Despite popular belief, Native peoples did not simply disappear from colonial New England as the English extended their domination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, the Native peoples in such places as Natick, Massachusetts, creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. So why did New England settlers believe that the Native peoples had vanished? In this thoroughly researched and astutely argued study, historian Jean M. O'Brien reveals that, in the late...

According to Jean O'Brien, Indians did not simply disappear from colonial Natick, Massachusetts as the English extended their domination. Rather, the Indians creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. In the late eighteenth century, Natick Indians experienced a process of "dispossession by degrees" that rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order, and enabled the construction of the myth of Indian extinction.

Native American and Indigenous Studies.