American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Recently, there has been considerable disagreement over how well or badly Puritan magistrates treated Native Americans who appeared before them. No one has, however, systematically compared, colony by colony, the penalties assessed red and white offenders who committed similar seventeenth-century crimes. Nor do most observers recognize that European dealings with the Indians constituted a dynamic, changing reality that depended significantly on how secure the early whites considered themselves from any native threat. This essay will attempt to describe how Puritan legal policies toward and punishment of red offenders developed variously throughout southern New England, with particular reference to that issue. Although the New England colonies dealt with Indians in a far from uniform manner, we shall see that white men generally exhibited considerable fairness only when they believed that their safety was at stake. They demonstrated an ethnocentric and, by late century, even racist unfairness once they had achieved some dominion over the Native American peoples around them. When that point was reached, the sentences Calvinist justices handed down to red and white offenders reveal remarkable differences. In the earliest years of white settlement, it was expedient for the Pilgrim and Puritan newcomers to deal fairly with the Indians. Few in number, these transplanted Europeans could hardly afford to alienate nearby tribes. Although the Massachusetts, the Pennacook confederacy of what would become New Hampshire, the Abenaki of Maine, and the Cape Cod residents had been decimated by epidemics from 1616 to 1619, the Narragansetts to the south and Pequots to the west could still muster sizable contingents of warriors. Even the Massachusetts and Wampanoags, despite heavy losses, collectively outnumbered the early English.

In 1628 Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation expressed his fear and outrage that local Indians were equipped with European muskets. "O, the horribleness of this villainy!" he wrote. "How many both Dutch and English have been lately slain by ... these barbarous savages thus armed with their own weapons." With powder, bullet-molds, and even replacement parts for their firearms, the Indians were, according to Bradford, "ordinarily better fitted and furnished than the English themselves." The militant first decades of seventeenth-century English America produced well-armed Indian forces among the Algonquians of coastal New England and the Iroquois further west, but a similar, if less well-known, phenomenon occurred in tidewater Virginia. Much sooner than most early American scholars have realized, the Powhatans desired, acquired, and used firearms-with lethal effect-against the English invaders of the James River basin. While Geronimo's Apache riflemen of the late 1805 have been recognized as the epitome of heavily-armed Indian warriors, few persons would associate the Native Americans' quest for equality in weaponry with the early Jamestown years. But in fact, no sooner had the English invaded the fertile lowlands of tidewater Virginia than the Powhatans adopted new technology and tactics and entered into a deadly arms race for cultural survival and territorial sovereignty.

The historian's attempt to recognize and convey accurately the reality of American Indians' experience in northeastern North America has long foundered on the ethnocentric character of written documentary sources. Because these sources mainly reflect the attitudes of Euroamericans, the historian has had to contend with a seeming lack of authentic Indian sources. Historians have emphasized that missionaries, in particular, notoriously biased their records with self-serving, and distorting, justifications. Although seventeenth century English missionaries have borne the brunt of this recent criticism, French Jesuits have also been closely scrutinized, if only because the priests' published Relations glowingly report their success among the Indian peoples of New France. The interpretation of Jesuit interaction with the Algonkian peoples within the French colonial sphere has struggled not only with documentary bias - historical prejudice has also been a problem. In the nineteenth century, Francis Parkman defined what became the dominant view of French and Indian relations. For Parkman, the priests of the Society of Jesus perpetuated the backward, suspiciously religious mentality of all colonial Frenchmen. In effect, Parkman judged the French, and particularly the Jesuits, as unprogressive; therefore they were natural allies of the malleable Algonkians whom they manipulated for sordid economic, political and military purposes. Both French and Indians were, in Parkman's thinking, inevitably vanquished before the economic and political momentum of the Anglo-American democratic experience.

The Tribal History-An Obsolete Paradigm James A. Clifton Because it is one of the better-perhaps the best recent example-of the genre, Edmund J. Danziger's newly published The Chippewas of Lake Superior can serve as a point of departure for an assessment of that peculiarly American historiographic form known as the tribal history. In this slim volume, as we will see, Danziger pushes to their utmost limits the basic assumptions, methods, and rationalizations of this traditional approach to the scholarly task of unraveling the sense and patterns of the past of Native American societies. In so doing he clearly revealed the fundamental limitations and defects of the model adopted to structure this inquiry. These striking weaknesses, it must be emphasized, are deficiencies of what Thomas B. Kuhn calls a "normal paradigm," not the person. They express the failure of the long established customary set of ideas, restrictions, presuppositions, and techniques that mark the tribal history as a distinctive genre now grown obsolete. Hence these comments must be read as a critique of the tribal history paradigm, not of any particular author who is intellectually trapped by its form and style. As Kuhn observes in his study of the evolution of science and scholarship, the historical development of a branch of disciplined knowledge is more a thing of fits and starts than a continuously steady accumulation of demonstrated facts and tested propositions. Such development, he argues cogently, proceeds by sequential phases of normal and revolutionary science. The normal phase of scholarship-of which the tribal history is but one long established variety-is built upon a basic underlying paradigm that structures and restricts the efforts of scholars in the discipline.