Date of Award

8-1-2013

Document Type

Campus Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Advisor

Joshua L. Reid

Second Advisor

Julie P. Winch

Third Advisor

Neal Salisbury

Abstract

New Englanders and Kahnawake Mohawks forged powerful kinship networks through captivity and war in the early-eighteenth-century colonial American northeast. While colonial New England authorities portrayed captives through sanctioned narratives as either perpetual victims or national heroes, those who remained with their captors remained silenced by ideologies and identities that were not their own. This work focuses on the lives of five former captives from Massachusetts who were adopted by and assimilated into the Catholic Mohawk village of Kahnawake and carried Native notions of identity, family, and belonging across the cultural, political, and geographic divides. The former captives, turned Kahnawake Mohawks, bound together two distinct and often warring societies as soldiers, missionaries, settlers, and chiefs for mutual security and prosperity of shared kin in a common space.

Comments

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