Many know the name Uncas only from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, but the historical Uncas flourished as an important leader of the Mohegan people in seventeenth-century Connecticut. In Uncas: First of the Mohegans, Michael Leroy Oberg integrates the life story of an important Native American sachem into the broader story of European settlement in America. The arrival of the English in Connecticut in the 1630s upset the established balance among the region's native groups and brought rapid economic and social change. Oberg argues that Uncas's methodical and sustained strategies for adapting to these changes made him the most influential Native American leader in colonial New England. Emerging from the damage wrought by epidemic disease and English violence, Uncas transformed the Mohegans from a small community along the banks of the Thames River in Connecticut into a regional power in southern New England. Uncas learned quickly how to negotiate between cultures in the conflicts that developed as natives and newcomers, Indians and English, maneuvered for access to and control of frontier resources. With English assistance, Uncas survived numerous assaults and plots hatched by his native rivals. Unique among Indian leaders in early America, Uncas maintained his power over large numbers of tributary and other native communities in the region, lived a long life, and died a peaceful death (without converting to Christianity) in his people's traditional homeland. Oberg finds that although the colonists considered Uncas "a friend to the English," he was first and foremost an assertive guardian of Mohegan interests.

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.

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.

Oberg argues that Unca's methodical and sustained strategies for adapting to these changes made him the most influential Native American leader in colonial New England."--BOOK JACKET.

Examines some of the work of early American writers that centered around the Algonquian Indians.

Contrary to the fictional account of James Fenimore Cooper, the Mohegan/Mohican nation did not vanish with the death of Chief Uncas more than three hundred years ago. In the remarkable life story of one of its most beloved matriarchs—100-year-old medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon—Medicine Trail tells of the Mohegans' survival into this century. Blending autobiography and history, with traditional knowledge and ways of life, Medicine Trail presents a collage of events in Tantaquidgeon's life. We see her childhood spent learning Mohegan ceremonies and healing methods at the hands of her tribal grandmothers, and her Ivy League education and career in the white male-dominated field of anthropology. We also witness her travels to other Indian communities, acting as both an ambassador of her own tribe and an employee of the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs. Finally we see Tantaquidgeon's return to her beloved Mohegan Hill, where she cofounded America's oldest Indian-run museum, carrying on her life's commitment to good medicine and the cultural continuance and renewal of all Indian nations. Written in the Mohegan oral tradition, this book offers a unique insider's understanding of Mohegan and other Native American cultures while discussing the major policies and trends that have affected people throughout Indian Country in the twentieth century. A significant departure from traditional anthropological "as told to" American Indian autobiography, Medicine Trail represents a major contribution to anthropology, history, theology, women's studies, and Native American studies.