| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David J. Silverman. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871. (Studies in North American Indian History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 303. $60.00.
This book provides a comprehensive and well-written analysis of the American Indian communities of southern New England and their critical engagement with the British colonial world. David J. Silverman methodically answers two central questions. First, how did both Natives and non-Natives manage to live peaceably together amid cataclysms such as the Pequot War and King Philip's War? Second, what role did Christianity play in community survival? The survival of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah is indeed remarkable. The book has an epic quality, as Wampanoags struggled through everything from epidemic disease and missionization to debt peonage and endogamous marriage.	1
Within the field of American Indian history, this study offers a refreshing departure from previous works that have explained indigenous Christianity as little more than a political device. Silverman's nuanced understanding of Wampanoag cosmology is woven into his articulate rendering of a complex and varied archival record. Try as they might, Puritan missionaries failed to impose their theological beliefs wholesale on a series of docile Indian villages. Wampanoag converts pestered New England Puritans with thoughtful questions about theological principles such as predestination. Some Wampanoags acted on their misgivings by embracing either Anabaptist or Quaker visions of Christianity. However, Puritan congregationalism became a favored extension of the village-based polities that were the fundamental political unit of New England's Algonquian communities. The varying needs and demands of the Wampanoag community thus resulted in a peculiarly Wampanoag brand of Christianity.	. . .

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