Content area
Full Text
In the century following the American Revolution, Indians in southern New England struggled to survive as communities, families, and individuals, in the face of prejudice and the region's rapidly shifting social and economic landscape. Their struggle was shaped by intermarriage with "foreigners & strangers," mostly African American men. The persistence, adaptation, and acculturation of particular ethnic groups, and the assimilation of members of those groups, are not unusual topics of study for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. But the story of New England Indians in the early republic is unusual because it took place on the side of America's racial line where few studies of ethnicity have gone. Examining relations between Indians and blacks in southern New England illuminates the fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history, and it offers new insight into the complexity and uncertainty of ethnic identity and assimilation.2
Some Indian groups retained the numbers, autonomy, cohesion, and resources to assimilate the newcomers and their racially mixed children. In particular, such communities used their lands as political and social controls to manage the effects of intermarriage. In doing so, Natives operated within a special legal status created by all four southern New England colonies-Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and Rhode Island-for lands belonging to groups and individuals recognized as Indian. Like federal Indian reservations, Indian lands could be managed and even sold by the legislatures and guardians that the colonial governments appointed, but with a few exceptions during certain periods, they could not be sold by the tribe or individual Indians without the permission of the legislature. These laws remained as the colonies became states, ending only with detribalization.3
How Indians managed their reserves gradually changed in the first half of the nineteenth century, even embracing aspects of Anglo-American landholding, as communities were reshaped by generations of intermarriage, emigration, and regional social and economic change. But the purpose remained the same: to preserve the community. Indian groups without advantages in numbers, autonomy, cohesion, and resources were more readily reshaped by wartime population losses and regional economic change; many of their members moved to nearby towns or cities where they lived with and became part of emerging African American enclaves. Among these latter families and groups, dual and shifting ethnic identities...