The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island: A History by John A. Strong

Abstract

279 Book Reviews The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island: A History. By John A. Strong. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011, 352 pages, $29.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Marsha Hamilton, University of South Alabama The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island is a narrative account of the Unkechaug from before contact with Europeans to the present day, thus John A. Strong organizes his material into a comprehensive chronological story. Several important themes emerge from this account. The first theme emphasizes the persistence of the Unkechaug, and by extension other Native Americans, through time. Although nineteenthcentury writers tended to romanticize Native Americans and published accounts about a tribe’s “last member,” many Native groups retained a strong sense of their identity. Strong argues that for the Unkechaugs that identity was rooted in their ability to retain a small reservation on Long Island’s South Shore. No matter how far away tribe members might go in search of work, they always had a place to which they could return. Strong builds on two additional themes. He illustrates that the Unkechaug were always part of the larger community. Over an extended period, they maintained strong relationships with the Floyds and Smiths, two of the most important landed and political families in the region. Unkechaugs worked for these families for centuries and the politically-connected patriarchs of these families protected them, although rather paternalistically . The Unkechaug also had economic and religious connections to other community members. They were not isolated from their EuropeanAmerican or African-American neighbors. Indeed, the Unkechaug intermarried quite often with African-Americans. These unions lead Strong to address the theme of identity and persistence. In so doing, he argues that Native American identity is cultural, not based strictly on bloodlines. 280 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY People of racially and ethnically mixed heritages are still Indians; nonIndian forebears do not negate Native culture and identity. Thus, the Unkechaug married “outsiders” and brought them into their cultural orbit, much as Native Americans had done for centuries, as can be seen in the Iroquois “mourning wars,” for example. The Unkechaug also adapted elements of European-American culture and religion, shaping these ideas to mesh with their own worldview. In the end, these helped them to persist as a people. The book’s fourth theme demonstrates that the Unkechaug, much like Native Americans elsewhere, were not passive victims of Europeans. They fought to shape the world created by interactions among Natives, Europeans, and Africans in ways that were amenable to their worldview. Of course, this is not a new theme in Native American historiography, but it is one that tends to be overlooked in textbooks and other works designed for a general audience. This is one of the strengths of Strong’s book. It is written for general readers; therefore, it provides a connection between scholarly circles, where an interpretation or argument might be well-known, and a wider audience of readers. The book’s scope is also one of its strengths, since the major themes are supported simply through the broad span of time covered. Readers will find it impossible to impose artificial boundaries for these issues: Native Americans existed until the turn of the eighteenth century and then disappeared, or through the American Revolution, or until 1876–1877 and the end of the “Indian Wars” in the western United States. Through this book, one sees that Native Americans have been a force in U.S. history all along, at the local and national levels. Another strength of the book is its source base. Strong grounds his work on an extensive collection of primary documents, including interviews and oral histories that he and Unkechaug leaders compiled to fight a civil suit filed in Federal court against the tribe in 2007. The source base, therefore, is as complete as possible, given the nature of the records, the unsystematic record-keeping of earlier eras, and the survival rate of the records that were kept. Although this book is a comprehensive history of the Unkechaug, a small tribe that rarely participated in events of a national scope, the themes and issues addressed can be applied broadly. The focus on a small group allows a very...