Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790.

By Jean M. O'Brien (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii plus 224pp.).

This study examines community membership and property holding in Natick, Massachusetts during the first 140 years, of the town's history. Natick was one of several "praying towns" established by the General Court of the province, and designed to hasten the acculturation and conversion of the Native population. In this work Jean O'Brien joins a group of historians who challenge the traditional belief that the Native peoples of the northeast verged on extinction by the close of the eighteenth century. O'Brien suggests that the "extinction myth" developed because Indians maintained a strong sense of cultural identity which encouraged geographic mobility, adherence to traditional gender roles and discouraged production for a market economy. These traditions combined to render the Native population quite mobile and often poor by English standards, and thus largely invisible to the dominant society which valued geographic stability and wealth.

Traditional Native gender roles made material success especially difficult. Indian men avoided planting and often left the settlement to pursue meager incomes as soldiers, sailors, and wage laborers much as they had left on the hunt years before. Women, on the other hand, were discouraged by English values from pursuing their agrarian ways.

The Indian tradition of corporate, usufruct land holding also clashed with English traditions of personal privatization and made economic success difficult. Once the English system was imposed, and a land market emerged in eastern Massachusetts, the Natives were dispossessed much as a later generation in the American West lost its land as a result of the Dawes Act. O'Brien demonstrates this by carefully reconstructing the boundaries of the early corporate lands of Natick and later, after privatization, the parcels held by individual Native families. This reconstruction reveals that while the community held the land corporately it sold some property in exchange for improvements like mills, and the construction of a meeting house. But after 1720, when the land was privatized according to English custom, Natives lost much more property, often a small piece at a time, when families fell into debt for various reasons, but most often as a result of illness or injury, and the attendant need to borrow for support or relief. O'Brien reveals, in a series of marvelous family reconstructions, that not all Natives lost their individual holdings, and that some even prospered as English-style farmers, but "dispossession by degrees" was the lot of most.

As the Indians gradually lost their land, they scattered, or merged with the African-American community. Many men continued to work as day laborers, mariners, soldiers, or to serve as indentured servants, while women produced and sold traditional crafts like baskets. Some Natives, especially women, married African-Americans; while others, including entire families, migrated westward.

O'Brien is persuasive in arguing that the Native population survived and that it lost much of its land as a result of the clash of cultures. She effectively uses vital records, land records, wills, and Native petitions to the General Court to make her case, but there is also a powerful logic to her argument which will appeal to those who believe that cultural change develops slowly. A people who had long practiced a cooperative, migratory, subsistence existence in which each gender performed specific economic functions became surrounded by a more numerous and powerful group, which was convinced of its rectitude and the superiority of its ways. As the new group sought to impose geographic stability, private land holding, and its distinct gender roles, it dispossessed the less numerous and less powerful people, especially as privatized Native land became a commodity in a market economy, and as disease weakened and impoverished the Native population.

Any study which is based heavily on land records, vital records, wills, inventories, and petitions to the General Court inevitably relies on some conjecture concerning the meaning of the information contained in these sources. To her credit O'Brien avoids overstating her case. Indeed at times it seemed she could have argued it more vigorously. For example, in her analysis of Native petitions to the General Court, which were necessary for Indian land sales, she accepts Native claims of indebtedness as the reason for such sales; she does not suggest Natives almost had to make such claims in order to sell, and that other forces such as a cultural aversion to using land in the English manner may have initiated both the petitions and sales.

While O'Brien is generally convincing, the book leaves a few questions unanswered. She does not explain why some Natives made the transition to English ways and others did not. Culture was obviously powerful, but some found its bonds less imposing. While O'Brien demonstrates that many Natives did not practice English-style agriculture, she does not really tell how they did subsist. There are hints. They set up weirs in the Charles River, and fished in lake Cochituate. Men hunted, and traveled in search of work. Women spun and practiced traditional crafts. But neither a systematic description of the Native economy nor a feeling for the Native community emerges, despite the careful family reconstructions. Nor is there a careful analysis of Native family size which may have contributed to the extinction myth, especially if Indian families were small by English standards. Finally the reader cannot help but ask what happened to Natick's Native population after 1790. These questions, and especially the last one, are beyond the scope of a work which focuses on land and culture, and such questions are probably beyond the grasp of any study which focuses on a single Native American community. They are raised here as issues that future scholars may wish to explore, and not to diminish the accomplishment of O'Brien's fascinating work.

Richard Morris 

Lycoming College