American Indian Culture and Research Journal

To the student of Anglo-Indian relations in seventeenth-century New England the absence of interracial marriage is a subject whose depth and breadth remain largely unexplored. The familial nature of English immigration and the relatively balanced sex ratio in the emergent Bible commonwealths have long been offered as explanations for the New Englanders' failure to inter-marry with the American Indians. Propounded too, are the differences of religion, culture, and education which, to the Puritans especially, constituted formidable barriers to interracial marriage. Finally, the New England natives' precipitate population diminution and relative inaccessibility have been advanced as reasons for the lack of Anglo-Indian intermarriage. Undeniably, such explanations have considerable merit. Unfortunately, their self-evident importance and general acceptance have discouraged further research into an intriguing question that reveals much about the dynamics of interracial relations in seventeenth-century New England. The purpose of this essay is to re-examine the standard explanations and to shed new light on the reasons why seventeenth-century New Englanders were unwilling to intermarry with their Native American neighbors.