expression for the rage of the Manitou, "the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians' religious beliefs". Manitou was "the spiritual potency of an object" or "a phenomenon", the force which made "everything in Nature responsive to man". Other suggestions have been offered, but all involve some relationship to beings or powers that the colonists associated with the devil or evil. It is, therefore, unlikely that it was his birth name, rather than one that he acquired or assumed later in life, but there is no historical evidence on this point. The name may suggest, for example, that he underwent special spiritual and military training, and was selected for his role as liaison with the settlers in 1620 for that reason. Early life Almost nothing is known of Tisquantum's life before his first contact with Europeans, and even when and how that first encounter took place is subject to contradictory assertions. First-hand descriptions of him written between 1618 and 1622 do not remark on his youth or old age, and Salisbury has suggested that he was in his twenties or thirties when he was captured and taken to Spain in 1614. If that was the case, he would have been born around 1585 (±10 years). Native culture The tribes who lived in southern New England at the beginning of the 17th century referred to themselves as Ninnimissinuok, a variation of the Narragansett word Ninnimissinnȗwock meaning "people" and signifying "familiarity and shared identity". Tisquantum's tribe of the Patuxets occupied the coastal area west of Cape Cod Bay, and he told an English trader that the Patuxets once numbered 2,000. They spoke a dialect of Eastern Algonquian common to tribes as far west as Narragansett Bay. The various Algonquian dialects of Southern New England were sufficiently similar to allow effective communications. The term patuxet refers to the site of Plymouth, Massachusetts and means "at the little falls". referencing Morison. Morison gives Mourt's Relation as authority for both assertions. The annual growing season in southern Maine and Canada was not long enough to produce maize harvests, and the Indian tribes in those areas were required to live a fairly nomadic existence, while the southern New England Algonquins were "sedentary cultivators" by contrast. They grew enough for their own winter needs and for trade, especially to northern tribes, and enough to relieve the colonists' distress for many years when their harvests were