This collection of fifteen essays examines the lives of important but relatively unknown Native Americans. The chapters explore the complexities of Indian-colonial relations from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, from Maine to the Ohio Valley. The volume is interdisciplinary, drawing on the methods and insights of social history, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and the study of material culture.

Descriptions of Indian peoples of the Northeast date to the Norse sagas, centuries before permanent European settlement, and the region has been the setting for a long history of contact, conflict, and accommodation between natives and newcomers. The focus of an extraordinarily vital field of scholarship, the Northeast is important both historically and theoretically: patterns of Indian-white relations that developed there would be replicated time and again over the course of American history. Today the Northeast remains the locus of cultural negotiation and controversy, with such subjects as federal recognition, gaming, land claims, and repatriation programs giving rise to debates directly informed by archeological and historical research of the region. The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Northeast is a concise and authoritative reference resource to the history and culture of the varied indigenous peoples of the region. Encompassing the very latest scholarship, this multifaceted volume is divided into four parts. Part I presents an overview of the cultures and histories of Northeastern Indian people and surveys the key scholarly questions and debates that shape this field. Part II serves as an encyclopedia, alphabetically listing important individuals and places of significant cultural or historic meaning. Part III is a chronology of the major events in the history of American Indians in the Northeast. The expertly selected resources in Part IV include annotated lists of tribes, bibliographies, museums and sites, published sources, Internet sites, and films that can be easily accessed by those wishing to learn more.

Despite the popular assumption that Native American cultures in New England declined after Europeans arrived, evidence suggests that Indian communities continued to thrive alongside English colonists. In this sequel to her Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650, Kathleen J. Bragdon continues the Indian story through the end of the colonial era and documents the impact of colonization. As she traces changes in Native social, cultural, and economic life, Bragdon explores what it meant to be Indian in colonial southern New England. Contrary to common belief, Bragdon argues, Indianness meant continuing Native lives and lifestyles, however distinct from those of the newcomers. She recreates Indian cosmology, moral values, community organization, and material culture to demonstrate that networks based on kinship, marriage, traditional residence patterns, and work all fostered a culture resistant to assimilation. Bragdon draws on the writings and reported speech of Indians to counter what colonists claimed to be signs of assimilation. She shows that when Indians adopted English cultural forms—such as Christianity and writing—they did so on their own terms, using these alternative tools for expressing their own ideas about power and the spirit world. Despite warfare, disease epidemics, and colonists’ attempts at cultural suppression, distinctive Indian cultures persisted. Bragdon’s scholarship gives us new insight into both the history of the tribes of southern New England and the nature of cultural contact.

This work is a fascinating history of precontact North America, presenting the facts and engaging the reader by using alternative history—what if key facts were different?—to help develop critical thinking skills. The first title in ABC-CLIO's groundbreaking series Turning Points—Actual and Alternate Histories delves into the history of North America before European contact. There is much classroom literature on Native Americans after first contact; there is little on the history before. This work fills that gap, detailing the thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Climate changes, major battles, technology, and settlement patterns—all played a part in shaping the pre-Columbian history of North America. This book takes eight key points in history, presents the facts as they happened, and examines what might have happened if there were different outcomes. Small changes can produce vastly different results; this book shows how, and engages students' critical thinking skills while teaching them basic history.

Images of bodies and bodily practices abound in early America: from spirit possession, Fasting Days, and infanticide to running the gauntlet, going "naked as a sign," flogging, bundling, and scalping. All have implications for the study of gender, sexuality, masculinity, illness, the "body politic," spirituality, race, and slavery. The first book devoted solely to the history and theory of the body in early American cultural studies brings together authors representing diverse academic disciplines.Drawing on a wide range of archival sources—including itinerant ministers' journals, Revolutionary tracts and broadsides, advice manuals, and household inventories—they approach the theoretical analysis of the body in exciting new ways. A Centre of Wonders covers such varied topics as dance and movement among Native Americans; invading witch bodies in architecture and household spaces; rituals of baptism, conversion, and church discipline; eighteenth-century women's journaling; and the body as a rhetorical device in the language of diplomacy.

Long before the Boston Tea Party, where colonists staged a revolutionary act by masquerading as Indians, people looked to Native Americans for the symbols, imagery, and acts that showed what it meant to be “American.” And for just as long, observers have largely overlooked the role that Native peoples themselves played in creating and enacting the Indian performances appropriated by European Americans. It is precisely this neglected notion of Native Americans “playing Indian” that Native Acts explores. These essays—by historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists—provide the first broadly based chronicle of the performance of “Indianness” by Natives in North America from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. The authors’ careful and imaginative analysis of historical documents and performative traditions reveals an intricate history of intercultural exchange. In sum, Native Acts challenges any simple understanding of cultural “authenticity” even as it celebrates the dynamic role of performance in the American Indian pursuit of self-determination. In this collection, Indian peoples emerge as active, vocal, embodied participants in cultural encounters whose performance powerfully shaped the course of early American history.

"Andrew Lipman's eye-opening first book is the previously untold story of how the ocean became a "frontier" between colonists and Indians. When the English and Dutch empires both tried to claim the same patch of coast between the Hudson River and Cape Cod, the sea itself became the arena of contact and conflict. During the violent European invasions, the region's Algonquian-speaking Natives were navigators, boatbuilders, fishermen, pirates, and merchants who became active players in the emergence of the Atlantic World. Drawing from a wide range of English, Dutch, and archeological sources, Lipman uncovers a new geography of Native America that incorporates seawater as well as soil. Looking past Europeans' arbitrary land boundaries, he reveals unseen links between local episodes and global events on distant shores." -- Publisher's description.