Red brethren: the Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the problem of race in early America

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Allowing for some latitude in using the phrase America in the title of this study, it nevertheless provides a thoroughgoing and finely nuanced depiction of crucial issues between Native Americans and white settlers in an important geographical area during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. basic elements of the general narrative have been known for some time: Native Christians in New England and New Jersey banded together for mutual support and ethnic survival, moving from the seaboard to upstate New York and thence to Wisconsin, some even to Kansas. lasting value of this work is that it covers all these events in comprehensive detail and painstaking accuracy.The author has furnished an exhaustive display of commonplace materials, as well as others less well known, in order to let natives themselves address such topics as conversion, native churches, intertribal alliances, migrations, and theological reflections on the whole process. breadth of his researches and synthetic presentation bids fair to being the definitive work in this field, an accomplishment that will endure for quite some time to come. He has unearthed documents found in more than twenty-seven archives, historical societies, and special collections. author has also incorporated all relevant publications and doctoral dissertations of the past two decades, thus applying the latest contemporary thinking to past events. These sources disclose generations of people who lived in hope and experienced despair. They afford us greater insight into the ways Indian groups sought strength in mutually held beliefs while enduring persistent greed for land and recurrent racial discrimination. great conundrum was disparity between reward and punishment in this life and the next. The question . . . was how to account for whites becoming 'strong & great' through their low avarice and Indians degenerating to 'nothing but a wreck of bones' despite their Christian efforts (137). In this context of suffering at the hands of white Christians, we hear generations of native leaders (many of them obscure but deserving recognition) who used both biblical and indigenous references to interpret what was happening around them.A central theme in this book is the chronicling of relentless encroachment by whites on Indian land. Readers learn in agonizing detail of episodes characterized by betrayal, factionalism, alcohol abuse, peonage, and famine. Despite native attempts to survive as ethnic communities with any real prospect of continuity, we observe a tragic progression of new situations and old problems as they unfold over and over again. …