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.