Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775

Abstract

Kathleen J. Bragdon. Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. 293 pages. $28.95. In 1666, Joseph Daggett, an English settler colonist who owned a 500-acre farm near Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, married a woman closely related to two chiefs of nearby Native American tribes. Over the next twenty-five years, local sachems, or native chiefs, conducted a number of land transactions with Daggett's descendants, most likely based on an affinity established by the 1666 marriage. The story of Daggett's marriage illustrates one of the main themes of Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1 775 by Kathleen J. Bragdon. Bragdon attempts to demonstrate that scholars who consider the relationships that existed between English colonists and Native Americans in New England rely too much on English sources. An anthropologist with an extensive linguistic familiarity with several Native American languages, Bragdon argues that the incorporation of primary source documents written in those Native American languages can provide new perspectives on well-known historical topics. For example, based only on evidence taken from the letters and journals of other English settlers, local historians and descendants of the Daggett family maintained a belief that the mixed-race children produced from Joseph Daggett's marriage splintered his family into two distinct groups. Supposedly, the pureblooded English branch treated their mixed-heritage family members as outcasts and pariahs. However, Bragdon's research revealed that land records and other Native American sources indicate that Daggett's descendants continued to interact with one another and the Native American community at Sangekantacket throughout the late eighteenth century. Bragdon's efforts demonstrate that political, economic and social relationships in New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are infinitely more complex than previously thought, and that an examination of sources written in the Native American languages can help to clarify misperceptions perpetuated by the attitude of racial superiority in some sources written by English colonists. Essentially, Native People of Southern New England is a continuation of Bragdon's 1999 book Native People of Southern New England, 15001650. Bragdon's new book attempts to show the ways in which Native American tribes in southern New England resisted English attempts to homogenize native culture. The six main Native American tribes of the area - the Pequots, Massachusetts, Pokanokets, Nipmunks, Pawtuckets, and Narragansetts - reacted to English conversion attempts in different ways. Traditional historiographie interpretations have argued that, over time, the interactions between the English colonists and the Native American tribes resulted in the native population becoming anglicized as Christian converts and losing their unique cultural heritage. …