Before their massacre by Massachusetts Puritans in 1637, the Pequots were preeminent in southern New England. Their location on the eastern Connecticut shore made them important producers of the wampum required to trade for furs from the Iroquois. They were also the only Connecticut Indians to oppose the land-hungry English. For those reasons, they became the first victims of white genocide in colonial America. Despite the Pequot War of 1637, and the greed and neglect of their white neighbors and "overseers," the Pequots endured in their ancestral homeland. In 1983 they achieved federal recognition. In 1987 they commemorated the 350th anniversary of the Pequot War by organizing the Mashantucket Pequot Historical Conference, at which distinguished scholars presented the articles assembled here.

By focusing on the complex cultural and political facets of Native resistance to encroachment on reservation lands during the eighteenth century in southern New England, Beyond Conquest reconceptualizes indigenous histories and debates over Native land rights. ø As Amy E. Den Ouden demonstrates, Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics living on reservations in New London County, Connecticut?where the largest indigenous population in the colony resided?were under siege by colonists who employed various means to expropriate reserved lands. Natives were also subjected to the policies of a colonial government that sought to strictly control them and that undermined Native land rights by depicting reservation populations as culturally and politically illegitimate. Although colonial tactics of rule sometimes incited internal disputes among Native women and men, reservation communities and their leaders engaged in subtle and sometimes overt acts of resistance to dispossession, thus demonstrating the power of historical consciousness, cultural connections to land, and ties to local kin. The Mohegans, for example, boldly challenged colonial authority and its land encroachment policies in 1736 by holding a ?great dance,? during which they publicly affirmed the leadership of Mahomet and, with the support of their Pequot and Niantic allies, articulated their intent to continue their legal case against the colony. ø Beyond Conquest demonstrates how the current Euroamerican scrutiny and denial of local Indian identities is a practice with a long history in southern New England, one linked to colonial notions of cultural?and ultimately ?racial??illegitimacy that emerged in the context of eighteenth-century disputes regarding Native land rights.

American histories have long held that in May 1637---"Connecticut's Birthday"---a small force of English colonists guided by Mohegan Native allies set out to break the back of Pequot dominion in New England. According to Alfred E. Cave's The Pequot War and other accounts, the English and Mohegans supposedly marched "undetected" across multiple Indian territories, and at the Pequot village of Missituc on the Mystic River, trapped and killed between 300 and 700 men, women and children---thus launching the northern English colonies' first "total war" against Native Americans. What new understandings emerge when, for the first time, readers can examine these records and traditions against the actual landscape? What were the realities of New England tribal life, and of Native American war, in the 1600s? If the colonists of Massachusetts Bay and Hartford were in their own words "altogether ignorant" of how to locate, identify, fight, and control Native peoples, how did thoroughly-intermarried Pequots, Mohegans, Narragansetts and others exploit these crucial English blind-spots with astonishing, subtle and yet plainly visible counter-strategies? Why were guns, armor and European assault-tactics the wrong means of war in New England? What were the consequences near and far of the colonies' refusals to adjust? Tracking every step of The Pequot War from its origins to its aftermath and influences, Mystic Fiasco is its most comprehensive and detailed study. Its basis in the landscape exposes the fundamental but unexamined paradigms that hard-wired the American colonial psyche from those days to these. With user-friendly maps and illustrations by renowned historical artist David R. Wagner and the documentary expertise of historian Jack Dempsey, Mystic Fiasco is filled with resources that empower you to go and discover this "Mystic Massacre" and Pequot War for yourself.

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 book offers the first full-scale analysis of the Pequot War (1636-37), a pivotal event in New England colonial history. Through an innovative rereading of the Puritan sources, Alfred A. Cave refutes claims that settlers acted defensively to counter a Pequot conspiracy to exterminate Europeans. Drawing on archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological evidences to trace the evolution of the conflict, he sheds new light on the motivations of the Pequots and their Indian allies, the fur trade, and the cultural values and attitudes in New England. He also provides a reappraisal of the interaction of ideology and self- interest as motivating factors in the Puritan attack on the Pequots.

The North American Indian group known as the Nipmucks was situated in south-central New England and, during the early years of Puritan colonization, remained on the fringes of the expanding white settlements. It was not until their involvement in King Philip's War (1675-1676) that the Nipmucks were forced to flee their homes, their lands to be redistributed among the settlers. This group, which actually includes four tribes or bands--the Nipmucks, Nashaways, Quabaugs, and Wabaquassets--has been enmeshed in myth and mystery for hundreds of years. This is the first comprehensive history of their way of life and its transformation with the advent of white settlement in New England. Spanning the years between the Nipmucks' first encounters with whites until the final disposal of their lands, this history focuses on Indian-white relations, the position or status of the Nipmucks relative to the other major New England tribes, and their social and political alliances. Settlement patterns, population densities, tribal limits, and land transactions are also analyzed as part of the tribe's historical geography. A bibliography allows for further research on this mysterious and often misunderstood people group.