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Upon first view, the cover may raise some questions, particularly the use of a headdress for a book concerned with peoples from the Northeast. Such regalia was not, to my knowledge, part of the cultural repertoire of Native nations in New England and New York. I admit that when I first viewed the cover, I was not sure what it had to do with the book. I wondered whether the use of such an image from a different region would continue the process by which peoples in the Northeast, from the eighteenth century onward, have been judged not truly “Indian” enough to be recognized as Native. Moreover, since the nineteenth century, such questions of authenticity often have turned on a supposed failure of Haudenosaunee, Wabanaki, and Algonquian peoples to embody an idea of indigeneity drawn from Plains peoples. Prior to my seeing the cover, people at the press had already had lengthy conversations about this question and then raised the issue with me. Then I got it: the feather taken from the headdress becomes the quill. Those juxtaposed images encapsulate my central argument, that settler ways of being and modes of representation are affected by processes of colonial relation without always being explicit about that influence. Settler occupation shapes the materiality of daily life without necessarily highlighting directly thewayseverydaynonnativeexperiencesremaindependentonpastandpresent practices of institutionalized expropriation. Instead, the results of such continuing colonial dynamics appear as the ready-to-hand means of settler expression and self-elaboration. Conversely, the pairing of the quill and the headdress suggests the ways that Native peoples in the Northeast needed to perform a particular kind of Indianness in order be legible as such, to be able to represent themselves as Indians in ways nonnatives could understand. For these reasons, I think the cover quite evocatively captures the spirit of the book, and I am deeply grateful to the designer. xiii Note on the Cover This page intentionally left blank ...

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