Reviewed by Peter C. Mancall | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 707 words from this article are provided below; about 1716 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Peter C. Mancall | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California

Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience. Edited by Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003. Distributed by the University of Virginia Press. 368 pages. $39.50 (cloth).
At some point in the relatively recent past, a group of scholars gathered together at Old Sturbridge Village, a simulacrum of a New England village sitting on the ancestral lands of the Nipmucs. Like too many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century meetings between natives and newcomers in this territory, the precise date of this modern encounter was apparently not worth recording; fortunately, many of the words delivered that day have now appeared in published form in this volume edited by Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury. According to the foreword, written by John W. Tyler, the editor of publications for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and one of the primary organizers, the meeting was notable for, among other things, the fact that "well over 50 percent of registrants were Indians, a first for an academic conference of this sort" (11). Tyler, who confessed to having suffered from "a bad case of liberal guilt" (9), noted that it was "hard to put into words what made the conference so special" (11). He listed a number of possibilities, including "the large number of native faces," the "warm sunshine at the cusp of early spring in Massachusetts," and the efforts of the program committee, which had ensured "a variety of voices among the presenters" (11). To judge from Tyler's tone, everyone involved was aware of the politics of such a gathering, particularly because the Colonial Society of Massachusetts was popularly considered "an organization (until recent decades) so brahminical its blood ran blue" (9).	1
It is not self-evident that such a gathering would produce important scholarship. As Calloway and Salisbury note, there has often been tension between academically trained historians, on the one hand, and native historians, on the other. "As a result of this mutual mistrust," they write, "native and non-native scholars have been telling histories of New England Indians that for the most part run parallel to one another, with no intersection" (15). To redress the problem, the conference organizers, who included native and non-native scholars, laid out an agenda. They would try "to do what the best scholarship in recent years has done: combine scholarly research and inquiry with native testimony and insight" and "strive for dialogue rather than definitive delivery" (16). They proceeded under the cloud of a real modern-day issue: the efforts of the Nipmucs to achieve federal recognition and the benefits that come from such a status. Though the editors had hoped that the chapters could contribute "to what might be termed the 'decolonization' of New England Indian history" (22), the politics of the federal recognition process suggest the limits of even the best scholarship to undermine almost four centuries of European conquest.	2
Still, the range of this volume's contents suggests the state of the field. In a witty and insightful analysis, Virginia DeJohn Anderson uses fragmentar y documentar y evidence to show how a group of Norwottucks made sense of a dead cow found in a creek as well as of the other livestock that had arrived with the newcomers. She shows how native peoples' response to domesticated animals reflected their response to colonization more generally. The Norwottucks and other natives came to terms with European animals through reasoning "by analogy from the creatures they already knew" (26), a process that (though she does not note it) mirrored sixteenth-century Europeans' efforts to make sense of the creatures (and everything else) they encountered in the western hemisphere. Anderson's discussion is infused by her sound grasp of regional mentalities, including the recognition that these native peoples "drew no sharp division between natural and supernatural phenomena" (28): their comprehension of newly introduced animals would differ markedly from English and Anglo-American views of livestock as living property. Her discussion also reflects an understanding of modern-day Cree attitudes toward animals, an approach employed by Calvin Luther Martin.¹ Like Martin, Anderson demonstrates the value of employing culturally relevant oral testimony to find meaning in colonial-era documents.	. . .

There are about 1716 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.