New England Indians created the multitribal Brothertown and
Stockbridge communities during the eighteenth century with the
intent of using Christianity and civilized reforms to cope with
white expansion. In Red Brethren, David J. Silverman considers the
stories of these communities and argues that Indians in early
America were racial thinkers in their own right and that indigenous
people rallied together as Indians not only in the context of
violent resistance but also in campaigns to adjust peacefully to
white dominion. All too often, the Indians discovered that their
many concessions to white demands earned them no relief.
In the era of the American Revolution, the pressure of white
settlements forced the Brothertowns and Stockbridges from New
England to Oneida country in upstate New York. During the early
nineteenth century, whites forced these Indians from Oneida
country, too, until they finally wound up in Wisconsin. Tired of
moving, in the 1830s and 1840s, the Brothertowns and Stockbridges
became some of the first Indians to accept U.S. citizenship, which
they called "becoming white," in the hope that this status would
enable them to remain as Indians in Wisconsin. Even then, whites
would not leave them alone.
Red Brethren traces the evolution of Indian ideas about race
under this relentless pressure. In the early seventeenth century,
indigenous people did not conceive of themselves as Indian. They
sharpened their sense of Indian identity as they realized that
Christianity would not bridge their many differences with whites,
and as they fought to keep blacks out of their communities. The
stories of Brothertown and Stockbridge shed light on the dynamism
of Indians' own racial history and the place of Indians in the
racial history of early America.
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