Of Subjects and "Savages"

Quite a few books have appeared over the past two decades dealing with enterprising-but-often-marginal individuals who used performances of identity and authority to access power, privilege, or wealth in the American past. Many of these people attained some level of fame or have received sustained attention from subsequent generations of scholars, despite their frequently obscure and underprivileged origins. The newest entry in this catalog of "slippery characters," as literary scholar Laura Browder termed them, is Jenny Hale Pulsipher's Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. Taking as her subject the little-known figure of John Wompas (alias White), a 17^th-century Nipmuc man, Pulsipher has produced an elegant and revealing microhistorical study that tells us as much or more about the English empire in Native North America as it does about the crafty individual at its center. While we might quibble with the author about whether Wompas was, in fact, an "ordinary Indian" (p. 7), given his central role in a startling number of land transactions and legal maneuvers in New England and Old England, we can certainly appreciate that his life and legacies have been largely ignored or misunderstood. And through her careful analysis, Pulsipher offers a clear and compelling portrait of a man who was "at the heart" of Indian land sales but simultaneously appears to have played a key role in "preserving his homeland" (p. 6). She argues that although his strategic use of both "Native and English political and legal structures" benefitted him personally, he also deftly maneuvered to preserve Native lands in Native hands.

Through Pulsipher's detailed reconstruction, based on what must have been maddeningly fragmentary records, we learn that John Wompas was born around 1637 to Nipmuc parents from the town of Hassanamesit. His mother and father were early converts to Christianity and took pains to ensure that their children would receive religious and educational instruction from area missionaries. Despite the paucity of sources on Wompas's early life, Pulsipher has managed to present a robust picture of the place and time by focusing on parallel experiences among "praying Indians" in the region. Though both his parents died during his childhood, Pulsipher shows that their choice to position Wompas nearer to English missionaries and colonial officials would have an outsized impact on his later life. Beyond her thoughtful signposting, the author also foreshadows a pattern of behavior that features prominently in Wompas's subsequent land-dealing strategies. Pulsipher describes his mother's deathbed prophesying as a deployment of "a Native pattern" for a "Christian purpose" (p. 27). This sort of deliberately cross-cultural strategy of communication would come to define John Wompas's approach to legal status and land claims.

After taking up residence with a white family in Roxbury, Massachusetts following his parents' death, Wompas had what appears to have been both an ordinary and an extraordinary adolescence and young adulthood. On the one hand, in comparison to other Indigenous youth who were not so centrally situated within the world of English Christianity, Wompas's immersion in the colonial communities of Roxbury and then Cambridge was quite outside the norm. On the other hand, as a Native servant in an English household, viewed as an object of pity and charity who lacked power and status, Wompas was not unlike the hundreds, if not thousands, of Indigenous people who lived in some form of bondage within English colonial society. One of his peers lived just across the Roxbury town green. She was a Mahican-speaking war captive named Ann Prask and in time she became his wife and an important source of land. Pulsipher works hard to situate the two in space, time, and society, demonstrating the stark differences in how they came to Roxbury while also revealing how similarly they were regarded by the...