Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New EnglandAcross nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled. InFirsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness. In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights. |
Contents
Local Texts Claim Indian Places As Their Own | 1 |
Historical Practices Argue That NonIndians Have Supplanted Indians | 55 |
Texts Purify the Landscape of Indians by Denying Them a Place in Modernity | 105 |
Claims in Texts about Indian Extinction Fail Even As They Are Being Made | 145 |
The Continuing Struggle over Recognition | 201 |
Other editions - View all
Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England Jean M. O'Brien No preview available - 2010 |
Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England Jean M. O'Brien No preview available - 2010 |
Common terms and phrases
Address Delivered American Indians ancestors ancient argued asserted bicentennial Boston Bridgewater Canonicus Caulkins century Church citizenship civilization claims colonial commemoration Conn Connecticut cultural deed descendants Dunstable Eliot England Indians English erected fathers Federal Acknowledgment Hartford Hill historian Historical Address Historical Discourse homelands Hundredth Anniversary Ibid included Incorporation Indi Indian affairs Indian extinction Indian history Indian lands Indian survival John John Milton Earle King Philip's King Philip's War landscape living Mashpee Mass Massachusetts Massasoit memory Miantonomi modernity Mohegan monument Nantucket Narragansett Narragansett Tribe narrators Natick nation Native nineteenth nineteenth-century Nipmuc non-Indians Norwich orator origins Pequot War Pilgrim place-names Plymouth poem political present purity racial remained replacement narrative Rhode Island sachem Schaghticoke scripted Settlement settlers southern New England Squanto Standish status story temporalities of race texts tion took tory Town treaty Treaty of Hartford tribal tribe Uncas University Press Wampanoag William Apess Worcester