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Uncas: First of the Mohegans. By Michael Leroy Oberg. (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. ix, 268. $27.50.)
For readers of American literature, Uncas was the "last of the Mohicans," an upstate New York tribe closely related to the Delawares, as depicted by James Fenimore Cooper. But history buffs with an interest in either New England or Native Americans have always known that Uncas was actually the sachem of the distinct, if similarly named, Mohegans of Connecticut during the tumultuous seventeenth century. Like his fictional namesake, the historical Uncas has often been represented as a noble hero who helped ensure the triumph of civilization over savagery. But he has just as frequently been portrayed as a traitorous villain who saved his skin by conspiring with whites to sell out his own people. It is to rescue Uncas from such simple moralizing that Michael Leroy Oberg has produced this well-informed, highly readable biography of the Mohegan sachem.
For Oberg, previous assessments of Uncas have lacked, above all, a sense of the sachem's complexity, a quality that recent scholarship by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists has rendered accessible. Oberg draws on this body of work to depict, first, Indian life in southern New England on the eve of European contact and then the "new world" opened to...