Power and Gender in Recent Native American Histories

The volumes considered here are all first books by early career scholars. All four deal with the processes of Euro–American colonialism in North America and their impact on Native peoples. Within this general topic, however, there are a wide range of questions and approaches. Some of this diversity stems from academic backgrounds: two of the authors are historians by training (Mitchell, Pulsipher), one an anthropologist (Den Ouden), and one a religious specialist within ethnic studies (Pesantubbee). In scope, Pulsipher’s work analyzes events within a large region, while the others focus more locally. Two of the authors work with materials from lower New England (Den Ouden, Pulsipher) and one the Southeast (Pesantubbee) at roughly the same period, and one the Southwest at a much later time (Mitchell). Two make serious efforts at ethnohistory, in which the specific characteristics of tribal cultures mold and influence the events and processes of historical change (Den Ouden, Pesantubbee), while the other authors simply attempt to insert Native Americans into a fundamentally Euro–American narrative (Mitchell, Pulsipher). For one, women are specifically the topic (Pesantubbee); for another, women are a separate, identifiable analytical category among many (Mitchell); for a third, the gender implications of historical events are consistently analyzed, but smoothly embedded within the total discussion (Den Ouden); and for the last, there is apparently no awareness that the sequence documented had gender–specific impacts at all (Pulsipher). In addition to all these differences, the volumes also vary widely in elegance of prose and skill of data handling.

Despite Den Ouden’s subtitle, her work focuses on the Pequots, Niantics, and Mohegans of New London County in southeastern Connecticut. She argues that these people lost their land and their identity as tribes, not through the violence of the Pequot War of 1637, but as a result of the methods European settlers subsequently used to deal with Native groups and leaders. Therefore, conquest was not an event, she says, but a continuous, and continuing, process that resulted in these groups becoming landless by 1776 and indeed not being federally recognized as tribes at all by the mid–twentieth century. It is this contemporary situation that generated Den Ouden’s years of research in support of their legal efforts to win acknowledgement as tribal entities.

In contrast, Pulsipher’s work with New England Indians is both broader and narrower. On the one hand, she identifies her subject rather more narrowly as authority, not in the sociological sense of legitimate power, but specifically as a hierarchical chain of command. On the other hand, her scope is wider as she traces disputes over definitions of authority between Massachusetts Bay Colony, the major actor, and the English crown, adjacent colonies, and those Indian tribes essentially from Den Ouden’s Pequots eastward and north to Maine. The issue, as she defines it, was whether the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter allowed so much autonomy to Bay leadership as to supplant the king in the chain of authority, or whether individual citizens and Indian tribes could circumvent colonial leaders and form direct contacts and alliances, such as petitions and treaties, with the crown. Over her time period, basically from 1664 to 1691, encompassing the English Civil War and an administration sympathetic to Puritan theocratic...