Extinction and Survival: Remembering New England Indians

As a historian working on nineteenth-century New England Indian history, I have found the local history genre useful, despite its quirks and prejudices, because mixed in among the lists of town proprietors, town officers, and revolutionary war soldiers, an occasional Indian will be mentioned, and a tiny hint of their daily lives—as basket sellers, speakers of the language, or neighbors knowledgeable in old Indian legends or healing—will be revealed. In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O'Brien calls these transient vignettes of Indian experience "ruptures" (p. xii), for they disrupt narratives built on the premise that New England Indians have disappeared. While O'Brien comments on the irony of these "ruptures," her main purpose is to bring to light the pervasive and insidious history-making of nineteenth-century New Englanders—white New Englanders or, as she puts it, "ordinary non-Indians" (p. xii)—who were determined to make invisible the continuing Indian presence in the region.

What makes Firsting and Lasting unique and interesting is its source base: the town, county, state, and New England-centered national histories of southern New England written by local residents and antiquarians to document and celebrate their histories. O'Brien slogged her way through 600 of these texts, produced mainly between about 1820 to 1880 (p. xv), noting and, in some cases, quantifying the contexts in which Indians appeared. Their titles alone are tedious: A Report of the North Providence Celebration at Pawtucket, North Providence, of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town, June 24, 1865 (1865); History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut, from the First Indian Deed in 1659 to 1854, Including the Present Towns of Washington, Southbury, Bethlehem, Roxbury, and a Part of Oxford and Middlebury (1854); A History of the Town of Northfield, Massachusetts for 150 Years, with an Account of the Prior Occupation of the Territory by the Squakheags: and with Family Genealogies (1875); and so on. Few other historians would be able to conjure up the endurance to persist on such a course of research, but O'Brien has, it would seem, read these texts with a passion, driven by disbelief at the wanton and blatant hypocrisy riddling the rhetoric local historians employed to claim New England for themselves.

Along with O'Brien's first book, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (1997), Firsting and Lasting is part of a renaissance that has taken place in New England Indian history in the past few decades, fueled partly by the simultaneous resurgence of New England Indian communities. Overrun by English settlers long before the United States government began signing treaties with Indians, many of the region's Indians have only recently acquired federal recognition as tribes or are still in pursuit of it. Firsting and Lasting connects the memory-making of the nineteenth century to the present in its conclusion by showing how Indian struggles for recognition—both recognition of their identity as Indians and legal recognition as federally recognized tribes—have had to counter the presuppositions generated by nineteenth-century local histories. The segregation of Indians to an ancient past and the expunging of evidence of Indian survival from the region's memory have residually inflected contemporary public contests over Indian claims, allowing for non-Indians to assert that New England's Indians had disappeared and to believe that real Indians could only be "full bloods" who spoke the language and had a primitive culture.

While many excellent books have recently been published touching on these aspects of New England Indian history, Firsting and Lasting has the most in common with Patricia E. Rubertone's Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (2001). Rubertone assessed Rhode Islanders' mythmaking of Roger Williams as founding father, the distortions of Narragansett culture that reside within his now iconic Narragansett dictionary (A Key into the Language of the Americas), and the archaeological evidence from a...