Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief

My youngest Daughter, aged Seven years, was carryed all the journey, & look’d after with a great deal of Tenderness.

—John Williams, 1707¹

Whither Eunice?

The famous story of Eunice Williams’s captivity and incorporation begins with tears and ends with tears, as it was a Mohawk woman’s grief that prompted her capture as a replacement child for one lost. Her inconsolability motivated Mohawk warriors from Kahnawake to venture from the southwestern part of the St. Lawrence River down to Deerfield, Massachusetts, in February 1704—during the dead of winter—to take captives.² Little is known of the specificity of the Mohawk woman’s unrest, or of the particulars of her life, as she is referred to only as “the mother.”³ Far more is known of Eunice Williams, the white child of completely unambiguous Protestant stock that would become her child. She was originally the daughter of the Reverend John Williams and Eunice Williams, and thus was the grand niece of famed Puritan minister Increase and cousin to Cotton Mather. In their commitment to piety, anti-popishness, proper puritan conduct, and writing and sermonizing on the sinister condition of Indian captivity, the Mathers have been described as “the most prominent divines of their generation.”⁴ Williams’s life receives its acclaim in part because of these genealogies. But her life is most famous because her captivation became thoroughly consensual and she became Mohawk through time. She steadfastly refused to return to her natal territory and family. Owing to yawning gulfs in the archives, we do not know what this conversion tale looked like within Kahnawake, but it is clear from the literature that, although originally “English,” she became a unilingual, Catholic “white Indian” who was captivated by and fully assimilated into Mohawk society.

In this article, I use the story of Eunice Williams’s captivity to argue that her incorporation into Mohawk society does not belong in the past; rather, it forms part of the gendered structure and imaginary of contemporary colonial settler society of North America. This gendered structure and imaginary is instantiated through The Indian Act of 1876, which defined and recognized indigeneity in Canada through a pre-citizened wardship status.⁵ This wardship status, which is now co-incident with state citizenship, continues to determine rights to material and semiotic resources for Indians in Canada, and shapes the identities and identifications of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada today.⁶ This article offers a speculative history regarding the Act and the captivity narratives surrounding Williams’s life in order to point to the possibility of their relatedness but also to stimulate further, deeper work on the role of historical narrative in stimulating political and social possibility in colonial, or settler, contexts through time.

The story of Eunice Williams, then, is more than a story of thrilling, dramatic, and violent eighteenth-century captivation. It is a story about the transformation of membership or incorporation into a rights-bearing unit of political status, with an attendant form of recognition—a recognition that was later conferred through The Indian Act. This is also a story of colonial alchemy, of recognition of political subject-formation, which moved race and gender to the forefront of deliberations over the meting out of those rights (only to efface them) and which was an evidentiary moment of deep identification that had occurred within Eunice Williams’s interior frontiers, within her mind. Her identifications and recognitions and the celebration of her story do not come without consequences, consequences that have not been considered in the literature on captivation. This is a literature that largely considers captivation to be a case of force, adoption, and/or kinning in an effort to re-historicize the past in deeply connected ways. These important contributions to literary and historical studies have significantly problemetized the notion of settler and Indigenous experiences as isolated from each other and have given us a sense, especially in literary studies, of the importance of Indigenous “savagery” to the construction and maintenance of a “civilized” colonial self. However, in colonial “situations”—historical...