Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (review)

Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790. By Jean M. O’Brien. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 224 pp., illustrations, prologue, conclusion. £35.00 cloth.)

In Dispossession by Degrees, author Jean M. O’Brien traces the decline of Natick, Massachusetts, as a distinctly Indian place between 1650 and 1790. Combining insights from the field of ethnohistory with the best qualities of the New England town study, O’Brien has produced an important, persuasive, and well-researched book that shows, despite the erosion of Indian landownership in Natick, that Indians did not disappear from the region. While English colonists and subsequent Anglo-Americans might create a myth of Indian extinction in New England, O’Brien argues that this disappearance occurred only “in Euro-American imaginations, or rather in their failure to imagine how Indians struggled and survived, and how cultural change is persistence” (4).

After an opening chapter discussing the contrasting English and native concepts of the land and its ownership, O’Brien argues that Natick was a site “where different cultures collided and new ways were negotiated” (43). The result was a blend—an English-style village imposed on what traditionally had been an Indian place. Indians accepted English lifeways at Natick, organized by John Eliot as the first of his “praying towns,” as a means of defending Natick as an Indian place. In this sense cultural change benefited Indians and allowed them “more secure native tenure on a site they selected.” Even here, native acceptance of English cultural practices was selective, however, something O’Brien demonstrates convincingly in her discussion of Indian naming practices, their use of the English language, their subsistence strategies, and their ideas about governance and land tenure.

After 1740, O’Brien argues, Indian landownership in Natick declined. Indian participation in a transformed, individualized land market resulted ultimately in native lands slipping from native control, the “dispossession by degrees” spoken of in the book’s title. The growing numbers of English landowners in Natick began to flout Indian rights, resulting in “a drastic erosion of Indian power in Natick” (173). Minority status increasingly meant no status, as Natick became more and more a town controlled by and for Englishmen.

Loss of land meant the disappearance of native people from those historical records that most concretely documented their existence. Moreover, the intermarriage of Natick Indian women with African Americans resulted in the disappearance of recognizably Indian surnames from town records, further contributing to what O’Brien calls “the myth of disappearance.” Still, Indians managed to perpetuate their lineages and remain in the community, despite their invisibility to neighboring whites. Indians preserved their identity and their ties, however tenuous, to the land.

O’Brien’s book joins a growing number of works looking at New England Indians living behind the frontier, tracing their efforts to maintain their culture and land base after the collapse of the “middle ground.” Drawing parallels between the condition of Indians at Natick and those, over a century later, affected by the policy of allotment under the Dawes Act, O’Brien shows just how insidious myths of native disappearance can be. Yet, although O’Brien makes some useful comparisons with later Euro-American polices toward Native Americans, her book introduces the question of how applicable her findings for Natick are for the region as a whole. Natick was founded as an Indian place, one that received the sanction of provincial officials and clergymen. But what happened in other Indian towns as English settlers began to encroach on their lands? Such historians as Richard Melvoin have explored this question, but much work remains to be done. O’Brien clearly has written an extremely well-crafted study that should provide historians with important insights that they will need to consider as they begin to explore this important subject.

Michael Leroy Oberg
SUNY-Geneseo

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