Americans In New England Research Articles

Native Americans of New England

Native Americans of New England

Concepts of Mission in Scottish Presbyterianism: The SSPCK, the Highlands and Britain's American Colonies, 1709–40

This article examines the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) and its missions in the Highlands and Britain's American colonies. Constituted in 1709 and operating as an auxiliary arm of the Church of Scotland, the SSPCK aimed to extend Christianity in ‘Popish and Infidel parts of the world’. It founded numerous Highland charity schools, and from 1729 sponsored missions to Native Americans in New England and Georgia. Missions were increasingly important in British overseas expansion; consequently, historians have viewed the society as a civilizing agency, which deployed religious instruction to assimilate ‘savage’ heathens into the fold of Britain's empire. This article suggests that the SSPCK was equally concerned with Christianization: missionaries focused on spiritual edification for the salvation of souls, indicating a disjuncture between the society's objectives and the priorities of imperial expansion. It also challenges the parity assumed by historians between the SSPCK's domestic and foreign missions, arguing that the society increasingly prioritized colonial endeavours in an attempt to recover providential favour. In doing so, it sheds new light on Scottish ideas of mission during the first half of the eighteenth century, and reassesses the Scottish Church's role in Britain's emerging empire.

Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race

Nancy Shoemaker examines how New England Native American whalemen experienced race in their global movements. Drawing on recent claims that race is contingent on an individual’s location within different social structures, Shoemaker highlights how Native Americans, disenfranchised in nineteenth-century New England, encountered constructions of race differently as they ventured into the global economy. Relying on Native American–authored logbooks and diaries and Pacific region newspaper accounts, Shoemaker’s book encourages rethinking Native Americans as colonized New England subjects and recognizing their participation in the exploration and colonization of the Pacific.Untangling the shifting complexities of race experienced by traveling Native Americans, Shoemaker divides her book into four sections, each devoted to a different setting challenging the meaning and relevance of race for Native Americans: Native Americans’ integration into the social hierarchy of whaling vessels, Native Americans’ interactions with indigenous groups in the Pacific and the Arctic, Native Americans’ assimilation into colonial societies in the Pacific world, and, finally, Native Americans’ experiences with colonialism back home. Through these sections Shoemaker exposes how Native American whalemen occupied positions of power in different settings and investigates the shifting interpretations of race that, at least partially, erased the concepts of the stereotypical Indian dominating racial discourses in New England.Particularly insightful is Shoemaker’s argument that Indians on whaleships rose to positions of authority. Even inexperienced Native whalemen benefited from stereotypes regarding their natural abilities as keen hunters with extraordinary eyesight and were immediately placed into the position of boat steerers. On subsequent voyages Indians quickly rose through the ranks of mate and even, rarely, to captain. Native American officers on whaling boats were respected by their white inferiors even as these same white people asserted their racial superiority off the ship.Similarly, Shoemaker exposes the complicated position of Native Americans in beach encounters and whalemen’s settlement in colonial contexts. Native Americans, aware of the complicated history of colonialism in their homes, nominally occupied the position of white explorers in the colonizing encounter, because these encounters were perceived through a colonialist binary. While this recasting of Native Americans as Europeans may have confused Native American whalemen, they were complicit in maintaining the distinctions. Similarly, Native American “beach combers,” who settled in indigenous communities in the Pacific, were regarded by colonial authorities as white colonists with the same rights and protections as European colonists. In contrast, if racially marked whalemen from other locations, such as Cape Verde or Hawaii, settled in New England, they were subsumed into the racialized hierarchies of the United States, being treated as African Americans or Indians or both, which left them disenfranchised and dependent on state guardians.Finally, Shoemaker returns to New England’s Indian reservations, questioning whether Native whalemen’s social standing on ships transformed local understandings of Native Americans in New England. She demonstrates that many of those whalemen returned to become outspoken advocates for their oppressed and disenfranchised communities, yet white observers largely ignored their existence in their reports, because these empowered, outspoken Indians threatened their stereotype of Indians.Shoemaker’s study opens up new ways of understanding the importance of race to Native American whalemen, who on their voyages experienced race as a flexible category that ignored but also devalued their experience as colonized subjects. Shoemaker’s monograph reminds readers to be more careful in understanding historical constructions of race, proving the need to study local understandings of race in a global, multidimensional context that contributes to complex self-understandings of indigenous people and challenges the simple constructions of race broadcast by white contemporaries.

Criminal Justice Needs of Native Americans in New England

Criminal justice needs of Native Americans in New England were examined through 71 questionnaires completed by members of Native American tribes in New England. Groups not recognized by the federal government lacked tribal law enforcement, emergency, court, or correctional services. Non-Native police departments serving the Native communities often lacked training in Native culture and traditions. Criminal justice systems had few opportunities for developing cooperative agreements with Native organizations. Official federal recognition of tribes, bands, or communities enables these groups to receive greater financial and criminal justice resources. The public safety needs of Native Americans can be better met by developing improved crime statistics, by developing tribal dispute resolution programs, and by fostering partnerships between Native American communities and non-Native criminal justice and social service agencies.

Asian Americans in New England (review)

Asian Americans in New England (review)

The Complexities of Consumption: Eastern Pequot Cultural Economics in Eighteenth-Century New England

Colonialism shaped economic interactions between Native Americans and settlers, and placed considerable constraints on indigenous people, but Native Americans creatively negotiated these material, economic conditions in practical and cultural ways in their daily lives. By the mid-18th century, Native Americans in New England were deeply entrenched in colonial and market economies as farmhands, domestic workers, whalers, soldiers, craft producers, store customers, and consumers. The Eastern Pequot community of southeastern Connecticut serves as an example which is examined by combining data from three years of excavation of two 18th-century reservation households and the transcribed store ledgers of a local merchant from the middle of that century. Using these dual information sources that sometimes converge and other times relate to different scales or materialities, the study permits a look at the long-term processes and negotiations of colonial market economies through the lens of consumption and cultural economics.

Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community. Edited By Monica Chiu. (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2009. Pp. xviii, 252. $50.00.)

<i>Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community</i>. Edited By Monica Chiu. (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2009. Pp. xviii, 252. $50.00.)

Captive America: Smart, Rowlandson and the Colonial Sentiment

In 1682, Mary Rowlandson published The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, which documented her kidnapping by neighboring Native Americans in New England. Over three centuries later in 2003, Ed and Lois Smart published their own captivity narrative about the kidnapping of their daughter Elizabeth Smart in Salt Lake City by a homeless religious zealot. Both Rowlandson and Elizabeth are high profile, white churchgoing women who become iconographically tied to their communities following their abductions and escapes. While the events in each of these narratives occur at widely different times in history, they both encapsulate the same rhetorical tools and are presented for largely the same reasons. The reason I will be addressing in this paper is that of bringing their communities together against a common foe. Rowlandson’s book and Bringing Elizabeth Home are both narratives which foster colonialism and American sentiment through the construction of the “other.” For Rowlandson, this other was the Native American. With the extraction and return of Rowlandson as a matriarchal figure, the Puritans as family closed ranks against those who threatened to break the familial bond. This collective self represents Good, and the wild other represents Evil. Her narrative is a didactic tool to help the collective self embrace the Good. For Ed Smart, as a member of the politically correct 21st century, the other is not quite as easy to define. However, he also states the importance of family and community unity, and sees his daughter’s kidnapping as a reason to support the current war in Iraq. He also sees his daughter as not only his child, but America’s, and therefore a symbol that all of America must work to protect. Speaking of their book, Ed and his wife write: “It is a journey of hope and faith, an odyssey filled with good and evil, shadow and light. It is a story we hope people will still be talking about one hundred years from now—not because it is about our daughter, but because it is a story about all of us. It is a remarkable saga of a community and a country banding together in collective prayer and coming together with a common goal: to bring Elizabeth home” (15). These two narratives, which represent the prototype and one of the latest offsprings of the literary genre, show the rhetorical impact of the captivity narrative in creating a real life heroine who is at the mercy of an other, but who ultimately prevails due to her inner strength and that of her community. This us and other must exist in order to foster colonialism, and the forced travel of these vulnerable women is the perfect tale of tragedy and triumph for the continued suppression of those whom we deem the evil to our good, the shadow to our light.

Guy not Gosnold: a correction

Over the past 25 years a copper-plate engraving created and first published in 1628 by the de Bry family in Part XIII of their Americae series has been reproduced in a number of publications. Often this image is presented as a depiction of Bartholomew Gosnold trading with Native Americans in New England in 1602. However, a careful examination of the relevant documents indicates that the image actually depicts Bristol merchant John Guy's encounter with the Beothuk Indians in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in 1612.