The Brothertown Nation of Indians: Land ownership and nationalism in early America, 1740–1840 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Brothertown Nation of Indians: Land ownership and nationalism in early America, 1740–1840 Karim M. Tiro The Brothertown Nation of Indians: Land ownership and nationalism in early America, 1740–1840 Brad D. E. Jarvis. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Unlike their counterparts west of the Mississippi, Native Americans of the eastern United States, and the Northeast in particular, have occupied a relatively inconspicuous corner of American historical consciousness. This has begun to change in recent years, not least as a result of major reservation-based casino gambling operations. At the same time, a small army of scholars has taken up the question of these peoples’ cultural survival in a region long overrun by settler colonialism. Brad D.E. Jarvis’ The Brothertown Nation of Indians is a useful addition to this burgeoning literature. The Brothertown nation was a product of the colonial context, as its English, gendered, urban, Christian name suggests. The Brothertowns were an amalgam drawn from various Algonquian-speaking tribes (Niantic, Pequot, Mohegan, Tunxis, Montaukett, and Naragansett) that lived in southern New England and eastern Long Island. All the peoples who comprised the Brothertown nation had undergone a similar experience of English colonialism in the century that followed King Philip’s War (1675–1676). The war had left them decimated. Relegated to reservations of ungenerous size, conflicts with their English neighbors were frequent. Jarvis notes the frequency with which non-native livestock damaged Indian fields, reflecting historians’ newfound appreciation of the role of animals in colonization. In regulating these disputes, the Indians found themselves at the mercy of local colonial authorities who were generally unsympathetic, uncomprehending, or both. Even worse, colonial governments routinely manipulated the politics of economically dependent tribes in order to wrest parcels of land from the tribes until the reservations no longer provided a basis for economic survival. Nevertheless, as a result of the First Great Awakening, many Natives found a basis for community renewal in Christian notions of comity, which also became a basis for common affiliation across tribal identities. However, the circle of community encompassed the Indians only; the willingness of the English to engage with the Indians was sharply limited, even when the common denominator was Christianity. Jarvis’ thesis is that the Brothertown Indians’ identity was rooted in an uncompromising commitment to holding on to their lands. This desire to find a secure homeland induced them to move several times, and even to accept United States citizenship in 1839. Indeed, the Brothertown nation became a reality only when the Oneida nation made lands available in their homeland in present-day central New York, several hundred miles from the coast. By moving inland in the mid-1780s, the Brothertowns were not fleeing colonial control entirely. Jarvis details the ways in which the Brothertowns sought to benefit from the paternalistic protection and beneficence of New York State while avoiding its control. When the rapid rise of the white population threatened the Brothertowns’ land base, they sought to remove again, first to Indiana, then to present-day Wisconsin. Jarvis’ discussion of their failed attempts to gain access to lands along Indiana’s White River is worthwhile, as is his discussion of federal policymakers’ attitudes toward the multilateral conflict over Menominee lands near the Fox River. The reader is left to wonder about the Brothertowns’ surprisingly fraught relations with other Indian nations. They sought the coaching of the British superintendent of Indian Affairs, Sir William Johnson, before formally engaging with the Oneidas, and their relations with the Oneidas, Delawares, and Menominees, were consistently troubled. Some of the questions raised by Jarvis’ study are addressed in a recent, complementary work that approaches the Brothertowns from a somewhat different tack, David Silverman’s Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the problem of race in early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Silverman sketches the broader context in which Brothertown developed, as well as some of the community’s internal dynamics. Jarvis’ strength is describing and analyzing the Brothertowns’ dealings with Euro-American governments. The Brothertowns’ decision to accept citizenship, which made them subject to federal and state law, was hailed by whites as evidence of their assimilation. But Jarvis views this development...