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Cover illustration: Courtesy Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
In 1668 Sarah Ahhaton, a married Native American woman of the Massachusetts Bay town of Punkapoag, confessed in an English court to having committed adultery. She was tried, found guilty, and publicly whipped and shamed. She contritely promised that if her life were spared, she would return to her husband and "continue faithfull to him during her life yea although hee should beat her againe".
These events, recorded in the court documents of colonial Massachusetts, may appear unexceptional, but they, in fact reflect a rapidly changing world. Native American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English Christians: elite native men frequently took more than one wife, while other men and women could dissolve their marriages and take new partners with relative ease. Native marriage did not necessarily involve cohabitation, the formation of a new household, or mutual dependence for subsistence. Couples who wished to separate did so without social reproach, and when adultery occurred, the blame centered not on the "fallen" woman but on the interloping man. Over time, such practices changed, but the emergence of new types of "Indian marraige" enabled the legal, social, and cultural survival of New England's native peoples.
The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice are treated with subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously neglected history. Plane's careful reading of fragmentary sources yields both conclusive and fittingly speculative findings, and her interpretations form an intimate picture, moving and often tragic, of Native American familial bonds in the first century and a half of European influence.
ANN MARIE PLANE is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
"The research behind this book is excellent. Ann Marie Plane demonstrates a great skill in her elucidation of specific court cases. By doing so, she shows us the real tensions that existed within families, and between families and communities, in the different populations of early New England."
Peter C. Mancall, University of Kansas, author of Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America
"Viewing the inhabitants of early New England -- natives as well as new-comers -- through the lens of marriage, this extraordinary books opens up new vistas onto a time and place we thought we knew, and knew well. Ann Marie Plane's imaginative use of intractable sources gives colonization a human face; through her tales of love (and lust), of loss (and gain), she gives voice to people long silent, bringing these obscure folk not only to light but also to life. Colonial Intimacies will change the way we think about New England and early America, about the colonizer and the colonized and about families from the Puritans' day to our own."
James H. Merrell, Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History, Vassar College
"Colonial Intimacies makes an important contribution to the history of early New England by adding a multicultural emphasis hitherto absent from social and family historical studies in the region. Ann Marie Plane has imaginatively conceptualized her book, and the multicultural emphasis yields significant results -- some of her insights, informed by her careful reading of anthropology and feminist scholarship, are remarkable. This is a fascinating book."
Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Cornell University
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