{"id":22015,"date":"2012-03-28T15:35:45","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T15:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=22015"},"modified":"2015-04-10T19:39:53","modified_gmt":"2015-04-10T19:39:53","slug":"firsting-and-lasting-writing-indians-out-of-existence-in-new-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=22015","title":{"rendered":"Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England"},"content":{"rendered":"

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Minnesota Press<\/a>
\n2010
\n296 pages
\n25 b&w photos, 2 tables
\n5 1\/2 x 8 1\/2
\nPaper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6578-5
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6577-8<\/p>\n

Jean M. O\u2019Brien<\/a><\/strong>, (White Earth Ojibwe) Professor of History
\nUniversity of Minnesota<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England\u2019s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled.<\/p>\n

In Firsting and Lasting<\/em>, Jean M. O\u2019Brien 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\u2019Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.<\/p>\n

In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O\u2019Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century\u2019s scientific racism and saw living Indians as \u201cmixed\u201d and therefore no longer truly Indian.<\/strong> Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not\u2014and have not\u2014accepted this effacement, and O\u2019Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O\u2019Brien\u2019s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England University of Minnesota Press 2010 296 pages 25 b&w photos, 2 tables 5 1\/2 x 8 1\/2 Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6578-5 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6577-8 Jean M. O\u2019Brien, (White Earth Ojibwe) Professor of History University of Minnesota Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,459,8,17,3015,20],"tags":[2724,10222,10223,3712,5568,341,10221],"class_list":["post-22015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-connecticut","tag-jean-m-obrien","tag-jean-obrien","tag-massachusetts","tag-rhode-island","tag-university-of-minnesota-press","tag-white-earth-ojibwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}