"The Rising of the Indians"; or, The Native American Revolution of (16)'76

Abstract

In 1676, some imperial observers saw a hemispheric "Rising of the Indians" in the Caribbean and North America that threatened the colonial project, a fear largely forgotten today. Applying the heuristic of a widespread Native American revolution of 1676 to King Philip's War, Bacon's Rebellion, the Kalinago wars, and the Pueblo Revolt challenges the ways that historians have framed these events—often as discrete occurrences, often as failures to stave off settler colonialism. A broader chronological and geographic perspective offers a means to reconsider precipitants, results, and Indigenous peoples' goals in resistance. Four common emergent properties—slavery, mobility, the creation of pan-Indian, multiethnic communities, and cultural revitalization—connected these near-simultaneous events across space and shaped their outcomes. While historiography centers the Pueblo Revolt as a uniquely successful rebellion, other Native American groups managed to expel or circumscribe European colonizers' presence and power in the short and long term because of these uprisings. In ways often overlooked by scholars, the Kalinagos, the Wabanakis, the Susquehannocks, and the Haudenosaunee succeeded (at least for a time) alongside southwestern Native nations in maintaining sovereignty and limiting empire, while cultural renewal central to resistance sustained Wampanoag and Narragansett communities through brutal occupation.