enough to command the respect of the tribe by itself. But what they didn't know -- except for those closest to his family -- was that it was his wife who ran the show."

Ponus Yacht Club

Ponus confided all tribal business with his wife, Alesha-nee. When the chief entertained guests at his residence, according to Joy Hartley's research, it was Aleshanee who sparkled and dominated the discussions of tribal affairs. She charmed chiefs of visiting tribes, and she was able to settle inter-tribal disputes with her quiet diplomacy.

"This was highly unusual for any of the Native Amer-ican nations. Their society was almost strictly paternalistic. Women's traditional roles were mostly limited to fishing, cooking, raising the children. But Aleshanee was different. She was said to have been an avid swimmer, body surfing in the white swells of the sound. All of the members of the tribe came to her for advice about raising children, about political infighting, about sex -- though the rumor was, back then, that she enjoyed the company of women a little more than was proper."

Ponus died in a freak hunting accident. Though his oldest son Owenoke was nominally named chief of the tribe, he was still too young to assume the responsibility of governance for the entire tribe. So Aleshanee continued to run the operation behind the scenes, though with 12-year-old Owenoke as chief, her role was much more out front.

When Capt. Patrick and Robert Feakes came to the Siwanoy village looking for a chief, they were directed to young Owenoke. On July 18, 1640, two days after their arrival, it was with the young chief that Messrs. Patrick and Feakes negotiated a bargain to buy the lands that would comprise Greenwich, Conn. for a sum of 25 winter coats.

While they were fleecing -- quite literally -- the Siwanoy tribe out of their ancestral lands, Aleshanee was receiving an unsolicited visit from another member of the English contingent. "They assumed that everything they saw belonged to them, including our women," spat Hartley. The legend is that Aleshanee impaled this poor Englishman with a buck's horn in his groin."

Neither Owenoke nor the other chiefs who witnessed the transaction understood just what they were getting into; they assumed Aleshanee had endorsed the deal. "There was no interpreter. So here was some white guy with an armful of warm coats -- our people had just suffered the worst winter in anyone's memory -- and all they needed to do to have them was to put a mark on a piece of paper. Aleshanee was infuriated, but there was nothing she could do then. She was smart enough to understand that these folks wanted us out; she had heard all the stories from New York of various tribes getting the big swindle."

 The Siwanoy, led by Aleshanee, refused to leave the land. "She knew that the land exists for everyone to share. The whole idea of a human 'owning' a piece of land seemed almost as foolish as a human owning a piece of the sky, or the ocean."

Around 1643, two companies of English colonists joined the Dutch in their quest to extinguish the Indian "threat". An attack on the Siwanoy village near Greenwich resulted in the massacre of almost 700 people, completely wiping out the Siwanoy tribe.

That's what the history books say. But Aleshanee escaped the joint English-Dutch genocide, along with four of her children -- two sons and two daughters -- by hiding out under a hollowed log. Pictorial diaries kept by Aleshanee that painted the picture of her escape, with 10 other adults and 12 children of the tribe, from the English guns into the woodlands. The diaries tell the story of their tenuous survival over the years, huddling during the cold winter months with what was left of their legacy -- the few winter coats that they were able to carry with them.

The Siwanoy lived in secret for a generation, only occasionally venturing into developed areas to steal a few indispensables: warm clothing, medicine, cigarettes, whiskey. However they soon recognized the necessity of assimilating into white American society.

 Aleshanee passed away in 1726 at the age of 110. As the American Revolution began, members of the Siwanoy -- then numbering near 100 people -- joined up with the American forces. They did not see themselves anymore as a distinct nation, just a rag-tag bunch of survivalist holdouts, and the Siwanoy passed quietly into history.

Joy Hartley is the sitting president of what's left of the Siwanoy. In 1998. the Siwanoy tribe's application for federal recognition was approved.

-http://old.fairfieldweekly.com/articles/siwanoy.html

" I think the number of foreign fighters in Iraq is probably below a thousand."

-Gen. John Abizaid, Cmdr. U.S. Central Command, Iraq;   9/26/04

The likelihood of a person committing suicide is partly determined as early as at birth, researchers believe. The Swedish team looked at 700,000 adults and found low birthweight and being born to a teenage mother meant a two-fold rise in suicide risk.

The report also said risk increased for shorter babies. The authors, from the National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention in Stockholm, said it proved genetics played an important role in suicides.

Babies weighing 2kg or less were more than twice as likely to commit suicide as adults than those weighing between 3.25kg and 3.75kg, according to the findings published in The Lancet.

Children born to mothers under 19 years old were also more than twice as likely to commit suicide as those born to women aged 20 to 29.

Suicide risk also increased for those born to mothers who did not proceed beyond secondary school or had had at least three other children.

From Kindred_Spirit

A fisherman aptly named Fisher
 fished for some fish in a fissure.
Till a fish with a grin,
pulled the fisherman in.
Now they're fishing the fissure for Fisher.

TAMPA, Fla. - The "Beer Belly Bandit" has struck again after a 10-month break, adding to the dozens of bank robberies he has committed in Florida since 2000.

Our Lady of the Hutch

By EVE LaPLANTE

Published: September 19, 2004

Anne Hutchinson was born in England in 1591. The daughter of a midwife and a Puritan preacher, she grew up to be both. While a woman could not preach in public, some well-respected Puritan women did run Scripture-study groups for other women. Hutchinson did this in England and, after 1634, in Massachusetts, where she landed with her large family during the Great Migration.

 Once a week, in her parlor, she interpreted Scripture and discussed Puritan theology before a growing audience of women and, eventually, men. At a time when women could not vote, hold public office or teach outside the home, she attracted a following of prominent citizens eager for social reform.

Stung by the challenge she posed as a woman wielding political and religious power, Gov. John Winthrop called her before the Massachusetts General Court on a charge of heresy. Hutchinson defended herself brilliantly, but the judges, faced with a perceived threat to public order, banished her for behaving in a manner not fitting for her sex. Through the winter they kept her prisoner. In March 1638, the First Church of Christ in Boston tried and excommunicated her.

Undeterred, Hutchinson, who was 46 and pregnant for the 16th time, set out in thigh-deep snow with 50 of her followers to found Rhode Island, six days away by foot. The later Colony of Rhode Island united her Rhode Island with Roger Williams's Providence Plantation.

After her husband's death, she petitioned Dutch authorities, who were more tolerant than the English of religious dissent, for permission to build a house above Pelham Bay, near the Split Rock. New Amsterdam welcomed her and her seven younger children. The next year, her Dutch neighbors warned her to abandon her farmhouse because of a coming raid by Siwanoy Indians. Hutchinson, who had opposed the Pequot War and all other English efforts to suppress the natives, refused to leave her house or bear arms.

In 1643, Siwanoy warriors, surprised to find any settlers present, scalped the Hutchinsons and burned their bodies. Hutchinson was survived by five older children who lived elsewhere and 9-year-old Susan, who was out picking berries during the rampage. The Indians discovered the little girl hiding between the halves of the Split Rock and adopted her.

Realizing the identity of his illustrious victim, the Siwanoy chief renamed himself Ann-Hoeck. The nearby river was given Anne's surname. Nathaniel Hawthorne modeled Hester Prynne, the heroine of "The Scarlet Letter," on Anne Hutchinson, whose descendants include three presidents: George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

From thenarrator

Authorities seize 80,000 cans of dog food sold as foie gras
By Nofar Sinai

The Health and Agriculture ministries' branches in Ashkelon yesterday seized 80,000 cans of dog food that had been disguised as foie gras, as if fit for human consumption.

The product, imported from Bulgaria by Fried Leonid and originally labeled "chicken for dogs," was given two different fraudulent labels: "Domestic Birds liver pate. Producer: S.E. Grenot, France" and "Pate foie gras. Producer: Lovmit General Toshevo."

16 YEARS AGO TODAY

Sep 24 1988

High on PCP and brandishing a shotgun, James Brown interrupts an insurance seminar next door to his business office in Augusta, Georgia and accuses the attendees of using his private restroom. The resulting 90-minute interstate pursuit ends only after police shoot out his truck tires. He ends up serving two years in prison.

The Godfather Of Soul, the Hardest Working Man In Show Biz, Mr. Dynamite, Soul Brother Number One--they were probably all titles among the many Brown thought up for himself, but that doesn't make them any less fitting. With a live-wire stage show based on stamina, style, sex and turn-on-a-dime syncopation, Brown led American black music into ever-harder and meatier territory.

A hardluck dropout born in 1928 in Macon and raised in Augusta, Georgia, Brown's famous screech made its debut in gospel choirs at the local church. At 20, after leading several imitative vocal groups and receiving a conviction for armed robbery, Brown joined with noted gospel singer Bobby Byrd to form the Flames, which became James Brown & His Famous Flames after the vocal quartet scored a 1956 million-seller with the torchy future show-stopper "Please Please Please"

 Brown went on an adventurous streak that yielded new, intricate beats and jazz-informed horns. His increasing knack for extemporaneous composing meant studio tapes often captured the bursting creative fire of interactions with his like-minded band. Song lyrics were replaced by chants, grunts, howls and screams while extended grooves chugged over spots where verses would normally change to choruses. "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" and "I Got You (I Feel Good) hit the top 10, and funk was born.

For the Millennium issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine's editors asked James Brown: "Who are your 20th Century heroes?"

Brown's reply? South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. "He's like a grandfather to me," said Brown.

http://launch.yahoo.com/artist/artistFocus.asp?artistID=1039259

Officials estimate 250,000 homeless

By Amy Bracken
ASSOCIATED PRESS

11:00 a.m. September 22, 2004

GONAIVES, Haiti – U.N. peacekeepers fired into the air to keep a hungry crowd at bay Wednesday.

More than 1,000 people have been declared missing in Haiti. The northern city of Gonaives was the hardest hit in the country – with some 600 dead. Piles of bodies grew in morgues as rescuers found more victims in mud and rubble.

Carcasses of pigs, goats and dogs still floated in muddy waters slowly receding from the streets in Gonaives, Haiti's third-largest city with some 250,000 people. No house escaped damage. The homeless sloshed through the streets carrying belongings on their heads, while people in homes that still had roofs tried to dry scavenged clothes. Flies buzzed around bloated corpses piled high at the city's three morgues. The electricity was off, and the stench of death hung over the city.

"We're going to start burying people in mass graves."

**********************************************************

FEARS OF EPIDEMIC

    Grave fears were felt by health workers that epidemics may occur because a lot of human bodies and animal carcasses left unburied, overflowing sewage has brought contamination, potable water and medical materials are in great need.

    At the General Hospital, Gonaives' main medical institution, medical supplies were running out, but the main road north from the city was destroyed in the storm, making it difficult to access aid materials.

    Nearly a week after the storm, water in some places of Gonaivesis still knee-high, and a number of children, orphaned or abandoned, were seen roaming around the city, an official of the Red Cross said.

    Aid workers feared waterborne disease, especially malaria and tetanus, may erupt, an official of the UN Children's Fund said.