Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast by Patricia E. Rubertone (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast by Patricia E. Rubertone Hartman H. Deetz (bio) Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast by Patricia E. Rubertone University of Nebraska Press, 2020 IN 1943 IN PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, Chief Sunrise shocked the city, making headlines simply by walking out into the street dressed in his traditional regalia. He was a Narragansett Indian, in Narragansett Territory, where Narragansett people have always been. Native people in New England are first contact people: we had no rumor, no experience, no expectation of how history with European settlers would unfold. My people, the Wampanoag, along with Nipmuc and Massachusett were among the first graduates of Harvard, and Narragansetts were among the first residents of Providence, when Roger Williams had to broker a deal to allow colonists to move in among them. Between the bark-covered wigwams, English mud and sticks, wattle and daub were being built. We have been here from the beginning. We are a part of the fabric of this place, and our history is American history. When the city of Providence was created Native hands were among those creating it. As the world modernized, Indigenous people modernized and urbanized with it. We work as house cleaners and laborers but also have become champion checkers players or marketed the "Indian Tonic" remedy of the Narragansett "Indian Doctress" for sale to the masses. Patricia Rubertone explores the interconnection—of kinship, of family moving back and forth from reservation to city, of intermarriages—that taps into the Indigenous underground of New England that still thrives today. Given these networks of families and kin I can hopscotch from one Native community to the next—with many of my cousins among them—all the way to New York. Many of the family names mentioned throughout this book—Noka, Brown, Mitchel, Helm, and Thomas—are still present today. Native Providence challenges the concept of the Monolithic Indian, one that is always rural, past tense, and pushed aside by the arrival of the modern world. Rubertone shows how Native people were adapting to and taking part in the modernization of the world along with their next-door neighbors, while at the same time holding a continuous occupancy that stretches into precolonial times. They did not come to the city; the city came to them. Almost every new shift in "Indian Policy" has been tested here on the [End Page 152] East Coast before being brought to the national scale, including war, boarding schools, subdividing then taxing and selling land, relocation, and detribalization. For some tribes their experience with colonization is not yet 150 years old: how are they adapting, and what lessons can they take from what we in the northeast have and are continuing to experience? Rubertone shows some of the ways that Native people in the northeast have survived the centuries. Rubertone manages to capture many important parts of what it is to be Indigenous in the northeast: continuity, connection, kinship, adaptability, resilience. As Indigenous people in New England, we are four hundred years into this grand experiment of colonization. What does that look like for people who have watched the cities grow around them? The concrete interstate laid over old trade paths, whose dirt was packed by millions of moccasin prints over thousands of years. Indigenous neighborhoods and homesteads stand like the groves of old growth, ancient oaks among invasive regrowth. To the casual observer we may seem to blend in, but we remain plain as day for those who know what they are looking at. Rubertone has produced an important work for Natives and non-Natives alike, one that challenges preconceived notions of who we are as Native people as well as what we can be. [End Page 153] Hartman H. Deetz HARTMAN H. DEETZ is an enrolled member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. Copyright © 2022 Regents of the University of Minnesota