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BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 1 / / Beyond Conquest / Amy E. Den Ouden 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [First Page] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to 41 ——— 10.60088pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [1], (1) 1 Dilemmas of Conquest Recovering Histories of Struggle In September of 1736 Mohegans held a ceremony on their reserved land to name a new leader. This land, where perhaps three hundred or more Mohegans were known to “dwell and plant” (Connecticut Archives, “Indians ” [hereafter ind], 1st ser., vol. 1:122), was engulfed by the town of New London and was the remaining fragment of what had been a much larger reservation, long known to Connecticut officials as the “sequestered lands” (1:89) or the “Mohegan fields” (1:122).1 Three decades prior to this leadership ceremony, Mohegans initiated what became a lengthy and complex legal dispute with the colony of Connecticut in an effort to protect their reserved planting and hunting lands. In 1704 Mohegan sachem Owaneco petitioned the English Crown to complain against dispossession at the hands of the Connecticut government; by 1705 an imperial commission determined that the lands in question had been unjustly appropriated and should be restored to Mohegans. In setting this order before the colony, the decision described Mohegans as “a considerable tribe or people . . . [who] cannot subsist without their lands” (Governor and Company of Connecticut, and Mohegan Indians, by their Guardians : Certified Copy of Book of Proceedings before Commissioners of Review, 1769 [hereafter Proc.] 1769:29, emphasis in original). This notion that the presumably conquered Indians in their midst existedasdistinctpoliticalentities–aspeopleswhopossessedaninherent and enduring right to their reserved lands – was to become a gnarly bone of contention for the Connecticut government.2 Indeed, in eighteenthcentury Connecticut disputes over Native rights to reservation land, and reservation communities’ tenacious struggles to preserve these lands, posed a challenge to colonial authority and called into question colonial notions about conquest itself.3 As Native women and men resisted colonial encroachment on their reserved lands, so too did they argue for the future of their communities and their collective rights to their 1 BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 2 / / Beyond Conquest / Amy E. Den Ouden Dilemmas of Conquest 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [2], (2) Lines: 41 to 45 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [2], (2) remaining lands. Their efforts to resist dispossession in the era following the devastation wrought by European disease, the major “Indian Wars” of southern New England, and the extensive expropriation of indigenous lands during the seventeenth century were in no sense a flight of fancy.4 The eighteenth-century struggles of reservation communities were grounded in and produced by their own knowledge of the past and of the colonial world in which they were enmeshed. This book examines these histories of struggle and the cultural and political facets of colonial relations of domination beyond the period of military conquest. Native women and men defending their reservations against encroachers and colonial pillaging of their ever-diminishing economic resources well understood the tenuousness of colonial justice. This they made clear in their protests, some of which were articulated in petitions to the Connecticut government requesting its intervention or protection in land disputes. In much rarer instances, Native communities opposing both dispossession and government intrusion into their own political affairs overtly defied colonial authority, as was the case with Mohegan resisters who brought their complaints to the Crown and mounted a public protest in September 1736. The colonial government did not take suchdefiancelightly,anditsresponsestoNativeresistanceinthisperiod offer important insight into the cultural and legal machinations of colonial power in the context of nonmilitary (but not necessarily nonviolent) confrontations with indigenous people. I have begun with the Mohegan leadership ceremony to suggest that Native resistance to conquest – conquest, that is, as an ongoing, multiform process extending beyond the seventeenth-century period of “contact ” and “pacification” – was central to the production of local Native histories in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the 1736 ceremony is elicited to begin to demonstrate that the locus of this challenge to colonial domination was reservation land: land that...

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