The creole hypothesis I can’t endorse. Have you ever seen a map of how far-flung the Algonquian languages were in North America?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages
All of these languages started to diverge from each other about 3000 B.C.—according to glottochronology and other estimates. Your hypothetical creole would have had to have been in place by that time to have created the extensive divergence between the languages we see today.
Give me a mechanism for this creolization that makes sense in this time frame. Show me with real-life examples how it happened.
Ironically, the process you are describing actually did happen once historically—when Pidgin Delaware (it never really became a creole) was formed with a largely Lenape vocabulary but with some deference to Germanic (Swedish, Dutch, English) grammar.
But not Algonquian itself, no.
Creoles differ substantially from pidjin ~
However, English has only one existing cognate language ~ Freis in Freisland, and it doesn't sound anything like English. Freis itself doesn't have as many dialects as your standard Germanic languages do.
Colonial Dutch, in the British colonies, was derived from a handful of Dutch dialects and within two generations it'd broken up into the requisite 32 different dialects, although many analysts argue it actually created a brand new 33rd dialect spoken West of Albany.
One of the characteristics of English that makes it the dominant language wherever it is spoken is that it doesn't form dialect forms very easily ~ if at all.
BTW, the write up in Wiki actually references a situation where SEVERAL Algonkian languages formed a new creole.
This stuff goes on all the time, particularly if you don't have large vocabularies, or if you have a large vocabulary already shared by other language groups.
