Textbook Indians disappear when conquered. Real people are not, however, quite so obliging. Today the Pequots operate the most lucrative casino in America (perhaps the world), gleefully winning a measure of restitution from the inheritors of the Puritans who supposedly wiped out that tribe in 1637. And soon the Gay Head tribe, a community that you will frequently encounter in this book but was believed to have "died" in the late nineteenth century, will build its own casino.
Historians generally close their studies of Indians and colonists in southern New England with the colonists' military triumph in 1676. But I find more fascinating the continued struggles of the "losers": how they survived by shaping new cultures and communities that absorbed a multitude of changes while maintaining essential traditions. This study examines the process of adaptation and persistence among the natives of eastern Massachusetts in the century following political and demographic subordination.
After 1676, Indians were but a few scattered islands in the English sea of eastern Massachusetts. This helpless, conquered minority may seem inconsequential. Yet the natives remaining within the Bay Colony posed a significant concern to the governor and General Court, even threatening the relationship between the colony and the Crown in 1760 when a lone Mashpee carried his community's complaint to London. Indians were also dominant in a number of villages. People in towns around Mashpee, for example, remained anxious about their unpredictable neighbors into the nineteenth century. Between 1744 and 1805, Natick Indians held most of the political cards in the town's dispute over its meetinghouse location--even when fewer than a dozen individuals remained. While the numbers and resources of Indians shrank during the eighteenth century, some groups still controlled important resources: Chappaquiddick held some of the best grazing lands on Martha's Vineyard, for example, and Mashpee became one of the few places east of the Connecticut River where deer could still be hunted.
"Indian" has become a controversial word in the late twentieth century, as Native American activists work to increase our understanding of this . . .