Subscribe
Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples living along North America’s eastern seaboard knew about earthquakes long before Europeans appeared in the region, according to an expert.
Tribal nations like the Seneca and Cayuga of the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy (also including Mohawk, Tuscarora, Onondaga and Oneida) as well as Algonquian peoples like the Natick (Massachusetts Indians) and Mi’kmaq of Atlantic Canada all have a word for earthquake, according to Boston College seismologist John Ebel.
Researching which tribes in the region have a word for earthquake could be useful, “because that would suggest that earthquakes were a rather repetitive thing,” Ebel noted in a recent talk at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting.
A statement by the Society noted that while northeastern North America might not feel like earthquake country compared to California, the region has a long record of witnessing large quakes. Since the past 400 years (coinciding with European colonisation), there have been written records that have documented these quakes.
However, according to Ebel, the record can be extended into the past with the help of Native American knowledge and can help scientists better understand earthquake hazard in the area.
He cited two instances. Ebel pointed to Moodus, Connecticut. ‘Moodus’ comes from an Algonquin dialect and means “place of noises.”
“For hundreds of years, people have heard “booms”—as if echoing in an underground cavern—in the area. Ebel said the Moodus noises are similar those he heard as a graduate student camping in the Mojave Desert following a magnitude 5.1 earthquake,” the statement observed.
“The Moodus noises sounded like distant thunder of a boom coming up from the ground, very similar to what I heard from the California aftershocks several years before,” said Ebel, who noted that modern seismic instruments have recorded earthquake swarms in Moodus. “So the ‘place of noises’ means that they were hearing earthquakes long before Europeans came to that locality.”
The second instance he pointed to was a hill called Mount Nashoba, 45 minutes from downtown Boston. ‘Nashoba’ is a Native American word that means ‘hill that shakes.’
Ebel said interdisciplinary research with ethnologists with more detailed knowledge about Native American languages and narratives could be very helpful to seismologists looking to extend the northeastern North America earthquake record into pre-colonial times.
“If there are legends that preserve information about probable earthquakes, for instance, it might be possible to define some sort of estimate of [shaking] intensity from the descriptions in the stories,” he said.