Beyond Survival: Native Americans Confront Colonization

Eden, Jason
Beyond Survival: Native Americans in Southeastern Massachusetts and Bermuda, 1620-1750

Jarvis, Brad
"Your People" and "Our People": Paternalism and the Preservation of "Indian" Lands in Brothertown, 1785-1805

In 1785 about 200 Native Americans from seven different communities in southern New England founded the community of “Brothertown” on Oneida lands in central New York. Its residents believed that education, conversion to Christianity, adoption of Anglo-American style agriculture, and physical separation from white society would counter the debilitating effects of alcoholism, disease, and economic marginalization. This paper explores land disputes within Brothertown during the first two decades of its existence (1785-1805), investigating how the Brothertowns’ attempts to maintain an autonomous community depended upon the assistance of state politicians whose interests ran counter to their own.

Jennings, Mathew
Looking Back From Ocmulgee

In late 1773, at Ocmulgee Old Fields (near Macon, Georgia), William Bartram recorded a Creek retelling of English colonial history. According to Bartram’s Creek associates, the Creeks’ violent history mirrored that of the English. The Creeks recognized the English as a “powerful, warlike people” and formed an alliance very early on. The Creeks placed themselves on an equal footing with the English as conquerors and partners in a military alliance while they maintained a specifically Creek understanding of violence. This allowed the Creeks to gloss over hostile moments in the Creek-English relationship. The story makes a claim for joint Native-English ownership of the Southeast. This paper focuses on the relationship between English and Creek people and their cultures of violence.

McCormack Patricia A.
Popularizing Contact: Thanadelthur, the Sacajawea of the North

Thanadelthur was a Dene S iné or Chipewyan woman who is usually credited as having single-handedly established contact between the Hudson's Bay Company and her own people. Captured by Crees as a young woman and taken from her own country, she carved out a new place for herself through her own resourcefulness and force of will. Her story is an exemplar of Dene traditions of the captive woman narrative, and it is still told in Dene communities 285 years later. She has also captured the imagination of non-Aboriginal people, and versions of her story have been widely appropriated into Canadian nation-building narratives. In Canada, she is celebrated in much the same way as Sacajawea of Lewis and Clark fame is in the United States, though Thanadelthur remains less well known. This paper draws upon James Knight's entries about the “Slave woman” in the York Factory journal, Dene oral narratives, and other re-tellings/representations of the Thanadelthur story to examine Thanadelthur as a liminal figure, a person with multiple interpretive lineages.