UC Santa Cruz

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, colonial projects in southern New England sponsored dozens of communities commonly called “praying towns.” Missionaries and colonial authorities envisioned these as bounded settlements where Indigenous people would learn to adopt Christianity and English cultural norms. However, English goals of remaking Indigenous people in their image as servants of the British Empire and Christian God were not the most important driving forces in the development of these mission communities. Rather, thousands of Indigenous people across New England drove their evolution, largely through land ownership strategies. Using the English colonial courts, they acquired and preserved secure land bases in a tumultuous borderlands region. In doing so they carved out viable spaces for themselves in the midst of European and inter-Indigenous violence, and shaped mission communities into sites of cultural, corporeal, and spiritual survival, creating a legacy of persistence that their descendants carry today. This study is the first to examine why Native people across southern New England pursued such a strategy, how they gained title to their ancestral lands under a foreign legal system, and the quintessentially Indigenous ways they managed that land once they owned it according to colonial laws. It draws on seventeenth-century documents, archaeological studies, digital mapping, and the knowledge of present-day Indigenous people in Massachusetts to bring this survival story to light.