Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

Abstract

""Driven by a creative reading of hundreds of local histories, Jean M. O'Brien's "Firsting and Lasting" reinvigorates the old question of the "vanishing Indian" in surprising ways, taking readers into the contradictions surrounding race and modernity, and offering an ur-history of the politics of tribal termination, dual citizenship, and cultural politics. It is a tour de force from one of our very best ethnohistorians." Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan" ""Firsting and Lasting is a crucial contribution to Native American studies, critical race theory, and the historiography of colonialism and its ideological legacy in New England. O'Brien's meticulous genealogy of the "master narrative of Indian extinction" that pervades nineteenth-century local histories--and persists to this day--is essential to the analysis of contemporary debates concerning the recognition and rights of Native peoples in the region." Amy E. Den Ouden, University of Massachusetts, Boston" "In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O'Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O'Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness."--BOOK JACKET