England Indians Research Articles

Margaret Ellen Newell Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015, XI-316 p.

Margaret Ellen Newell Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015, XI-316 p.

Margaret Ellen Newell. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery.

Margaret Ellen Newell. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery.

“‘to subscribe unto GODS BOOK’: The Bible as Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century New England Colonialism”

AbstractReading scripture in the vernacular forged a unique discursive community in colonial New England, just as it had in post-Reformation England and elsewhere. But just as important were the many ways the bible functioned as a physical object imbued with special power, serving as talisman as much as text. In the colonial context, missionary activity among New England Indians introduced both aspects of scripture to indigenous communities, which in their turn, endowed it with meanings of their own. This essay first reviews the role of the Bible as physical object among the English colonists, before turning to its reception, rejection, and uses among New England’s Algonquian peoples. Examining bibles as items of material culture in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut reveals the creativity and creolization inherent in the introduction of the Bible to this colonial context. The intellectual, practical, and talismanic properties of the Bible so familiar to the English were cast into new relief in the colonial contest between Europeans and Indians, between literate and oral cultures, and between these vastly different religious systems.

Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. By Margaret Ellen Newell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. Xi, 316. $45.00, cloth.

Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. By Margaret Ellen Newell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. Xi, 316. $45.00, cloth. - Volume 76 Issue 4

Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery

Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery

Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery

Indian slavery has been the topic of considerable scholarly work in recent years. Typically, newer works explore the phenomenon with an eye toward the importance of indigenous protocols and the rarely appreciated commodity value of slaves in peripheral arenas of Anglo-American settlement. In Brethren by Nature Margaret Ellen Newell argues forcefully that Indian slavery was central to the development of early American societies—in this case, New England—and that Indian slavery was a prism through which Anglo-Americans filtered emerging ideas about race and labor. Newell is concerned with establishing that New England colonists were committed early on to acquiring Indian labor, often as slaves. This desire, in her telling driven by acute regional labor shortages, was therefore a critical ingredient in colonial warfare. Indian slavery, in one of her more original arguments, was not simply a by-product of the Pequot War during the 1630s or King Philip's War during the 1670s; it served as the underlying rationale for colonial leaders and colonists alike.

Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery

“Slavery flourished in colonial New England,” writes Margaret Ellen Newell in Brethren by Nature, and “Native Americans formed a significant part of New England’s slave population” (3). Indian servants augmented the colonial workforce “in important ways.” They were the “dominant form of non-white labor” (5). Bound Indian laborers, who “likely numbered in the thousands” (14), performed a variety of tasks associated with “ironworks, fisheries, livestock raising, extensive agriculture, provincial armies, and other enterprises that required unusually large workforces” (5). Most, however, worked and lived in English households, where they “interacted with the English in daily, intimate ways” (6–7), producing over time an “increasingly hybrid society” (14).In telling this important story, Newell includes a number of powerful stories of individuals ensnared in the region’s trade in human flesh. She recasts the Pequot War and King Philip’s war as racial conflicts motivated in part by a desire to enslave New England Algonquians, 350 alone in the “Great Swamp Fight” that took place in Rhode Island late in 1675 and perhaps 2,000 in all during this important Indian rising against the English.Despite its considerable virtues, there are still some problems with Newell’s book. The number of Indians involved in slavery in New England, either held within the colonies or shipped out to the West Indies, is a bit hazy, a problem that scholars who preceded Newell in this field have confronted as well. Newell’s determination to find Indian servants leads on occasion to some selective and problematic use of evidence. She identifies 319 Pequot captives in New England in 1640, for instance, a few short years after the Pequot War but offers no evidence to contradict Michael Fickes’s assertion that many of these Indians ran away (57, 270n46). On another occasion Newell referred to “one of the only surviving documents that mentions Pequots” as captives, a warning from the Massachusetts Bay Company to the governor of Providence Island that “we would have the Cannibal Negroes from New England inquired after, whose they are and special care taken of them” (49). But this document does not refer to Pequots, and Newell offers no evidence to contradict John Thornton and Linda M. Heywood’s claim that this document referred not to Pequots at all but to Angolan slaves (269n23).Newell’s concept of hybridity is a bit murky as well. Certainly, New England Algonquians played an important role in shaping New England society. A spate of books over the last decade or so has suggested that New England Algonquian leaders—like Uncas, Ninigret, or Metacom—might justly be placed on the list of New England’s founding fathers. But what about Indian servants, their movements tightly controlled, their interactions almost exclusively with the English, subject to proselytization and discipline, many of them children or others perhaps traumatized by the viciousness of the Puritans’ way of war? The evidence suggesting that “Indian actors and goals sometimes determined outcomes” in English households is difficult to firmly establish with the evidence Newell presents (86).Newell appropriately demonstrates the involvement of New England’s founders in the slave trade. Her work demands that historians reconsider their analyses of the colonists’ conflicts with the region’s native communities. New Englanders sought out Indian labor and at the local level constructed the institutional bases to bind native peoples to ever longer terms of servitude. She shows how New Englanders developed many of their ideas about race, freedom, and slavery as they constructed the institutional framework for Indian servitude. Readers will learn much from her work about how New Englanders conceived of Indian labor, but perhaps not as much as they might like about the Indians ensnared in the colonies’ systems of bound labor.

George Weekes: Rogue Missionary to New England Indians, 1731-1755

During the mid-1700s, an uneducated layman named George Weekes began preaching to Native Americans in the town of Harwich, Massachusetts. Weekes’ missionary activity triggered a passionate response from Nathaniel Stone, the local minister, and inaugurated a debate regarding ministerial qualifications within the community. Scholars who study English missionary activity in colonial New England tend to focus upon the careers of trained clergy, such as John Eliot or Josiah Cotton. Other individuals, who possessed questionable moral character and little education, also preached to New England Indians, however. In this instance, the career of George Weekes, a rogue missionary, reveals that contact with Native Americans could shape ecclesiastical life in colonial Massachusetts. It also suggests that Native Americans encountered popular, as well as elite, English religious culture when they interacted with English missionaries in early New England.

“Savages” in the Service of Empire: Native American Soldiers in Gorham's Rangers, 1744–1762

Gorham's Rangers, initially an all-Indian ranger company, was instrumental in Britain's conquest of Nova Scotia (Acadia) during the eighteenth century. In the process of uncovering that story, the essay assesses New England Indians’ role in shaping colonial frontier warfare as well as the impact of military service on Native American communities.

"Beyond My Skil": Mary Rowlandson's Counting

In her 1682 narrative of King Philip's War, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Mary Rowlandson remains certain of at least one thing regarding the Indians who hold her captive: are lot of them. They come in great numbers (68), even vast (106), or perhaps many hundreds (79); they stand thick as the trees (80) and seem to wield a thousand hatchets (80). Though when Rowlandson looks for food there was nothing to be seen (106), the Lord strangely (79, 105) provides for the Indians, and even while carrying their old decrepit mothers they are able to [hold] the English army in play (78). She cannot help but be amazed at the numerous crew of Pagans that were on the Bank (82) of river opposite her, and arriving finally at an Indian settlement, Rowlandson is dumbfounded: Oh the number of Pagans ... that came about me, that I may say as David, Psal 27. 13, I had fainted, unless I had believed, c she takes updated body counts of the English around her; she makes careful note of important days or lengths of traveling time; and she finally redeems herself by her deft determination of exactly how much she is worth for ransom. However, when she tries to count the Indians, she admits, it was my skil (79). Just as Rowlandson the prisoner of war literally wanders along the frontier beyond English colonial settlement, so her narrative figuratively takes place on the frontier of developing discourses in which people become countable numbers. When she writes of her experience, Rowlandson relies on quantification of various kinds to lend sense of order to the chaos around her. Colonialism required this kind of population counting, need to map both bodies and territory with measurable systems. Rowlandson attempts, on the ground, to apply this strategy of counting bodies to ensure her own survival: numeracy helps create mental border between enemy and friend; it helps her find her children when they are taken from her; and when she negotiates her ransom, it ultimately sets her free. Her narrative is sustained dramatization of an individual attempting to see the world through the colonial lens of population numbers--numbers that offer the promise of drawing clear borders between peoples even as they mask the permeability of those boundaries? Testing out these ideas about countable bodies, Rowlandson's narrative offers window into the inconsistencies within perfectly enumerated colonial worldview. Even as Rowlandson tries to render her environment familiar by numbering the people she encounters, she reveals the inability of numerical categories to serve as means of separating kin from enemies. Numbers cannot freeze bodies into stable count: they can only induce the act of counting, and this tension between the desire to enumerate and the mutability of bodies arises especially around the appearance of the reproductive bodies of women and children. By contrast, official histories of the colonists' encounters with the Indians, such as Increase Mather's history of King Phillip's War and Cotton Mather's narrative of Hannah Dustan's captivity, insist on the ability of both friend and foe to remain quantified and separate in the midst of conflict. Even when women and children are on the front lines of battle, the Mathers can always keep count of them. By tracing the sustained focus in Rowlandson's narrative on the bodies of children--both her own and those of the English and Indians around her--we can see the persistent problems reproduction poses to separating people into quantifiable groups in the midst of conflict. First, children might switch categories and alter the count, especially white captive children encountering the highly successful adoptive practices of New England Indians. …

Indians in Southern New England: Older Paradigms and Newer Themes

Indians in Southern New England:Older Paradigms and Newer Themes Christopher Bilodeau (bio) Jean M. O'Brien. Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 224 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $99.00. Kathleen J. Bragdon. Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xviii + 293 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.95. Rachel Wheeler. To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. xiii + 316 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $45.00. Jenny Hale Pulsipher. Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xii + 361 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendixes, notes, and index. $24.95. Richard W. Cogley. John Eliot's Mission to the Indians before King Philip's War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xiv + 331 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $71.50. David J. Silverman. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxiv + 303 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, appendixes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $32.99 (paper). Daniel R. Mandell. Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xx + 321 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, essay on sources, and index. $57.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper). [End Page 213] In the field of American Indian history, the historiography of southern New England Indians holds a privileged position. In 1975, Francis Jennings published The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, a work that, in the words of Kirsten Fischer, turned "an inherited historical narrative on its head."1 Jennings' book, in pugnacious, even at times bombastic, language, was the academic equivalent of a scorched-earth campaign against Puritan New England Indian policy, academic hair-splitting, and Francis Parkman. Emphasizing the victimhood of the Indian peoples at the hands of English deceit and greed, and published during the endgame of a deeply controversial war in Southeast Asia, the book resonated with scholars across the globe. Although Jennings' assault did not go without reprisal—most importantly from a main target of his ire, Alden T. Vaughan, author of New England Frontier and standard-bearer of the previous paradigm2—it carried the day, shifting the tone and tenor of the field in ways that changed the landscape of American Indian history forever. It has made the historiography of southern New England Indians a space of consistent interest, engagement, and contestation ever since. One can say that the state of the field today is not quite so combative, but the quality of the work remains high. An examination of some recent monographs on the Indians of southern New England (most predominantly the Pequots, Mohegans, Wampanoags, Naticks, Massachusett, and Narragansetts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) helps us answer broader questions about the direction of the historiography on the whole. Where has the field come from, and where it is going? This essay attempts to answer this question and some others, arguing that scholars have begun to elucidate new themes for several years now.3 These themes grew organically from the preoccupations of previous historians of American Indians over the past several decades (as opposed to a major work or event that radically changed a historiography from the outside). Curiously, many of them stem from a growing dissonance between older historiographical narratives that used to mesh so well. Issues and problems that would be so powerful and suggestive for historians of a previous generation—giving voice to underprivileged and marginalized peoples, emphasizing themes of domination, agency, empowerment, and creative adaptation—are now beginning to clash with one another in suggestive ways, ways that expose some of the assumptions that previous historians simply took for granted when they wrote their (often very good) works. Philip J. Deloria has highlighted something akin to this dimension in a recent historiographical essay, emphasizing that "future Indian histories may well be produced in a self-conscious collision, the politics and epistemology of...

Firsting and lasting: writing Indians out of existence in New England

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. By Jean M. O'Brien. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 269 pages. $25.00 (paperback). Jean O'Brien offers an insightful and thoroughly researched examination of how ordinary non-Indians in New England from the early to late nineteenth century contributed to the processes of Euro-American colonialism that, in this particular case, erased Native Americans from both the past and present (xii). To O'Brien, the proliferation of New England town histories written by local authors and amateur historians during the nineteenth century, as well as the at-large national authence who consumed these publications, constituted a deliberate ideological project to divest New England of its indigenous history and Native presence, with severe consequences for Indians who continued to inhabit the region during this period (xxiii). In particular, O'Brien argues the system of transforming what happened [a long and continuing process of colonialism and Indian survival] into that which is said to have happened [Indian extinction] justified the violence and dispossession perpetrated by EuroAmericans against indigenous in the pursuit of establishing Anglo civilization and social order in North America (xxi). Consequently, these New England authors constructed a hegemonic discourse of the past that not only discarded the continent's original inhabitants and their histories, but also asserted the superiority of American identity and modernity. However, as O'Brien concludes, Native resisted such colonialism by embracing change in order to make their way in a changing world, as they had done for centuries, most notably evidenced by nineteenth-century Pequot activist William Apess (145). Specifically, O'Brien thematically charts the evolution of this hegemonic ideological project throughout her monograph, with a concluding chapter on how New England Indians resisted such colonialism. Beginning with Firsting, O'Brien demonstrates how New England writers replaced Native indigeneity, or the identification of Indians as the original occupants of New England lands, with an Anglo indigeneity that emphasized a mythos that Native willingly, peacefully, and legally conceded all their lands to Euro-Americans (51). Therefore, these authors reinvented the Puritans, their ancestors, and other Anglo-immigrants as the rightful and first settlers of New England, completely purging the region's history of an Indian past and presence. Subsequently, O'Brien details the process of Replacing that New England writers and their consumers conceived of to justify this displacement of indigenous peoples. By positing Indians as the antithesis to modernity and civilization, as evidenced by New England monuments, place-names, artistic commemorations, archaeological excavations, and material culture from the nineteenth century, local historians naturalized the notion of rightful English replacement of Indian peoples in both the past and present (103). Ultimately, New England authors and authences engaged in Lasting, or the creation of a literary motif of Indian extinction that purified New England history and society of an indigenous existence. In doing so, these writers denied the contemporary reality that Native populaces embraced modernity, instead Grafting a narrative of Indians' racial degeneracy (i.e. the loss of Indian full-bloods) and declension, all of which was meant to convey the triumph of Anglo-American civilization and modernity at the expense of indigenous peoples. Yet in conclusion, O'Brien evinces the many ways New England Indians defied this historical revisionism and literary colonialism, from engaging in wage labor and the capitalist marketplace, to the political activism epitomized by William Apess, who contested the hegemonic narrative of Indian extinction in New England by trumpeting Indians as equal citizens and [the] right of Indian nations to exist as sovereign entities (188-189). …

The Long Wake of the Pequot War

This article explores the aftermath of the Pequot War of 1636–38. The Pequot War has sometimes been characterized as so staggering a blow to New England Indians that it, in effect, secured several decades of peace. But by following the soldiers and survivors of the war, and by surveying the psychological climate in postwar New England, this article argues that the period following the Pequot War was anything but calm; it was instead marked by fear, suspicion, and violence. Following ripple effects of the war beyond New England and even into New Netherland, this article also makes connections between the violence of the Pequot War and Kieft’s War, the devastating Indian war that convulsed the Dutch colonies in the 1640s. Most broadly, this study suggests the lingering costs of war and conquest—not only for the “losers,” but for the conquerors, as well.

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (review)

Reviewed by: Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England Lucy Maddox (bio) Jean M. O’Brien. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. 269 pp. ISBN 978-0816665785, $25.00. Much has been written about the narratives of entitlement through which European-Americans, beginning with their first contacts with indigenous people, explained and justified their displacement of Native Americans. Following Roy Harvey Pearce and Robert Berkhofer, a significant number of scholars have helped to document the rhetorical strategies and maneuvers used to produce a unified national narrative that granted ownership of both the past and the future of the United States to its white occupants. In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien has extended that project in very productive and fascinating ways by examining the crucial local frameworks—primarily town histories—that contributed to the formation of the national narrative, nourished it, and allowed it to survive. O’Brien has limited her study to southern New England, which made it possible for her to do an exhaustive study of extant local history sources for the area, most of them produced in the middle of the nineteenth century. Her research has unearthed ample evidence, remarkable in the sheer number of examples, that local New England communities set out to convince themselves and others that “their” Indians not only were unfit for citizenship in the present and future of the United States but that they had, in fact, become extinct by the time of the writing of the history. O’Brien organizes her study by grouping the sources into several categories: “firsting” narratives, that document local history by enumerating a series of first institutions or practices created by whites; “lasting” narratives, that select out individual Indians, some of them still living, and mark them as the last of their tribe—such as Squanto, whom O’Brien describes as “the first last Indian, but . . . decidedly not the last” (108); and “replacement” narratives, whose rhetorical strategies allowed whites to claim indigeneity for themselves and to assert their authority over Indian places. The work of these “replacement” narratives was to set in place a version of Indian history, often enshrined in place names, while insisting that the Indian people themselves were gone for good. O’Brien’s documentation of these narrative patterns is scrupulous and persuasive; the examples she cites are also intrinsically interesting. In their local specificity, they humanize the larger, national narrative, bringing it into clearer focus and helping to locate its origins in the intellectual and cultural work done by particular individuals and communities. The reshaping of Indian biographies is an important part of the process O’Brien describes. Local historians might be eager to claim certain Indians as their own, but those Indians were, in a remarkably consistent pattern, [End Page 856] represented as inevitably the victims of change and never the agents of change. One way of reinforcing the claim that Indians and their cultures were moribund or already extinct was to associate them, in written histories and in displays and commemorations, with artifacts, relics, and burials. In general, O’Brien argues, the point of writing an Indian life was to deny that life access to modernity. At times, the undeniable physical presence of living Indians in local communities had the effect of confounding the “lasting” and “replacement” narratives, and could even lead, as O’Brien points out, to almost comic confusions and contradictions in the local narratives. She has even found accounts of commemoration ceremonies at which Indians from the area were invited to sit on the ceremonial platform while local orators eulogized the now-extinct Native tribes. We will probably never know, O’Brien suggests, how the Indians on the platform received the news of their extinction. O’Brien concludes her study with a forceful accounting of Native resistance to these narratives that intended to write the New England Indians out of existence. Indians continued living and working in small communities throughout the very period when their extinction was being inscribed in the local histories; they adapted in many ways to the changes around them, entering the market economy and refusing to be...

From Mashantucket to Appomattox: The Native American Veterans of Connecticut's Volunteer Regiments and the Union Navy

Due to complex social arrangements among New England Indians and changing perceptions of race, many New Englanders believed that most Indians in the region were “extinct,” while others viewed Indians as “colored men.” At the time of the Civil War, these perceptions allowed many Indian volunteers to cross racial boundaries and serve in both white and colored regiments.

Water-Voyaging Indians and the Metropole

Early American historians have gone trans-Atlantic-for those in field, this observation should come as no surprise. New monographs and edited volumes pertaining to Atlantic World go into print with alarming regularity. Early Americanists have dedicated countless conferences, seminars, and study groups to Atlantic World, and scholars will organize more as discipline continues to mature with subfields more clearly defined. For those not in field, a few sentences cannot do justice to either sheer volume of literature or analytic power blossoming from Atlantic-world methodologies that are now so varied and complex.' Approaches have diversified; subject matters have moved back and forth between macro and micro levels. Interest in transmission of knowledge and movement of people across Atlantic has led to scholarship focused on how these exchanges carried cultural, social, political, and intellectual implications for colonies as well as metropole. In such varied contexts Native Americans were once neglected. Recently they have gotten attention they deserve. An emerging body of work has followed the cultural turn. Troy Bickham, Laura Stevens, and Kristina Bross entwine literary analysis and historical contextualization.1 Bickman has explored Native Americans' representations within metropole's print culture and cosmopolitan Londoners' reactions. Bross and Stevens have treated missionary text productions for an Anglo trans-Atlantic audience in which authors framed writings about proselytizing of New England Indians to appeal to Londoners' enlightenment sensibilities and a growing belief in an English benevolent empire. Additionally, Native American Atlantic Ocean travels no longer go unnoticed. With an influential article Eric Hinderaker set visit in 1710 of four Iroquois Kings within metropole Britons' conceptualizations of meanings of empire.2 A promising Mohegan preacher, Samson Occom, journeyed in 1760s to London, garnering mission monies for Connecticut-based New Light Eleazer Wheelock who ran Moor's Charity School for native education. Joanna Brooks has edited

Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience

Book Review| October 01 2005 Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury. Nancy L. Hagedorn Nancy L. Hagedorn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2005) 25 (1): 105–106. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501666 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy L. Hagedorn; Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2005; 25 (1): 105–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27501666 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2006 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (review)

Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (review)

The Little Osage Captive: The Tragic Saga of Lydia Carter

PUBLISHED IN 1822 AND DESCRIBING THE POIGNANT LIFE of an Osage Indian girl, The Little Osage Captive, An Authentic Narrative declared its intention promote zeal in the missionary cause and to enlighten and convert the heathen. Recommended for children and placement in schools, it described Indians, or Native Americans, as savages who needed civilizing and Christianizing.1 Yet its narrative has much offer the modern reader. Spanning the years 1817 1821, this intriguing story grew out of a ruthless struggle between neighboring divisions of the Osage and Cherokee tribes living in the region then known as Arkansaw.2 The dramatic events began in what was then the Missouri Territory before moving east Alabama Territory, Tennessee, Mississippi, and even Washington, D.C. The story would conclude back west in the newly-created Arkansas Territory (established March 2, 1819) and provides a rare glimpse of life along the lower Arkansas River more than a decade before Arkansas statehood. It offers a vivid sense, too, of the complex human consequences of the federal government's policy of removing eastern Indians territory long occupied by other native peoples. Rev. Elias Cornelius, the narrative's author, graduated from Connecticut's Yale College in September 1813 and received a ministerial license from the Congregational Church on June 4, 1816. Within a few weeks, he was appointed an agent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), an early movement Christianize Native Americans, which operated with the support of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists.3 As part of his ABCFM commission, Cornelius embarked on a lengthy journey in January 1817 converse with the [southern] natives and obtain their consent have schools, and other institutions, established among them, for the purpose of instructing them in Christianity, and the most useful arts of civilized life, and raise funds support these efforts.4 Twenty-three and unmarried, Cornelius would travel for twenty months and reach New Orleans before returning home. In Washington, D.C., Cornelius met with the secretary of the treasury, William H. Crawford, and a correspondence with the acting secretary of war, George Graham, and the agent for the Office of Indian Trade, Thomas L. McKenney. From these officials, Cornelius received warm assurances of friendship and cooperation and letters of introduction addressed agents of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee tribes.5 Arriving in Tennessee and Cherokee-occupied lands by September 1817, Cornelius spent two months at newly opened Brainerd Mission.6 This ABCFM-sponsored school had opened the previous March under superintendent Cyrus Kingsbury with help from the Cherokee agent, Col. Return Jonathan Meigs.7 They, along with Gen. Andrew Jackson, had persuaded Cherokee leaders support the school at a council meeting the previous year. As a result, Kingsbury purchased 160 acres for $500 from John McDonald (grandfather of John Ross, the future Cherokee leader) for the new school and farm. Initially called Chickamaugah after a nearby Cherokee town, the school's name was changed during its second year honor David Brainerd, a pioneer missionary New England Indians. Through Brainerd and similar schools, the ABCFM hoped the whole [Cherokee] tribe English in language, civilized in habits, and Christian in religion.8 Cornelius left Brainerd continue his journey on November 6, 1817. Traveling west on a road from Huntsville Natchez, Cornelius and his companions reached Caney Creek, at a spot two miles south of the Tennessee River in present-day Colbert County, Alabama, on November 15. Two hundred miles west of Brainerd, Caney Creek marked the eastern boundary of the Chickasaw Nation. Normally just a small stream, the creek was severely flooded from recent rains. After several futile attempts cross, the group decided make camp and try again the following day. …

Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, the Whalefishery, and Seafaring's Impact on Community Development

How southern New England Indians fared in the business of whaling in the early nineteenth century and the long-term consequences of whaling for Native American communities are subjects that deserve closer examination.' This essay is primarily a study of the post-American Revolution Mashpee Wampanoag community of Cape Cod and focuses on the group's ties to the whalefishery. It makes two interrelated arguments: Wampanoags from the Cape, like other men from southern New England, were an important source of whaling labor into the early nineteenth century; and early American whaling transformed the lives of Mashpee whalers and their families. Examining Mashpee's intimate relationship with the whaling business, this work reconsiders the roles played by Indians in the maritime world and the influence of wage labor on one Native American group. Nantucket accounting papers pertaining to the Mashpees permits for analysis of these Indians as whalers. Historians have already learned from colonial whaling contracts, court records, and merchant accounts that for the Native men of southern New England, America's whaling trade was an exploitative arm of colonial labor relations. The primary route into whaling in the eighteenth century, which was the practice of indenturing, threatened Native ways as Indians remained caught in cycles of labor exchange for credit, goods, and money. New research in Nantucket merchant house account papers dated to the early republic period reveals that white trading networks between the island and the mainland maintained control over Mashpee whaling labor.2 The first section of this essay tracks the development of whaling as a labor system in which, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, stateappointed guardians and local merchants maintained authority over the lays (earnings in fractions of the total catch of a whaling voyage) and the accounts of Mashpee whalers. The Massachusetts government dissolved the guardianship system in 1763 with the creation of the district of Mashpee but reversed this decision in 1788 by reinstating three guardians. In 1789 the legislature re-