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  • Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians
  • Laurier Turgeon
Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. By Patricia E. Rubertone. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xvii, 248 pp., inventories, maps, illustrations, index. $40.00 cloth.)

This book by Patricia Rubertone will interest historians and literary scholars of the colonial period in North America, as well as archaeologists and anthropologists. Drawing heavily on archaeology and anthropology but also on literary theory and oral traditions, Rubertone suggests new ways of approaching history and using it to rethink the effects of colonialism on the Indians. Moreover, she provides elements for the elaboration of a counterhistorical discourse intended to help decolonize the Indian past. In fact, the author adopts the Amerindian perspective so as to capture the complex history of Amerindian actions and reactions to European colonial domination: a history full of difficulties, troubles, and suffering, but also a good dose of resistance, adaptations that were sometimes fortunate, and survival. She focuses her attention on the Narragansetts, one of the most numerous and powerful indigenous groups in the south of New England, who, after having allied themselves with the English, were massacred by them in 1675 during the course of "King Philip's War," which was intended to eliminate all Amerindian resistance in New England. Diminished and defeated, the Narragansetts have continued to suffer the insults of English and American colonization up to the present day without ever entirely disappearing. This study centers on the seventeenth century; the author does not hesitate, however, to move back into prehistoric time, to unveil for us the historical depth of this group, and then to carry the study up into the twentieth century to highlight the postcolonial heritage of colonialism.

The contribution of this book is above all methodological. Rubertone innovates in founding her analysis on the notion of translation rather than on the more well-known theories of acculturation, transculturation, or interculturation. She retains the anthropological sense of the word translation, that of the interpretation of one culture by another. More globalizing, the concept of cultural translation allows research perspectives to be expanded on three levels of interpretation: the translation of Amerindian experience in canonical ethnohistorical texts, the translation of the contents of these incomplete and uncertain texts in the construction of historical metanarratives, and the translation of these narratives in the construction of a national collective memory that perpetuates colonial claims to territory and natural resources. This approach thus aims to spotlight in a [End Page 817] critical manner intercultural relations in the colonial context and to understand the ways in which they have been realized. The author reminds us that too often ethnohistorical texts serve not only to describe cultures of origin and to construct historical metanarratives but also to interpret archaeological contact sites—even those of the precontact period. Their influence is wide in the periods both preceding and postdating the first contacts. Translation is therefore as much concerned with temporal relations (past-present) as with intercultural relations (Amerindian-English). The author takes the present as a starting point for seeing how this present has been constructed by the past. Her process also aims to be reflexive; she is always mindful to set aside her own interpretations and is conscious of the difficulties posed by the attempt to inscribe the Amerindian experience.

Rubertone next offers new methods for analyzing and integrating textual and material information. Instead of turning to archaeology as a simple means of completing the ethnohistorical texts (travel narratives, memoirs, histories, biographies) or enriching them with a material substratum, in order to construct a fuller Amerindian history she reverses the perspective by using the archaeological approach to deconstruct the texts and their usages so as to elucidate the process of colonialism over the long term. Her study accomplishes a true archaeology of the construction of historical knowledge. She uncovers layer by layer the stratigraphy of meanings that ethnohistoriographical texts and colonial histories have progressively constituted over time. Archaeology is exploited not only as a method but also as a source of information, in order to bracket and call into question the written sources of European origin. The author adopts a...

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