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Introduction At the end of the American Revolution, only a few thousand Indians remained in southern New England. Declining in numbers and plagued by alcoholism, poverty, and the contempt of their white neighbors, they seemed to teeter on the brink of extinction. But Indians and their communities did survive, and their story over the subsequent century has great significance for American history. First, the ways in which they struggled to improve themselves, their families, and their communities , as a marginalized yet protected minority, facing the pressures of acculturation and racism, shed light on aboriginal peoples past and present. Natives in southern New England retained some remnants of autonomy, particularly those with sizeable communally held lands reserved under state laws, comparable to modern federally recognized tribes. That status made Indians unique: they were simultaneously within and without the dominant economic, political, and legal systems. Individuals and families moved between their reserves and the outside world--working, selling, living, and often dying outside, but generally planning to return. Wherever they lived, they could not vote, sell communal lands, or be sued for reserved property. Outside, Indians were famous (or notorious) as transient workers: whalers, farm laborers, domestics, herbal doctors, circus performers, basket makers, and peddlers. Once back home, they maintained a culture that re- flected aboriginal traditions (such as political and economic rights for women, and disapproval of individual enterprise) even as new bits of outside culture were adopted (such as raising sheep and fencing and inheriting fields). Second, because many Indians married African Americans or whites, their story illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, and identity in America from an unusual and early vantage point. Relationships between southern New England Indians and African Americans went through three distinct phases: mutual advantage through intermarriage during the eighteenth century; growing opportunities for people of color outside Indian enclaves at the turn of the century; and finally con- flict when black men found they had more to gain by ending the legal distinctions that supported Indian boundaries. But intermarriage is also a complex and mysterious picture that confounds historic segmentation, involving whites, Indians, and blacks, and features conflicts that linked race and gender. Scholars have taken two basic approaches to examining the evolution and formation of group identity, whether national (political) or ethnic (primarily cultural). The first is to emphasize internal mechanisms in maintaining core traditions. The second is to emphasize the role of external influences in shaping or reshaping the group. This study shows the interplay of both factors in the struggles of Indians to maintain and reinvigorate their communities. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the history of Indians during this period provides a unique view of developments in New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction. It highlights the dialectic between race and class in the region 's social structure, beginning when poor whites, blacks, and Indians served as servants together and were regulated in similar ways; continuing with the rise of racist segregation and democratic politics following American independence; and ending with the emergence of an abolitionist and civil rights movement in the mid-nineteenth century, which brought together middle-class white reformers and ambitious African Americans--and threatened Indian communities. Within this structure, Indians formed part of a larger transient class that contributed to, but barely benefited from, the rise of industrialization, agrarian improvement, and consumer culture in southern New England, as Indian men worked as whalers or day laborers and women cleaned homes and peddled the baskets, brooms, and mats that helped farmwives keep order. The Indians’ experiences also reveal how evangelical religion in the early republic served to organize and empower the lower classes, and how later religiousdriven social reforms among such groups emerged from internal needs and external direction. That direction came from elites associated with the Whig and Republican parties, given in the name of helping Indians, and uncovers significant continuities and changes in the structure and ideology of the region’s reform movement, and shifts in how Indians were perceived. Those emerging depictions of Indians at midcentury also show how a distinctive New England identity and history emerged even as the region's intellectuals presented a newly critical view of their past and purpose. Tribe, Race, History is roughly divided into halves: the first three chapters focus on the first half-century, the last three on the second half. The first three chapters are more thematic than chronological, as Native groups varied widely in their residential patterns, political power, and group...

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