Politics and Eschatology: Reassessing the Appeal of the “Jewish Indian” Theory in England and New England in the 1650s

This article examines the “Jewish Indian” theory — which claimed that American Indians were the ten lost tribes of Israel — in 1650s England and New England. The theory found support in England while failing in New England. This difference in reception can be explained by considering its ecclesiological, political, and eschatological implications. Biblical commentators in both England and New England held to a form of “Judeo‐Centric” eschatology, which looked for a sudden, miraculous conversion of the Jews and their eventual superiority to Gentile believers. Such beliefs undermined crucial elements of New England ecclesiology when applied to Native Americans. Conversely, the New England Company used the theory in its publications as a fund‐raising tool in England. These publications impacted upon debates on Jewish readmission to England in the mid‐1650s, with New England missionary models suggested as a way of evangelising Jews. This article therefore argues for the importance of understanding eschatological beliefs in local contexts, while demonstrating the way in which such beliefs can be maintained and reoriented in the face of apparent disconfirmation.     

‘To unite their strength with ours’

The history of evangelical activity in northern Aotearoa/New Zealand in the early‐19th century is deeply marked by the presence of missionaries. Positioned in an auxiliary role, missionary women as wives and mothers were incorporated into the work of the mission station which primarily involved responsibility for domestic and familial tasks. In the period 1827–45, there were three distinct phases of women's contribution to the public work of the Paihia mission. In the first phase, educated middle‐class women established and taught in the Native Girls' school and English Girls' school. In the second phase and in response to the growing demands of the mission community, unmarried daughters of resident missionaries were recruited as pupil assistants. For three of these girls in particular, this work provided a form of apprenticeship as they were subsequently appointed and registered as missionaries. By the early 1830s, the recruitment of women missionaries entered its third phase when the CMS sent a number of single women from England. This paper reports on the three phases of women's involvement in missionary endeavours and ways in which this increasing level of involvement helped in the development of mission work as a professional occupation for women.     

Sarah and the Puritans: Feminist Contributions to New England Historical Archaeology

This article analyzes a seventeenth-century adultery case from southern Massachusetts to examine the effects of Puritan colonization on Native American women. As a feminist analysis the article focuses on gendered access to power and considers Puritan strategies for transforming Native American gendered relations. This reading highlights Puritan use of physical punishment and public humiliation to shape gendered behavior. It exposes Puritan efforts to transform Native American men into Puritan patriarchs and to transform Native American women into submissive consorts. It concludes with a series of characteristics that will define archaeological sites that date to the period immediately after New England’s colonization. Arguably, Sarah and the Puritans contributes to history more than it contributes to archaeology because the primary evidence is documentary, rather than archaeological. Nonetheless, this analysis informs archaeological interpretation by revealing the consequences of cultural change on the archaeological record. By demonstrating colonization’s transformative power on southern New England Native American culture, Sarah and the Puritans identifies the context in which many historical period Native American sites were created. Ultimately, this affords an opportunity to gender New England colonization and to examine the archaeological record of that process.     

History to Prehistory: an Archaeology of Being Indian

This paper explores a conception of being Indian in New Orleans that complicates and localizes Indian histories and identities. It poses that the notion of “being Indian” may be approached not only through the history and archaeology of persons but also as an identity such that being Indian itself is an artifact produced by a wide range of people in the development of New Orleans in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Employing a critical reading of intercultural relations, I explore archaeological evidence that suggests colonial New Orleans was created in both Indian and non-Indian terms through exchange. In this process archaeology shows that being Indian was part of a widely-shared colonial strategy that places a fluid Indian identity at the center of local history. The paper also considers how the marginalization of Indian people in the early nineteenth century was one way New Orleans and the greater southeast connected with dominant American sensibilities. Developing with the idea of “prehistory,” nineteenth-century Native Americans were distanced as a cultural other and pushed to margins of New Orleans society. The subsequent internal tensions of assimilation and removal derailed Indian challenges to White domination they had employed over the previous 100 years. As this action coincides with the invention of American archaeology as the science of prehistory, the paper concludes with a critical reflection on archaeological terminology.

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Re′sume′ Cet article explore l’idée d’être Amérindien à la Nouvelle-Orléans qui rend plus complexes et plus spécifiquement locales les histoires et caractères identitaires amérindiens. Il suggère que la notion d’ ? être amérindien ? peut être appréhendée non seulement à travers l'histoire et l'archéologie des personnes, mais également par le biais d’une identité à proprement parler, procédant de l’acceptation qu’être Amérindien est en lui-même une construction empruntant à un large éventail de personnes de la région de la Nouvelle-Orléans durant la période coloniale et post-coloniale. Utilisant une lecture critique des relations interculturelles, j'explore les faits archéologiques qui suggèrent que la Nouvelle-Orléans coloniale fut créée selon des principes à la foi amérindiens et non amérindiens par l’entremise d’échanges. Dans ce processus, l'archéologie démontre qu' ? être amérindien ? faisait partie d'une stratégie coloniale largement utilisée et qui se servait d’une identité amérindienne polyvalente comme point central de l'histoire locale. Cet article traite également de la fa?on dont la marginalisation du peuple amérindien au début du 19ème siècle fut un moyen par lequel la Nouvelle-Orléans et plus largement le sud-est sont entrés en adéquation avec la sensibilité américaine dominante. En même temps que se développait l’idée de ? préhistoire ?, les amérindiens du 19ième siècle furent écartés en temps qu’? autre culture ? et repoussés aux marges de la société de la Nouvelle-Orléans. Les tensions internes qui ont suivi, liées à leur assimilation et déplacement, ont entravées les efforts des Amérindiens contre la domination des Blancs, efforts déployés au cours des 100 années précédentes. Ceci co?ncidant avec l’invention de l’archéologie américaine comme la science de la préhistoire, cet article termine avec une discussion critique de la terminologie archéologique.

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Resumen Esta ponencia explora una concepción de ser Indio/a en New Orleans que complica y localiza historias e identidades Indias. Propone que se puede abordar la noción de “ser Indio/a” no sólo a través de la historia y la arqueología de las personas, sino también como una identidad que hace que ser Indio/a sea en si mismo un artefacto producido por una amplia porción de gente en el desarrollo de New Orleans en los períodos coloniales y post-coloniales. Usando una lectura crítica de relaciones interculturales, exploro la evidencia arqueológica que sugiere que el New Orleans colonial fue creado en términos Indios y no-Indios por el intercambio. En este proceso la arqueología demuestra que ser Indio/a era parte de una estrategia colonial extensamente compartida que ubica una identidad India fluida en el centro de la historia local. La ponencia también considera la manera como la marginalización del pueblo Indio al comienzo del siglo XIX fue una forma a través de la cual New Orleans y el gran sudeste se conectaban con las sensibilidades norteamericanas dominantes. Al desarrollarse con la idea de “prehistoria”, los Nativos norteamericanos del siglo XIX fueron distanciados como un otro cultural y desplazados a los márgenes de la sociedad de New Orleans. Las tensiones internas subsiguientes de asimilación y extirpación torcieron el curso de los desafíos Indios al dominio blanco que habían estado usando en los últimos cien a?os. Como esta acción coincide con la invención de la arqueología norteamericana como la ciencia de la prehistoria, la ponencia concluye con una reflexión crítica de la terminología arqueológica.

     

Materiality and Autonomy in the Pocumtuck Homeland

The Indigenous people of New England’s middle Connecticut River Valley are often imagined as having been subservient to powerful tribal nations elsewhere. Yet, archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence suggests Pocumtuck independence and autonomy in relations with neighboring Native groups and with Dutch, English, and French colonizers during the seventeenth century. We employ a decolonizing framework, drawing on H.M. Wobst’s critique of the preoccupation with dominance and geopolitical “centers” to analyze this evidence. By framing artifacts, colonial texts, and cultural interactions as both past and present “material interventions,” we can generate better understandings of Pocumtuck political autonomy, agency and identity.     

A Vision of an Anglican Imperialism: The Annual Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 1701–1714

This article examines the first two decades of the oldest continuing Anglican missionary society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1710. It argues that, contrary to the prevailing historiography of the British missionary movement, this early eighteenth‐century society was genuinely evangelistic and marks the real beginning of that movement. The society also marks the beginning of a formal, institutional engagement by the Church of England with the British Empire. In the Society's annual anniversary sermons, and influenced by the reports sent by its ordained missionaries in North America, the Church of England's metropolitan leadership in England constructed an Anglican discourse of empire. In this discourse the Church of England began to fashion the identities of colonial populations of Indigenous peoples, white colonists, and Black slaves through a theological Enlightenment understanding.     

Village and community in early colonial New England

The long-standing correlation between community function and nucleated settlement form in early colonial New England is mistaken. Puritan communities were established, but new communities—often called villages in colonial records—were developed and survived quite well regardless of settlement form. As in England at the time, village meant community and community was a social web. Village status in New England provided a community with land and thus enabled the community to undertake settlement. But the social web that comprised community did not require nucleated settlement, and the dispersed settlement form that many colonists had known in England dominated the village landscape of early colonial New England.     

British Women Travellers and Constructions of Racial Difference Across the Nineteenth-Century American West

At a time coinciding historically with the height of the British Empire, the immigrants' rush to occupy American West lands and the wholesale removal of Native Americans onto reservations, encounters between Native peoples and British women travellers became emblematic of a whole range of socio-spatial relationships of domination, subordination and resistance. In this paper, I examine representations of western Native Americans in the travelogues of ten British women travellers to the late nineteenth-century American West, produced primarily during encounters at sites along the western rail lines. Constructions of racial and gender differences in the texts can be tied to British colonial discourses, as well as to the social relations inherent in the multiple contact zones within which the encounters took place.     

Missionaries and the Māori Language in Nineteenth‐Century New Zealand: A Mixed Inheritance

The historiography dealing with New Zealand's colonial period (1814 – c.1900) underwent a substantial revision during the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, the role and activities of the missionaries in the country during the colonial era was subject renewed scrutiny, which served as a much‐needed antidote to the largely uncritical depiction of these proselytisers in earlier histories. However, this revisionism sometimes took a reductionist approach to the work of the missionaries, and in the process, overlooked some of their accomplishments in a colonial environment that was at best unsympathetic and often hostile towards the Māori culture and language. Since then, a more nuanced and considered historiography has emerged – one which also incorporates the histories of imperial missionary activity in the realms of literacy and indigenous languages in other parts of the world into New Zealand's experience. This work examines the seminal role that Protestant missionaries and their parent churches played in the colonial era in converting Māori into a written language, in spreading the use of literacy within Māori society, with consideration given to the role of Māori agency in this process, and the challenges in policy and practice that the Protestant missionaries had in this period.     

The Shifting Ideological Currents of the Transatlantic Puritan Community in the Early Seventeenth Century

This article explores the ideological transfigurations which appeared when English Puritans relocated to New England. It does so by examining particular communications which took place between the Puritans of the “Great Migration” of the 1630s and their erstwhile associates in “Old” England. Though both sets of Puritans had seemingly much in common when they were ideological allies back in Old England, not least being an antipathy towards the Laudian ecclesiastical establishment of the late 1620s and 1630s, the movement to the colonial periphery of New England exposed previously unnoticed, or, at least, overlooked, ideological divisions. This article explicates one significant ideological issue upon which these Old and New England Puritans were divided: that of the appropriate relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres of the polity.     

MtDNA origins of an enslaved labor force from the 18th century Schuyler Flatts Burial Ground in colonial Albany,NY: Africans,Native Americans,and Malagasy?

A burial ground located in the Town of Colonie, NY along the Hudson River revealed fourteen individuals dated from the 17th through the early 19th centuries. Bioarchaeological analysis suggested some of these individuals were of African ancestry who had worked and died on the property owned by the prominent Schuyler family. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis was carried out on skeletal remains of seven adults using restriction fragment length polymorphism typing and direct sequencing of the control region to infer their origins and relatedness. Results show that none of the individuals were maternally related, with four individuals identified as African haplogroup L, one identified as Native American haplogroup X, and two identified as haplogroup M and M7. Individuals of African ancestry correlate with published mtDNA data on African Americans and their geographical origins corroborate with the various exit points during the African slave trade to New York State. Individuals identified as haplogroup M7 and M resemble lineages found in Madagascar. Historical documents suggest several hundred people were imported from Madagascar through illegal trading to New York by the end of the 17th century. This study highlights the diverse origins of the enslaved labor force in colonial New York and contributes to our understanding of African American history in the northeast.     

Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries

Much of the literature on missionaries and translation in colonial Africa has tended to view missionary or colonial authored texts (Bibles, dictionaries, and grammars in particular) as instruments through which foreign ways of thinking were imposed upon unsuspecting Africans. In a detailed comparison of two Gikuyu dictionaries—one authored by an Anglican missionary and the other by a Presbyterian missionary some ten years later—this article locates significant contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion and authority. By situating these contradictions within the social history of early twentieth-century Gikuyuland, the author is able to demonstrate that these contradictions are not "mistakes"; rather, such inconsistencies evidence the complex ontological and political debates provoked out of early evangelistic activity. For the author, who draws theoretical insight from Homi Bhabha and M. M. Bakhtin, mission texts like dictionaries are fundamentally dialogical, the product of sustained and contentious conversations between missionaries and African interlocutors. Thus, they not only shaped Gikuyu life, as earlier scholarship contended, but were profoundly shaped bycontemporary Gikuyu debates over religion, power, and authority.     

Local Intermediaries? The Missionising and Governing of Colonial Subjects in South Dutch New Guinea, 1920–42

This paper will show that the colonial project in south Dutch New Guinea was a joint project in which evangelisation, education, ‘civilisation’ and ‘pacification’ were taken up by the Dutch Catholic mission in close collusion with the colonial government. This was also a project in which a few Dutch missionaries deployed many goeroes (teachers) from elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies. These goeroes had an important position assigned to them by the Catholic mission and colonial government in the development of the Papuans and the area. This colonial structure utilised by both Dutch colonial administrators and missionaries has been labelled in the literature as a system of ‘dual colonialism’. Drawing on records held in missionary and colonial archives, the paper explores this dual colonial structure by analysing the roles of Catholic goeroes from the Kei and Tanimbar islands. This is done by taking Felix Driver’s concept of local intermediaries as the point of departure. While this concept makes visible the key role of goeroes, it is not without its issues, which will also be explored.     

'They . . . shall no more be called Peaquots but Narragansetts and Mohegans': Refugees,Rivalry, and the Consequences of the Pequot War

Abstract

This paper argues for a series of complex dynamics and relationships between major indigenous groups within seventeenth-century New England and the English colonial authorities in the aftermath of the Pequot War, and argues for greater attention to these developments between the Mystic massacre and the outbreak of King Phillip's War almost forty years later.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 4. August 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 4 Front cover SELF-EXCLUSION Locked gates, fences and razor wire symbolize the closed borders and exclusionary nature of ethnonationalism. They also raise questions about what it means to be inside those locked gates. In this issue, Joyce Dalsheim considers the dynamics underlying ethnonationalism in the latest Israeli elections. Back cover INDIGENOUS AMERICA AND ENGLISH HERITAGE This ink and watercolour image by the English painter John White from the late 16th century depicts dancing Tupinambá Indians, based on an earlier account by a French traveller to Brazil. White's watercolours, like those he composed when he lived among Algonquians in eastern North America, have been celebrated for their elegant naturalism. At the same time, Europeans widely associated the Tupinambá with cannibalism. White's careful lines therefore capture tensions that were inherent in the English imperial gaze, where the fascination with Native American lifeways, adornment and commodities existed alongside underlying assumptions about violent conflict. More often than not, ethnographic curiosity led to appropriation and dispossession. In 17th-century London, feather headdresses, admired for their lustre, found their way into cabinets of curiosities or into imperial performances like court masques. Torn from their original contexts, such objects were repurposed to endorse an aesthetics of empire that involved both a visibility and erasure of Native American artefacts and peoples. In this issue, Lauren Working considers what English heritage would look like if Native Americans were integrated more fully within it. She explores the opportunities that exist for using history, anthropology and objects to shed light on the complex, often troubling legacies that emerged out of the first moment of empire in England. Acknowledging the entangled nature of Native American and English histories can become a means of conveying multiple but intersecting narratives and perspectives, weaving indigeneity into the story of Englishness and opening up new possibilities for collaboration, museum display and reconciliation.     

“…being weary,they had rebelled”: Pueblo subsistence and labor under Spanish colonialism

Native American responses to Spanish colonialism are explored through an analysis of multiple lines of evidence concerning subsistence practices, diet, and health in the Salinas Pueblo area of central New Mexico. Zooarchaeological and paleoethnobotanical data from three Pueblo villages that experienced different degrees of Spanish missionization are the focus of this study. In addition, human osteological data from one village provide important information on activity patterns and health. These data are used to document the kinds of changes that occurred in Pueblo labor patterns, food consumption, and health from the pre-colonial to colonial periods. Synthetic analyses document the development of some degree of inter-village specialization in large game hunting, hide processing, and corn farming, presumably in response to Spanish tribute levies in corn and antelope hides, and demands on Pueblo labor in other arenas. There also appears to be a degree of divergence in women’s and men’s lives in the colonial period. These southwestern data are then compared with similar information from the southeastern US to identify patterns of similarity and difference in Native American experiences of and strategies for dealing with Spanish colonization.     

Remedial agents: missionary physicians and the depopulation of Hawai'i

This article examines the activities and perspectives of nineteenth-century American missionary physicians in the Hawaiian Islands. The physicians' attitudes toward Hawaiian morbidity and depopulation are viewed in relation to the greater missionary community's role in the political transformation of the island nation. The article argues that missionary physicians monitored and reported on Native Hawaiian depopulation (a result of introduced western diseases) while simultaneously advertising the islands' benefits to American consumptives, imperialists, and others. Mission doctors also failed to respond effectively to the greatest epidemiological crisis Hawai'i had ever faced: a venereal scourge with a resulting blight of Native Hawaiian infertility. As a result of these and other factors, American hegemony in Hawai'i by midcentury was a foregone conclusion.     

Apartheid on Trial: South West Africa and the International Court of Justice, 1960–66

The deputation of Basuto chiefs to England in 1907 provides an example of close co-operation between traditional African chiefs, educated black activists, and white humanitarians in pursuing to the heart of empire the claims of Africans seeking remedy for injustices suffered under colonial rule. The deputation arrived at a time when the Colonial Office felt severely constrained in its ability to fulfil its responsibility of trusteeship towards its African subjects in colonies which were ‘on the eve of responsible government’. This article highlights the support provided in England by Frank Colenso, the son of Bishop Colenso of Natal, in partnership with his sisters in Natal, and argues that, though failing in its immediate aim, this black-led initiative led to a strengthening of relationships between black South African activists and white British-based humanitarians. It also provided an impetus for the development in England of a loosely knit informal organisational framework able to provide material, moral, and political support for South African political activists who were to visit England in deputations from the newly formed South African Native National Congress (forerunner of the ANC) to pursue their grievances against the South African government in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.     

Engendering New Netherland: Implications for Interpreting Early Colonial Societies

Here, we study the Algonquian and Iroquoian women who lived in settlements surrounding the Dutch colony of New Netherland, in today’s northeastern United States. We begin by examining their roles in the colony and find that their lives did not fall into the pattern of servitude, concubinage, culture-brokering, and intermarriage that many have seen as the fate of Native or African women in other colonial societies. Instead, these women were, by and large, independent agents and followed their own indigenous customs as they interacted with Europeans. We then go on to explore how this new revisionist view of their actions affects archaeological interpretations of their households and the households of the Europeans as well. We further point out how the role of Native women in New Netherland was influenced in part by the presence and absence of other groups of women—both European and African—there.