Love, Colonial Style

Ann Marie Plane. Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. xviii + 252 pp. Figures, map, table, notes, and index. $39.95.

To those who may have missed the remarkable providences in recent historiography, it is time to declare that New England has at last rejoined colonial North America. Once upon a time, New England declared itself the pure-bred norm from which the vast majority of other North American experiences deviated--in its very setting of the standard proclaiming its aloofness from less pristine areas of the continent. Thirty years ago, New England's distinctiveness was historiographically reinforced by the "Christian Utopian Closed Corporate Community" model of English people who were willfully oblivious to the Atlantic world and to the Native people around them. ¹ And, more recently, scholars ranging from Jack Greene to Michael Zuckerman have pronounced New England so far outside the diverse mainstream of early American development as to be virtually irrelevant to any larger story. ² But inward-turning Dedham is no longer New England. The region is finding its place in the paradigm of racialized, gendered, exploitative imperial multiplicity that defines--if something so motley can define--our current understanding of colonial North America. ³

In this historiographical context, three genuinely inspired ideas drive Ann Marie Plane's fascinating study of Native American conjugal relations in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: that New England--far from being the harbinger of American exceptionalism--was a colonial enterprise in which the subjugation, rather than the extermination, of the indigenous population was a central goal; that, as such an enterprise, New England can fruitfully be compared in light of colonial theory to other locales in the early modern and modern imperial world; and that the intimate realms of sexuality and family structures were crucial sites where the contest between colonial domination and indigenous resistance and accommodation played out.

"Marriage," Plane argues, hardly existed among the Algonquian-speaking peoples of southern New England prior to European contact--if by that term we mean the peculiar form of familial and property relationships between a heterosexual couple that western Europeans in general and Puritan divines and magistrates in particular held as the norm. Instead, an array of conjugal relationships coexisted in Native societies. Sachems frequently had several wives, primarily to cement political bonds among the handful of elite lineages that constituted the only social sector in which polygyny was common. The vast majority of commoners lived in monogamous relationships that took a number of different forms--sometimes planned by parents and other elders and involving the exchange of economic resources, sometimes arranged by the partners themselves with or without formal ceremony. The evidence is contradictory on the extent to which sexual fidelity was expected in any of these relationships, which in any event could be ended relatively easily, particularly when there had been no economic commitment by larger kin groups. And the entire spectrum of conjugal arrangements fit into a system in which, while sachem titles descended patrilineally, the main lines of kinship were matrilineal, children lived with their mothers but not necessarily their fathers, and wigwams were home to extended families. Importantly, then, the household as a spacial, familial, and economic unit was not defined by the conjugal pair but by a larger, often quite flexible, kinship group.

The diversity of southern New England Algonquian conjugal unions only became "marriage," Plane argues, when European explorers and colonizers began to write about the relationships. "In their pages," she says, "'Indian marriage' was born as a concept--a concept that helped to express and to contain the frightening divergences between English men and women and their North American 'others'" (p. 7). This act of naming, of ascribing and bounding difference, began an asymmetrical dialogue between colonizer and colonized in which divergences in conjugal practices became central tropes in defining what was "civilized" and what was "savage," what was "English" and what was "Indian." Marriage took on this ideological work because of...