Reviewed by Colin G. Calloway | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Colin G. Calloway | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College

Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871. By David J. Silverman. Studies in North American Indian History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 328 pages. $60.00 (cloth).

Twenty-five years ago, the William and Mary Quarterly published James P. Ronda's article on "Generations of Faith."¹ Since then Ronda has pursued other interests in the nineteenth-century West, but his article has stood, among a growing tide of studies of Indians and Christianity in colonial Massachusetts, as reminder that things were rather different on the Vineyard, where Indian people played a central role in running their own church. The literature about Indians and Christianity, and more recently Indian Christianity, in Massachusetts is now so rich that one may wonder whether there is need or place for yet another study, but David J. Silverman effectively removes any such doubts. Mining a variety of sources and focusing on the Wampanoag community of Aquinnah (or Gay Head) at the southwest end of Martha's Vineyard, he explores the range of Indian experiences on the island from the seventeenth century, where most studies of Indians and missionaries in New England have focused, to the late nineteenth century. He embeds his discussion of Christianity in larger stories of adaptation and survival and shows that Wampanoag strength and Wampanoag decisions for a long time determined the balance of continuity and change on the island they shared with English colonists.

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