From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600–1830 by William A. Starna

Abstract

Book Reviews 511 ies of previous correspondence or remembrances of respected forefathers to be collected in family histories, etc., were handled: in a letter to Martin Van Buren drafted but not sent from roughly April 25, 1820, Madison rebuked the younger politician for inappropriately allowing some of their correspondence to be published and thereby exposing Madison to criticism for his participation in partisanship(59). He was similarly concerned for the reputations of others, and on one occasion advised a friend’s son to avoid publishing certain letters which the father had written to Madison containing remarks about various notable persons which “may be displeasing” to them(342). To a certain extent, this concern for personal honor was merely an extension of Madison’s constitutional musings, all of which were intended to ensure that the reputation of republicanism not be unduly damaged by an American mishandling of the concept. By protecting the reputations of those individuals most closely associated with the institutions and exercise of the new government, Madison was protecting the regime itself: it was an application on a small scale of his overwhelming concern that the American “example of a free system . . . be more of a pilot to a good port, than a Beacon, warning from a bad one”(158). What stands out most in this volume, then, is the extent to which Madison had not yet truly “retired” but rather remained an active partisan on behalf of the American experiment in self-government. From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600–1830. By William A. Starna. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013, 320 pages, $60.00 Cloth. Reviewed by David Hoogland Noon, University of Alaska Southeast Sometime in 1980 or 1981, I wrote an assignment for my fifth-grade class about the “Stockbridge Indians” of western Massachusetts during the late colonial and Revolutionary War era. My father, who grew up in Stockbridge, had composed a similar project when he was in high school, and I quite likely borrowed most of my material from the work he had done more than two decades earlier. After reading From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600–1830—a book that 512 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY tells, among other things, the story of how the Mahican came to gather in Stockbridge—I wish that I could find those old reports and subject them to William Starna’s historiographical scrutiny. I would certainly have lots of company. As much as anything, From Homeland to New Land is a fascinating and highly detailed—and I would imagine for some readers, somewhat frustrating—account of the gap between what historians believe they know about the Mahican people and what the documentary record supports. The book provides a depressingly familiar narrative about the corrosive effects of disease, land loss, resource depletion, and missionary interference on the ability of small, decentralized native communities to control their own future. Starna chronicles the efforts of the Mahican to pursue their interests in a region where relationships with other native peoples (especially the Mohawk) as well as Dutch and English newcomers presented an almost endless sequence of complications, leading eventually to relocation and removal to western Massachusetts and then, later on, to Wisconsin. He offers a thorough description of the natural and human worlds that would have shaped Mahican existence from the pre-contact period through the early nineteenth century, and he surveys the economic and political changes that followed in the wake of European encroachment and American independence. Drawing on a vast body of sources from Dutch, English, and American records as well as more recent archaeological work, From Homeland to New Land greatly improves our understanding of the Mahican history. Yet Starna’s exhaustive command of the geographic, archaeological, and historical evidence enables him not only to relate as much as can be told about the Mahican, but it also allows him to systematically dismantle the suppositions, contradictory assertions, and baseless speculations that have somehow passed through the scholarly record from one generation to the next. The chapters on “Mahican Places,” “Native Neighbors,” “The Ethnographic Past,” or “The Mahican Homeland” consistently frustrate a reader’s naïve wish for clear statements...