Book Review

Canada and the United States

Recent years have witnessed the publication of a number of fine books exploring the experience of Indians living behind the New England frontier. In contrast to an older narrative that suggested the disappearance of Indians from early New England by the end of the seventeenth century, these works have stressed the creativity and resourcefulness with which Native peoples and communities responded to a world of rending change. Ann Marie Plane provides an important addition to this growing corpus of scholarship.

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Plane focuses on the lives of New England's Indians at the most intimate level. If English missionaries and colonial magistrates tried to reshape Native peoples in their own image, she asks, did they as well bring changes to Indian marriage practices and Native family structure? To answer this question, Plane explains the tangled process through which the first English observers noted the differences between Native communities and their own. She examines how the first missionaries prayed for Indian religious conversion and, finally, how colonial magistrates molded a legal system that subordinated Indian notions of law and legality to those of the English. She argues that as English authorities incorporated Native laborers into their homes and as they developed and articulated an ideology of how these households should operate, they distanced themselves from Indian marriage practices, finding in these and in other differences justification for discrimination against Indians in the eighteenth century. In this sense, "the intimacies of native sexual and domestic life proved inextricably intertwined with the establishment, rise, and maintenance of English colonial authority" (p. 5).

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