In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter two Community and Family At about the time of American Revolution a Narragansett, Alice Prophetess, bought an African American slave and made him her husband. She would later tell their grandson William J. Brown that she did so “in order to change her mode of living.” Brown commented that, among her grandmother’s people, “it was customary for the woman to do all the drudgery and hard work in-doors and out . . . The Indian women observing the colored men working for their wives, and living after the manner of white people, in comfortable homes, felt anxious to change their position in life.” But as more Indian women like Prophetess married African Americans, he noted, Indian men developed a “very bitter feeling” against blacks. These conflicts, which were sometimes expressed in racial terms, developed from the resentment against Indian women for choosing outsiders, the potential that such marriages could endanger communal resources, and the perception that the children and grandchildren of such marriages were more likely to follow a path away from the tribe’s culture. Brown was a leader of the African American community of Providence, Rhode Island, and gave no indication in his 1883 autobiography that he retained any sense of Narragansett identity.1 The rising tendency of Indian women in southern New England to marry “foreigners & strangers,” mostly African American although also white, created a major challenge for Native groups.2 As they struggled to maintain their communities and lands, they were confronted with the need to define their social boundaries as a growing number of individuals and families moved between, into, and out of surviving enclaves. This human movement reshaped Indian identity and continually tested the ability of groups to assimilate newcomers and resist challengers. Some groups retained the population, cohesion, and resources to assimilate new- comers and their “mixed” children, using their lands as political and social controls to manage the effects of exogamous marriages. Ironically, in doing so Natives relied on their legal handicaps, for neither tribes nor individuals could sell Indian land to outsiders without the permission of the legislature. In addition to concerns over immigrants’ access to resources and power, after 1820 some Indian communities became alarmed at emigrants’ efforts to sell tribal lands and, in response, sought to limit or deny group membership to those who left. Exogamous marriages and state laws allowed Indian women to hold far more political and economic power than their white and black contemporaries. Although the largely familial authority of Indian women had roots in aboriginal culture , it was renewed by the extended absences of Indian men and the increasing “adoption” of black or white husbands who, as outsiders, lacked the status of those born into the community. Thus women became guardians of their communities even as their exogamous marriages served as potential conduits of disruptive changes. The power wielded by Indian women did not go unchallenged, however, as Indian men sought at the beginning of the nineteenth century to increase their power and respectability. A different situation faced Indian groups without the advantages of numbers and lands. They were more easily reshaped by regional trends such as urbanization as, after 1800, members moved to nearby towns or cities where they lived with and became part of emerging African American enclaves. Among such families, dual and shifting ethnic identities and affiliations became quite common. The persistence, adaptation, and acculturation of particular ethnic groups, and the assimilation of members of those groups, are not unusual topics of study for scholars and policy makers. But this aspect of New England Indians in the early republic is unusual because it took place earlier than such developments and issues are generally studied, and on the side of America’s racial line where few studies of ethnicity have gone. Examining relations between Indians and blacks in southern New England illuminates the fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history and offers new insight into the complexity, malleability, and uncertainty of ethnic identity and assimilation. indian networks in the early republic Indians had forged regional networks in the century before the Revolution. The migration of individuals and families within these networks continued after the war, encouraged in part by regular religious meetings. An Anglo-American resident of Dartmouth remembered from his childhood in the 1770s that Indians 40 t r i b e , r a c e , h i s t o r y [3.145.55.169] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 12:36...

Share