Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast by Thomas M. Wickman (review)

Thomas Wickman argues that students of early American history have had “a long-standing vernal bias” (286). By this he means that scholars have tended to overlook how Indigenous peoples and colonists survived winter in New England. Even climate historians who have studied the history of the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–1850) have understood the cold as largely a catastrophe brought on by forces outside of human control when the truth, as Wickman puts it, is “that in myriad ways people make their own seasons” (15). Though subtitled an environmental and cultural history of winter in a nod to disciplinary conventions, Wickman aspires to write a “political ecology of winter” (286) that seeks to cast settler colonialism in a new light.

Settler colonialism, at least in the US context, involved, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has explained, “the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft” (An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States [Beacon P, 2014], 2). Scholars writing in this intellectual vein are deeply concerned with the land because it is the basis of human life and because of the genocidal impact of colonial dispossession on Indigenous peoples. Wickman enters into the discussion of settler colonialism by pointing out that it is “based on a novel and contested European assumption that newcomers would stay for the winter, occupying some lands year-round, rather than returning home after a season of trading and fishing” (2).

The Indigenous peoples who lived in the Northeast did more than cope with winter. They thrived in the snow, employing snowshoes to carry out winter military raids. They used them to hunt deer, beaver, moose, and porcupines as well as to visit kin and to establish networks of trade. Their mobility through the winter season allowed Native peoples to carve out a significant amount of material independence based on hunting, fishing, and trapping for subsistence. Although Wickman has little substantive to say about Indigenous customary rights to the commons where subsistence practices took place, he notes that activities such as frostfishing (fishing for tomcod, which spawns in the winter) required access and collective ownership over resources. He certainly has a point that seasonal community activities like frostfishing demonstrated the Native peoples’ command of the natural world. As he puts it, these kind of activities offer “a useful counterbalance to a tendency among historical climatologists to produce narratives of nature overpowering people” (271).

A clash developed when the English arrived. English colonization was based on permanent settlement of the land throughout the twelve months of the year. This required the invasion, dispossession, and occupation of Native people’s land. For example, the colonists cut timber for fuel and for building, and that impinged on Indigenous peoples’ own use of these resources. The English also brought along cows and pigs, livestock that needed to be wintered if the settlers were to stay throughout the year. Swine are fearful of snow, and thus the colonists turned them loose to forage for shellfish in coastal areas—oyster beds and clam banks that Native peoples understood as collective resources necessary for winter survival.

It is wrong, however, to imagine that the English ran roughshod over the Native groups who preceded them on the land. English settlers did not don snowshoes, at least not at the start of settlement. It took considerable time for the English to make sense of Indigenous winter rituals and routines. Significant vulnerability to winter existed for most of the seventeenth century, especially during a period of global cooling referred to as the Maunder Minimum (1675–1715).

A turning point came during King Philip’s War. The English interned various Native allies on an island in Boston Harbor, making clear their intention “to project greater power over the colder months than before” (104). Frustrations with the largely passive English approach...