Reviews of Books

The Indians' New England

John Wood Sweet

Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790. By Jean M. O'Brien. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 224. $54.95.)

King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676. By James D. Drake. Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Pp. x, 257. $50.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.)

In 1892, when a group of Boston gentlemen founded the Colonial Society of Massachusetts to promote knowledge and appreciation of "our Colonial Ancestors" and their role in the "building of our Nation," one of the top priorities was the design of an appropriate crest. The society settled on an image featuring "a naked savage holding a bow and arrow," his body framed by the arms of a cross.1 The figure was adapted from the seal the Colony of Massachusetts Bay had adopted sometime between its two great seventeenth-century wars of conquest. In the original version, a dialogue bubble spouts from the Indian man's mouth: "Come over and help us," he exclaims. This evangelical vision of encounter has survived the centuries—most ubiquitously, perhaps, in holograms on Massachusetts driver's licenses—as the preferred image of the region's colonial past. But not all New Englanders have found this view satisfying. In 1925, a Wampanoag woman named Rachel Ryan told an ominous story about a "great and wise chief" who lived before the "coming of the white man." "On his death-bed he said that a strange white people would come to crowd out the red men, and that for a sign, after his death a great white whale would rise out of the witch pond below." Sure enough, the night he died, the whale surfaced.2 For scholars, particularly in the last several decades, the encounter between whites and Indians has been the "great white whale" of New England history: the elusive object of a continuing quest to understand the region's divisive past and America's multicultural present.

1

New England Encounters, edited by Alden Vaughan, documents that effort. The volume comprises fifteen essays published during the last half century in the New England Quarterly. Launched in 1928, the NEQ was, in the words of Colonial Society president Samuel Eliot Morison, "An Historical Review of New England Life and Letters." The venture was no mere exercise in filiopiety. It reflected the spirit of the 1920s; with its interests in colonial history and nineteenth-century literature, the NEQ joined in the quest for a distinctive national culture that was inspiring such intellectuals as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford and that eventually gave rise to the field of American studies. By the 1950s, when the first essays included in New England Encounters were published, the Colonial Society had dropped its requirement that members be descendants of colonial settlers of Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay and embraced a broader social and scholarly outlook.3 As the essays show, the widening horizons gradually—and sometimes fitfully—inspired changing approaches to Indian-English relations in NEQ. Unfortunately, New England Encounters obscures this evolution; as editor, Vaughan has arranged the essays topically and relegated original publication details to the end of the book. Within this frame a chronological narrative of settler-Indian relations unfolds from the early-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Each essay is graced by an introduction by Vaughan, who seeks to bridge narrative gaps, establish historical context, and emphasize thematic continuity. More analytical and historiographical discussions can be found in brief postscripts, where most of the authors take the occasion to reflect on their original essays and subsequent revisions and enter into ongoing debates.

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