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  • Indians in Southern New England:Older Paradigms and Newer Themes
  • Christopher Bilodeau (bio)
Jean M. O'Brien. Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 224 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $99.00.
Kathleen J. Bragdon. Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xviii + 293 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.95.
Rachel Wheeler. To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. xiii + 316 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $45.00.
Jenny Hale Pulsipher. Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xii + 361 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendixes, notes, and index. $24.95.
Richard W. Cogley. John Eliot's Mission to the Indians before King Philip's War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xiv + 331 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $71.50.
David J. Silverman. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxiv + 303 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, appendixes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $32.99 (paper).
Daniel R. Mandell. Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xx + 321 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, essay on sources, and index. $57.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper). [End Page 213]

In the field of American Indian history, the historiography of southern New England Indians holds a privileged position. In 1975, Francis Jennings published The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, a work that, in the words of Kirsten Fischer, turned "an inherited historical narrative on its head."1 Jennings' book, in pugnacious, even at times bombastic, language, was the academic equivalent of a scorched-earth campaign against Puritan New England Indian policy, academic hair-splitting, and Francis Parkman. Emphasizing the victimhood of the Indian peoples at the hands of English deceit and greed, and published during the endgame of a deeply controversial war in Southeast Asia, the book resonated with scholars across the globe. Although Jennings' assault did not go without reprisal—most importantly from a main target of his ire, Alden T. Vaughan, author of New England Frontier and standard-bearer of the previous paradigm2—it carried the day, shifting the tone and tenor of the field in ways that changed the landscape of American Indian history forever. It has made the historiography of southern New England Indians a space of consistent interest, engagement, and contestation ever since.

One can say that the state of the field today is not quite so combative, but the quality of the work remains high. An examination of some recent monographs on the Indians of southern New England (most predominantly the Pequots, Mohegans, Wampanoags, Naticks, Massachusett, and Narragansetts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) helps us answer broader questions about the direction of the historiography on the whole. Where has the field come from, and where it is going?

This essay attempts to answer this question and some others, arguing that scholars have begun to elucidate new themes for several years now.3 These themes grew organically from the preoccupations of previous historians of American Indians over the past several decades (as opposed to a major work or event that radically changed a historiography from the outside). Curiously, many of them stem from a growing dissonance between older historiographical narratives that used to mesh so well. Issues and problems that would be so powerful and suggestive for historians of a previous generation—giving voice to underprivileged and marginalized peoples, emphasizing themes of domination, agency, empowerment, and creative adaptation—are now beginning to clash with one another in suggestive ways, ways that expose some of the assumptions that previous historians simply took for granted when they wrote their (often very good) works. Philip J. Deloria has highlighted something akin to this dimension in a recent historiographical essay, emphasizing that "future Indian histories may well be produced in a self-conscious collision, the politics and epistemology of...

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