Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History & the Contemporary – serie

These 15 essays examine the lives of important but relatively little-known Native Americans. They explore the complexities of Indian-white relations from the 17th to the early 19th century, from Maine to the Ohio Valley. Figures such as Shickellamy, Awashunkes and Molly Ockett are highlighted.

This book offers the first full-scale analysis of the Pequot War (1636-37), a pivotal event in New England colonial history. Through an innovative rereading of the Puritan sources, Alfred A. Cave refutes claims that settlers acted defensively to counter a Pequot conspiracy to exterminate Europeans. Drawing on archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological evidences to trace the evolution of the conflict, he sheds new light on the motivations of the Pequots and their Indian allies. He also provides a reappraisal of the interaction of ideology and self- interest as motivating factors in the Puritan attack on the Pequots.

This text looks at the 1675 war between the English colonists and the indigenous people of New England, which decimated the region's native population. The author examines the causes of the conflict, and its effects on the relationship between the two cultures.

Focusing on the prolonged interaction between Native Americans and Europeans in the Western Great Lakes fur trade, Sleeper-Smith (history, Michigan State U.) argues that, contrary to stereotype, Indians have existed as a viable and distinct people from the earliest times to the present and that, while encounter changed indigenous communities, it also encouraged the evolution of strategic behavior that ensured cultural continuity. In particular she explores the often misunderstood role played by Native women in establishing the fur trade as an avenue of sociocultural change.

This volume draws together an unusually rich body of original sources that tell the story of the 1704 French and Indian attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, from different vantage points. Texts range from one of the most famous early American captivity narratives, John Williams' ""The Redeemed Captive"", to the records of French soldiers and clerics, to little-known Abenaki and Mohawk stories of the raid that emerged out of their communities' oral traditions. Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney provide a general introduction, extensive annotations, and headnotes to each text. Although the oft-reprinted ""Redeemed Captive"" stands at the core of this collection, it is juxtaposed to less familiar accounts of captivity composed by other Deerfield residents: Quentin Stockwell, Daniel Belding, Joseph Petty, Joseph Kellogg, and the teen aged Stephen Williams. Presented in their original form, before clerical editors revised and embellished their content to highlight religious themes, these stories challenge long-standing assumptions about classic Puritan captivity narratives. The inclusion of three Abenaki and Mohawk narratives of the Deerfield raid is equally noteworthy, offering a rare opportunity not only to compare captors' and captives' accounts of the same experiences, but to do so with reference to different Native oral traditions. Similarly, the memoirs of French military officers and an excerpt from the Jesuit Relations illuminate the motivations behind the attack and offer fresh insights into the complexities of French-Indian alliances. Taken together, the stories collected in this volume, framed by the editors' introduction and the assessments of two Native scholars, Taiaiake Alfred and Marge Bruchac, allow readers to reconstruct the history of the Deerfield raid from multiple points of view and, in so doing, to explore the interplay of culture and memory that shapes our understanding of the past.