scholarly journals Uncovering Indigenous Worlds and Histories on a Bend of a New England River before the 1650s: Problematizing Nomenclature and Settler Colonial History, Deep History, and Early Colonization Narratives

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Strobel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Praying Town

The essay explores the often-ignored histories of the indigenous people who resided on the confluence of the Merrimack and the Concord rivers up to the 1650s. This place is characterized by a significant bend in the Merrimack River as it changes its southerly flow into an easterly direction. Today, the area includes the modern city of Lowell, Massachusetts, and its surroundings. While the 1650s saw the creation of a Native American “praying town” and the incorporation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s towns of Chelmsford and Billerica, it is the diverse and complex indigenous past before this decade which North American and global historians tend to neglect. The pre-colonial and early colonial eras, and how observers have described these periods, have shaped the way we understand history today. This essay problematizes terminology, looks at how amateur historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries have shaped popular perceptions of Native Americans, and explores how researchers have told the history before the 1650s. The materials available to reconstruct the history of the region’s Native Americans are often hard to find, a common issue for researchers who attempt to study the history of indigenous peoples before 1500. Thus, the essay pays special attention to how incomplete primary sources as well as archeological and ethnohistorical evidence have shaped interpretations of this history and how these intellectual processes have aided in the construction of this past.

Algonquian Diasporas

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Community Members ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native American Tribes

This chapter examines how King Philip’s War gave rise to a significant but often ignored or misperceived history of bondage, enslavement, and diaspora that took Native Americans far from their northeast homelands, and subjected them to a range of brutal conditions across an Atlantic World. It focuses on Algonquians’ transits into captivity as a consequence of the war, and historicizes this process within longer trajectories of European subjugation of Indigenous populations for labor. The chapter examines how Algonquian individuals and families were forcibly placed into New England colonial as well as Native communities at the war’s conclusion, and how others were transported out of the region for sale across the Atlantic World. The case of King Philip’s wife and son is especially complex, and the chapter considers how traditions around their purported sale into slavery in Bermuda interact with challenging racial politics and archival traces. Modern-day “reconnection” events have linked St. David’s Island community members in Bermuda to Native American tribes in New England. The chapter also reflects on wider dimensions of this Algonquian diaspora, which likely brought Natives to the Caribbean, Azores, and Tangier in North Africa, and propelled Native migrants/refugees into Wabanaki homelands.

scholarly journals Spiritual and religious aspects of torture and scalping among the Indian cultures in Eastern North America, from ancient to colonial times

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Juha Hiltunen
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
American People ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The North ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Religious Aspects

Only a few decades ago a common perception prevailed that the historic­al Native Americans were very prone to violence and warfare. Scalping and torture were seen as a specific custom attached into their ideology and sociocultural ethos. However in the 1960s a completely reversed picture started to emerge, following the course of other worldwide movements, such as ethnic rights, pan-Indianism, ecological conscience, revisionist historiography and so on. Immediately the Native American people came to be seen as the victims of the European colonialism and the Whites were the bad guys who massacred innocent women and children, either at Sand Creek or in Vietnam. Books were written in which the historians pointed out that the practice of scalping was actually not present in the Americas before the whites came. This theory drew sustenance from some early colonial accounts, especially from the Dutch and New England colonies, where it was documented that a special bounty was offered for Indian scalps. According to this idea, the practice of scalping among the Indians escalated only after this. On the other hand, the blame fell on the Iroquois tribesmen, whose cruel fighting spread terror throughout the seventeenth century, when they expanded an empire in the north eastern wilderness. This accords with those theorists who wanted to maintain a more balanced view of the diffusion of scalping and torture, agreeing that these traits were indeed present in Pre-Columbian America, but limited only to the Iroquoians of the east. Colonial American history has been rewritten every now and then. In the 1980s, and in the field of archaeology especially, a completely new set of insights have arisen. There has been a secondary burial of the myth of Noble Savage and a return of the old Wild Indian idea, but this time stripped of its cartoon stereo­typical attachments. The Indians are now seen as being like any other human beings, with their usual mixture of vices and virtues. Understanding this, one may approach such a topic as scalping and torture without more bias than when reading of any practice of atrocities in human history.

scholarly journals The New England Puritans: History, Social Order, and Gender

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Riley Bolitho
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Social Order ◽  
New World ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Church

The article will address the history of the Puritan migration from England to early colonial America, contextualizing their social order and gender in culture in the New World given special emphasis to their theology. The methodology employed is qualitative analysis of factors that: caused Puritan emigration and their early experience in Massachusetts Bay; organized their social structure; and illuminated the position of gender in culture. Generally, Puritans migrated out of New England for varying reasons but primarily out of deep-seated theological frustrations with the Church of England. Their theology is then described and assigned its place as the organizing principle of society; understanding this, gender is consequentially realized as not a particularly useful category of culture for the Puritans although we can observe how cultural works articulated women’s position in society—which was principally as wives, mothers, and worshipers.

An Early Colonial Historian: John Oldmixon andThe British Empire in America

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pat Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

For many years, Arthur M. Schlesinger observed, the American colonists were too occupied with living the present to explore their own past. Such historical works as were written generally confined themselves to a single province. Perhaps the most important intercolonial work of the early eighteenth century was compiled by an Englishman: Daniel Neal'sHistory of New-England(1720). In theNew Cambridge Bibliography of English Literaturethe entry for Neal is immediately preceded by that for John Oldmixon (1673–1742), miscellaneous Whig compiler and butt of the Tory wits. This may serve as a reminder that Oldmixon, too, wrote a pioneering work of colonial history – a flawed, prolix but deeply interesting book which merits more scrupulous attention than it generally gets.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Catherine Cumming
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
Financial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.  

Indigenous Written Sources for the History of Bonny

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Susan M. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Court Records ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similar Character ◽  
Written Sources

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640—1730

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Native Culture ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The One ◽  
Christian Practices ◽  
Gospel Message ◽  
Over Time

Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king's son in Matthew 22:1—4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town's praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”2

The limits of power: the political ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest

Antiquity ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 66 (250) ◽  
pp. 153-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
History Of

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3),The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

Representing Native American Women in Early Colonial American Writings: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Juan Ortiz and John Smith

Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 25-45
Author(s):  
Mª Carmen Gomez Galisteo
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Contact Period ◽  
Native American Women ◽  
American Women ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Hernando De Soto ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Cabeza De Vaca

Most observers of Native Americans during the contact period between Europe and the Americas represented Native American women as monstrous beings posing potential threats to the Europeans’ physical integrity. However, the most well known portrait of Native American women is John Smith’s description of Pocahontas, the Native American princess who, the legend goes, saved Smith from being executed. Transformed into a children’s tale, further popularized by the Disney movie, as well as being the object of innumerable historical studies questioning or asserting the veracity of Smith’s claims, the fact remains that the Smith-Pocahontas story is at the very core of North American culture. Nevertheless, far from being original, John Smith’s story had a precedent in the story of Spaniard Juan Ortiz, a member of the ill-fated Narváez expedition to Florida in 1527. Ortiz, who got lost in America and spent the rest of his life there, was also rescued by a Native American princess from being sacrificed in the course of a Native American ritual, as recounted by the Gentleman of Elvas, member of the Hernando de Soto expedition. Yet another vision of Native American women is that offered by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, another participant of the Narváez expedition who, during almost a decade in the Americas fulfilled a number of roles among the Native Americans, including some that were regarded as female roles. These female roles provided him with an opportunity to avert captivity as well as a better understanding of gender roles within Native American civilization. This essay explores the description of Native American women posed by John Smith, Juan Ortiz and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca so as to illustrate different images of Native American women during the early contact period as conveyed by these works.

A Hint of Things to Come …

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-36
Author(s):  
Charles R. Cobb
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Landscape Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Landscape Transformations ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter provides an overview of landscape studies in archaeology, particularly as practiced in the southeastern United States. There is an extended discussion justifying historical anthropology as an important point of departure for this study, in particular because of its usefulness for exploring processes of colonialism. The chapter provides summaries of the major Native American groups and European powers that appear in the remainder of the volume. Generally speaking, the three major European players, or the Spanish, English, and French had different goals and methods of colonization. These methods cumulatively spurred a highly ramified history of landscape transformations for Native Americans. The chapter’s approach resonates well with post-colonial approaches that attempt to decolonize the past by removing Europeans as the primary lens by which we view the actions of Indigenous peoples. Working under rubrics such as “Native-lived colonialism” and “decolonizing the past,” archaeologists increasingly are seeking to integrate European texts, the archaeological record, oral histories, and the perspectives of Native peoples to try and achieve a plural perspective on past lifeways.

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