Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (review)

Historian Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England arrives at an important historical moment. As efforts launch now in Massachusetts to "commemorate," in the year 2020, the 1620 "landing" of the Pilgrims, O'Brien's book interjects an important new analysis of nineteenth-century Euro-American origin stories and the myth of "Indian disappearance" in New England. Having analyzed over four hundred local texts that elaborate histories of town founding and the acts by which revered English ancestors "introduced the arts of civilization"—as one nineteenth-century Anglo historian put it (17)—that transformed the "savage" environs of northeastern North America, O'Brien guides us through a carefully contextualized reading of New England narratives of "firsting," as she identifies them, which performed the "political and cultural work" of appropriating "the category 'indigenous' away from Indians" (6). Contemporary New Englanders inculcated with the notion that there are no longer "real Indians" indigenous to the region would do well to read O'Brien's book, which deftly tracks the nineteenth-century genealogy of this myth and the racial discourse with which it is infused, documenting along the way the "strategic blindness"( to borrow Robert Young's phrasing) of local chroniclers who asserted the demise of the Native peoples in their midst.

In its broadest significance, Firsting and Lasting is about history and power. It investigates the ways they are imbricated in the local, quotidian narrative practices that enshrined versions of the past in which Europeans are cast as the sole history makers and producers of culture in New England. Ruminations on Indianness are absolutely essential to such nineteenth-century constructions of history (commemorations are key among them; see chapter 2). Throughout the book, readers encounter numerous examples of what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo called "imperialist nostalgia": lamenting, from a pose of innocence, the "vanished" world of those doomed by colonization. This sentiment, and the assertion that European (supposedly "superior") cultural and economic institutions are the very instantiation of history, are neatly encapsulated in this passage from an 1895 History of the Town of Manchester, Massachusetts:

The history of America begins with the advent of Europeans in the New World. The Red Men in small and scattered bands roamed the stately forests and interminable prairies, hunted the bison and the deer, fished the lakes and streams, gathered around the council-fire and danced the war-dance; but they planted no states, founded no commerce, cultivated no arts, built up no civilizations. . . . They made no history

(20; emphasis in original).

In three of the four core chapters, "Firsting," "Replacing," and "Lasting," O'Brien lays out a richly detailed examination of how such local texts formulate New England claims to "modernity"—a modernity bolstered by white supremacist ideology and one from which Indians must be excluded. In her meticulous textual analyses, O'Brien offers fresh and compelling insights on what might be termed the narrative enactment of racial thought as it percolated in local settings. Assumptions about an immutable hierarchy of "races" and "the iron fist of racial purity" (151) were wielded by nineteenth-century assessors of Indianness who mapped a dismal "racial" destiny for Native peoples. As Judge Joseph Story's 1828 "centennial oration on the 'first settlement' of Salem, Massachusetts" insisted, Indians faced an ineluctable, "natural" fate: "By a law of nature, they seem destined to a slow, but sure extinction. Everywhere at the approach of the white man, they fade away" (49).

O'Brien argues that, in addition to local accounts of "firsting," the regional "master narrative" of "Indian extinction" (202) depends heavily on New England accounts of "replacement," which "dismiss Indians as long gone, replaced by non-Indians who are making modernity" (55), and on "lasting" stories, which are tales of "the solitary Indian survivor" (generally assigned the status of "pure blood") that "captured non-Indian imaginations throughout the nineteenth century" (116-17). "The whole enterprise of the 'last of the _________...