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Reviews of Books
| Uncas: First of the Mohegans. By Michael Leroy Oberg. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 268. $27.50.)
Reviewed by James D. Drake
, Metropolitan State College of Denver
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Few doubt the ability of a good biography to convey aspects of a people's history. That for nearly half a century professors have been assigning Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958), testifies to the genre's power. At the same time, no historian would deny that biography has its pitfalls; these have appeared especially extreme when the subject has been a historical figure who left few or no written records of his or her own. Biographies of the enigmatic Mohegan sachem Uncas, like most treatments of prominent Indians such as Metacom, Popé, or Pontiac, have usually centered on his relationship to colonists. Biographers have typically either vilified or romanticized him for allying with the English. Given the scarcity of sources and the tendency until relatively recently to view the clash of cultures in North America through the lenses of dichotomy and inevitability, it is not surprising that Uncas and other early American Indians have eluded biographical nuance. Not only have scholars tended to simply celebrate or castigate these leaders, they have described their ability to shape historical events in similarly divergent terms.1 |
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Unlike past writers, Michael Leroy Oberg avoids caricaturing Uncas and humanizes him. Because Uncas closely allied himself with the English yet managed to maintain a greater cultural gap between his people and the colonists than did many other leaders, he was unique. Yet if one had to choose an Indian whose life story could be used to present a microcosm of seventeenth-century New England, it would have to be Uncas. He had a powerful impact on the region's history from the Pequot War through King Philip's War and in the intervening decades of relative peace. |
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Like most Indian leaders, he pursued what he perceived to be best for his people in a rapidly changing world. This dedication to Mohegan interests provides the unifying theme for Oberg's work. It allows Oberg to escape the tired formulations that have plagued treatments of Uncas: the noble savage who helps Euramericans only to inevitably disappear, or the traitor to his race who aids and abets the natural enemy because doing so appears to be in his own self-interest. Although Oberg's argument is persuasive, it does leave him walking a fine line, much like his subject who "always walked a treacherous path between the English, his native rivals, and his numerous tributaries" (p. 108). Uncas did not just defend Mohegan interests; he helped to create them, and they served him well. Moreover, Mohegans' successes came almost entirely when their interests coincided with those of at least some English. |
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Though Uncas was born into a "world in balance," to borrow the title of Oberg's first chapter, he soon found himself and the Mohegans a "subject people," gaining little from their tributary status with the Pequots (p. 50). He rose to prominence by overthrowing Pequot domination in the aftermath of the disease and destruction brought to southern Connecticut by English settlers. In doing so, he relied on violence, threats, and rumors to draw the English into the devastating Pequot War. |
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