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KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 414 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [414], (1) Lines: 0 to 64 ——— 13.41pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: Eject [414], (1) 17. “Vanishing” Indians in Nineteenth-Century New England Local Historians’ Erasure of Still-Present Indian Peoples jean m. o’brien Histories It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of this country, to be doubly wronged by the white men—first, driven from their native soil by the sword of the invader, and then darkly slandered by the pen of the historian. The former has treated them like beasts of the forest; the latter has written volumes to justify him in his outrages.1 In this passage from the first published American Indian autobiography (1826), Pequot William Apess leveled the double charge that EuroAmericans had violently seized Native homelands, then deliberately justi fied their outrageous conquest through their creation of historical memory . An enormous body of scholarship has more than substantiated Apess’s charges, which he made through an intriguing borrowing from the writings of Washington Irving that he inserted into the “Appendix” of his autobiography.2 Importantly, New England antiquarians had begun producing local histories in at least the decade before Apess published his autobiography. These histories, which would become a nineteenthcentury cottage industry in New England that moved well beyond justifying Euro-American conquest, pressed another insidious claim: that New England Indians were on the verge of extinction, if they had not already passed from the scene. It is somewhat puzzling that an army of antiquarians could so uniformly conclude that disappearance was the inevitable fate for New England Indians. If this scenario had played out, then why did Massachusetts and other New England states need bureaucracies for Indian affairs, and why did Massachusetts extend official recognition to the still surviving groups KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 415 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [415], (2) Lines: 64 to 79 ——— 13.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: Eject [415], (2) in the commonwealth until ending the of Indians’ “wardship” status in 1869? As Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Massachusetts in the middle of the nineteenth century, John Milton Earle compiled a census that identified well over one thousand Indians in the commonwealth, a figure that is certainly too low.3 And as scholars of nineteenth-century New England Indian history have made clear, New England Indians lived rich and traceable lives at exactly the moment historians were writing their eulogies.4 How could the narrative of Indian extinction coexist with the actual survival of Indian peoples in New England? As a preliminary effort toward unraveling this problem, I examine the ways in which nineteenth-century non-Indian local historians narrated their Indian past, and especially the ways in which they asserted the claim of Indian extinction. Reflecting back on the colonial past and the struggle for independence from Britain, a cadre of antiquarians asserted claims about the “glorious” achievements of residents of their communities. They did so as part of a larger effort to assert the primacy of New England in the forging of the new nation.5 Within this broad historical narrative constructed by local historians and other published commentators on the New England past, stories about Indians often appeared. These stories usually served to justify colonialism, to confer glory upon Euro-American ancestors, and, importantly, to insist that New England Indians had vanished from the region. I would like to suggest that these historical narratives included stories about interactions with Indians in order to establish a claim of “uniqueness ” for their particular places as well as to assert an American identity. In order to stake these claims, historical narrators needed to include Indians because Indians were central to the uniqueness and Americanness of their local colonial experience and because the “glorious triumph” of colonialism was the central narrative in nineteenth-century New England. But at the same time...

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