Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief

Audra Simpson

Wicazo Sa Review, Volume 24, Number 2, Fall 2009, pp. 105-129 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: 10.1353/wic.0.0031

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wic/summary/v024/24.2.simpson.html

Access provided by University of Utah (7 Nov 2013 12:49 GMT) Captivating Eunice Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Audra Simpson

My youngest Daughter, aged Seven years, was carryed all the journey, & look’d after with a great deal of Tenderness.

—John Williams, 17071

WHITHER EUNICE?

The famous story of Eunice Williams’s captivity and incorporation begins with tears and ends with tears, as it was a Mohawk woman’s grief that prompted her capture as a replacement child for one lost. Her inconsolability motivated Mohawk warriors from Kahnawake to venture from the southwestern part of the St. Lawrence River down to Deerﬁ eld, Massachusetts, in February 1704—during the dead of winter—to take captives.2 Little is known of the speciﬁ city of the

Mohawk woman’s unrest, or of the particulars of her life, as she is re- WICAZO REVIEW SA 105 ferred to only as “the mother.”3 Far more is known of Eunice Williams, the white child of completely unambiguous Protestant stock that would become her child. She was originally the daughter of the Reverend

John Williams and Eunice Williams, and thus was the grand niece of FALL 2009 famed Puritan minister Increase and cousin to Cotton Mather. In their commitment to piety, anti-popishness, proper puritan conduct, and

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 105105 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2110:51:21 AMAM writing and sermonizing on the sinister condition of Indian captivity, the Mathers have been described as “the most prominent divines of their generation.”4 Williams’s life receives its acclaim in part because of these genealogies. But her life is most famous because her captivation became thoroughly consensual and she became Mohawk through time. She steadfastly refused to return to her natal territory and family. Owing to yawning gulfs in the archives, we do not know what this conversion tale looked like within Kahnawake, but it is clear from the literature that, although originally “English,” she became a unilingual, Catholic “white Indian” who was captivated by and fully assimilated into Mohawk society. In this article, I use the story of Eunice Williams’s captivity to argue that her incorporation into Mohawk society does not belong in the past; rather, it forms part of the gendered structure and imaginary of contemporary colonial settler society of North America. This gendered structure and imaginary is instantiated through The Indian Act of 1876, which defi ned and recognized indigeneity in Canada through a pre-citizened wardship status.5 This wardship status, which is now co-incident with state citizenship, continues to determine rights to material and semiotic resources for Indians in Canada, and shapes the identities and identifi cations of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada today.6 This article offers a speculative history regarding the Act and the captivity narratives surrounding Williams’s life in order to point to the possibility of their relatedness but also to stimulate further, deeper work on the role of historical narrative in stimulating political and social possibility in colonial, or settler, contexts through time. The story of Eunice Williams, then, is more than a story of thrilling, dramatic, and violent eighteenth-century captivation. It is a story about the transformation of membership or incorporation into a rights-bearing unit of political status, with an attendant form of recognition—a recognition that was later conferred through The Indian Act. This is also a story of colonial alchemy, of recognition of political subject-formation, which moved race and gender to the forefront of deliberations over the meting out of those rights (only to efface them) and which was an evidentiary moment of deep identifi - cation that had occurred within Eunice Williams’s interior frontiers, within her mind. Her identifi cations and recognitions and the cele-

106 WICAZO REVIEW SA bration of her story do not come without consequences, consequences that have not been considered in the literature on captivation. This is a literature that largely considers captivation to be a case of force, adoption, and/or kinning in an effort to re-historicize the past in

FALL 2009 deeply connected ways. These important contributions to literary and historical studies have signiﬁ cantly problemetized the notion of settler and Indigenous experiences as isolated from each other and

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 106106 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM have given us a sense, especially in literary studies, of the importance of Indigenous “savagery” to the construction and maintenance of a “civilized” colonial self. However, in colonial “situations”—historical moments and processes that are still in play—the captivating savage not only defi nes but undermines and seduces the colonial self—the notion of the captive white does things to Indian social structure and polity as well. It is to this interconnected side of things that I wish to move the analysis.7 In order to do this, we must fi rst turn to what captivity narratives are and what they do. Captivity narratives are read as a literary and historical tradition that is vital to the construction and maintenance of an American “self” (vis-à-vis otherness) because they select which stories and histories will authorize dominance or the always precarious power of a dominant group (re: settlers). In taking up Gramsci, Turner- Strong argues that the captivity genre of literature and fact-making is a “selective tradition” that is an “element of hegemony,” in that it is part of the process through which a dominant social group legitimates its power by grounding it in a set of authoritative understandings.8 Thus, “captivity” is not only a genre of literary and historical production but is also a discursive formation, like law and policy, which then does things.9 In this article, I point to that possibility by offering a speculative history that may be used, or discarded, for deeper historical inquiries into the relatedness of colonial narratives and law. My argument now moves in two directions: fi rst, the history that embeds social and politically infl ected psycho-dynamics of desire (in particular, the desire to become Indian, even where Indians have been viewed as repulsive or fearsome) and, second, the alchemic power of law-making, which would render a white woman an Indian in the eyes of the settler state. What follows is some of the history surrounding Eunice Williams’s life, but I am arguing here that, although her story appears to be a piece of a much larger, organic system of exchanges and reciprocal violences and naturalizations, it had a political effi cacy that resonates in gendered and raced ways to dis-empower, in the long run, Mohawk governmental systems and, in particular, Mohawk women. It does so by readying a readership and a state for a different sensibility for citizenship.

EUNICE WILLIAMS

From the start, Eunice Williams’s captivation was not very remarkable. At WICAZO REVIEW SA 107 that time, the Northeast was a landscape marked by exchanges and obliga- tions, which formed the fulcrum of “politics.” French, English, Mohawk, and other Indigenous nations had very different reasons for partaking in war,

for taking captives, and they had different methods for dealing with them FALL 2009 when they did so. For Mohawks in those historical moments, Williams and others could be bartering chips to be exchanged for political purposes but

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 107107 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM in the Deerfi eld raid were replacements for love lost. The wars and sick- ness that settlement wrought (as well as the wars that they had experienced before) stressed the clan relationships of obligation and reciprocity that underwrote their social system, requiring that others be found to occupy the structural place of affection and obligation required by kinship. On a narrative rather than a purely socio-structural level, Eunice Williams’s story, then, emerges in this fulcrum of exchanges and so is embedded within a key account—that of her father’s, the Reverend John Williams’s, classic story of her captivity and his attempts to redeem her, The Redeemed Captive (TRC, 1707). I turn to his story because much of what we know of her life was enframed within this narrative and the histories that followed. The Redeemed Captive is one of 450 to 500 fi rst-person accounts of captivity that were published in over 1,200 editions between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth century.10 This is more than a story of kidnapping, natural- ization, and cultural transgression. Her story within his story, along with others, is an instrument that enunciates the gendered and raced preference for social and legal incorporation by settler regimes, as well as the anxiety that obtained to these preferences as they became lived. These are settler regimes that became states and so required representations of events such as captivity (which were dramatic episodes of much larger political brokering undertaken by both Indigenous and settler regimes) to foment themselves. These emerging states needed to foment themselves because they were new, they were precarious, and they required stories of foreign-ness within and alchemies of white transformation (into indigeneity) in order to “settle” foreign lands, as well as to assuage identities fractured by the moral and epistemological questions of origins and self-knowing presented by their own foreign-ness within a land that they had to settle quickly, in a myriad of ways.11 Thus, I wish to speculate that captivity narratives could be used to justify the domestications of space and lives upon that space. How to domesticate space through story? Eunice Williams’s story articulates settlers’ colonial and raced desires to become and be Indian (even where they were revolted by Indians)—a mirror process of claiming and owning land. In this way, the story of Eunice Williams’s life is a shadow logic to that of claiming and owning land. Even where settlers were mystifi ed by land, they claimed it, in perfect Lockean fashion, when it was “occupied” and mixed with labor. In the contemporary landscape, settlers will claim identity where it is mixed with their experience, but it is to historical confi gurations of recognition and conferral—the fi rst captivity, rather

108 WICAZO REVIEW SA than the moral morass of self-identiﬁ cation—that we ﬁ rst must turn.

WOMEN OF VALUE: STORIES OF RENOWN

FALL 2009 He wrote a letter to the Jesuit to desire him to send my child to see me, and to speak with them that took her, to come along with it. But the Jesuit wrote back the letter that I should

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 108108 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM not be permitted to speak with, or see my child, if I came that my labour would be lost; and that the Macquas [Mohawks] would just as soon part with their hearts, as my child.

—TRC, 28–29.

How does the value that is attached to Williams’s life make her saleable in narrative form, and what does that saleability then do to the raced and gendered relations to land and to each other that formed not only the Northeast but also settler society today? What of her value? Williams’s life is itself initially contained within a captivity narrative, but it is one that obtains its value through the political desire that underwrote her person, as a subject who was captivated and whose struggles for redemption were chronicled.12 But she was an exceptional person in that she could not be ran- somed, exchanged, or sold. This was within a political and legal space of war and clear, unambiguous settlement—a landscape that was predicated upon exchanges in order to keep peace and goodwill, as well as anxieties regarding conversions of all sorts. Two captives describe this landscape of exchange and anxiety to John Williams in his narrative of his own redemption:

Before the return of that Army, they told me, We were lead up & down and Sold by the Heathen, as Sheep for Slaughter, and they would not devise what they should do with us, we should be so many Prisoners, when the army returned. The Jesuit told me, It was a great Mercy that so many of our Children were brought to them, and that now especially since they were not like speedily to be returned, there was hope of their being brought over to the Romish faith. They would take the English Children born among them, and against the consent of their parents, baptize them.

—TRC, 37.

Eunice Williams’s affective value was accrued by these competing regimes but also by the will of two families to keep her. Eunice Williams’s own will, expressed clearly, to stay with her captors, the Maguas (Mohawks), whose value was determined by the English to be savage— even worse, “popish” or “romanish”—increased Williams’s value, as she

needed to be “redeemed” from not only the savages but also the Catholic WICAZO REVIEW SA 109 Church.13 Goodness and virtue themselves depended upon it. I now want to turn to the primary text of her captivation, written by her father in his account of his own captivation, along with that of

his family and his daughter’s failed redemption. Written as a sermon FALL 2009 and then delivered and published only one year after his redemption— 1707—Williams’s narrative begins with a violent awakening from sleep.

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 109109 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM He tells us that, in the dead of winter, the 29th of February, 1704, “[t]hey came into my House in the beginning of the Onset (dawn), and by their violent endeavours to break open Doors, and Windows, with Axes and Hatchets, Awakened me out of Sleep; on which I leapt out of bed. . . .“ (TRC, 3). In response to this violating entry, Williams immediately took a pistol, placed it to the chest of one of the fi rst Indians to come upon him, and attempted to fi re it but realized it was not loaded. At that point, he was bound and immediately told that he would be taken to Quebec. Thus, the fi rst scene of this narrative was set with a forced entry, violence, bounding, misfi re, two children “[taken] & [carried] to the door and a negro woman murdered. But they let him get dressed. Once the sun [had] risen for an hour they [were] all carried out” (TRC, 4). Williams then takes his readers on the MARCH: a harrowing journey, where he sees war skirmishes caught up in numbers, in details, in clothing lost, and in murders, an accounting system that sounds like: “kill’d a suckling child,” kill his Negro man, (after they set to drinking) (TRC, 7). With that shock established, he moves to more relational concerns, with the second mention of his wife, occurring on the same page, when he is allowed to talk with her and he mentions his second master. His wife relays to him that she is not long for the world, they are separated, and he wades through water above his knees, travels up a small mountain (TRC, 8), and is told that he cannot go back to help his wife. He then learns from a fellow prisoner that she fell in the water and “traveled not far, for at the Foot of this Mountain, the cruel and blood thirsty Salvage who took her, fl ew her with his Hatchet, at one stroak; the tidings of which were very awful: and yet was the hard heartedness of the Adversary. . . .” (TRC, 9). She is then given a Christian burial and he read that burial (by neighbors who survived the attack) as God’s work, as she would not be made meat (ibid., 9), in that she would not be eaten by animals. He then describes, “Another suckling infant killed, a girl of 11 years of age,” with no mention of why; this accounting shifts later in the book, when he starts to offer a reason for such violence, but he seems concerned in the earliest parts of the text with accounting of various forms. The sociological and numerative registers within the text are then punctuated by the sensation of grief, when he describes the state he was in: “I was made to Mourn, at the Consideration of my Flocks being so far a Flock of Slaughter . . . and from fears what we must yet expect, from

110 WICAZO REVIEW SA such who delightfully imbrued their hands in the blood of so many of His people” (ibid., 10). His grief compounded by bodily pain, he describes that his “ankle bones and sinews hurt, having injured them before the March, and he walked in water up to the ankles. Saturday they

FALL 2009 moved fast, four women were tired and so were slain. Shoot Geese, kill two women who were too faint to travel” (ibid., 12). The sociological descriptors continue, with speciﬁ c details that read like retrospective

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 110110 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM updates and foreshadowings of the fate of people, of who would live and who would die: “Mary Brooks miscarries after falling in the ice, is weak and will be killed by her master.” Each day was an encounter with these questions of fate, and brushes with pain, whereby the value of each person was considered at the hands of “salvages,” or savages. A formula starts to emerge; the weak, the infi rm, those who could not be carried— those were the bodies that mattered little enough to be destroyed. This is the savage’s calculus of value at play, a value that was predicated in Williams’s rendering on the portability of persons, a portability that ap- peared, in such sociological descriptors, as simply killed or not killed. Williams’s children, we know, were both on the “kill or not be killed list” (two were killed immediately on the night of forced entry), and much of his narrative of the march north to “Quebeck” is caught up in this way with sorting out these systems of value. These sortings were manifest in descriptors such as those found above, which later were qualifi ed with an explanation such as “is weak and will be killed by her master.” Here we have the sense of the everydayness and spectre and, perhaps, inevitability of loss, “Next day are made to scatter into different companies and one of his children [does not say in any way, boy or girl] is carried away by Indians belonging to the Eastern parts” (ibid., 13). The system of value then stops on him, when his master, who is the man he tried to kill on the fi rst night, then comes to him in the middle of the night, puts a gun to his head, and says he will kill him. God intervened, Williams tells us, and he did not. We do not know why; we just know that “God intervened.” He and two children from his town were “taken from the company of the English” and a four-year-old girl is killed by “her Magua” (ibid., 13), and we are told with great specifi city that he killed her because he could not carry her and his pack at the same time. This decision to murder her, then, was made based on matters of portability. She is deemed less valuable than the capacity to carry a pack, and/or the pack itself. There is then on the march a prayerful passage in his text, delivered to his readers, which describes a moment when he realized that he was separated from his congregation, and that those whom he was separated from were “in his [God’s] sanctuary” (re: dead) and he realized that he himself was “unfruitful and unthankful” for such mercy (ibid., 14). Upon realizing these losses and the mercy shown to his own life, his soul was about to sink, but he invoked God’s words “for strengthening

and support” (ibid., 14). He then went to the commands to Moses to WICAZO REVIEW SA 111 anticipate the scattering of his people among nations if he was to trans- gress. But if he was to keep the commandments, “and do them,” those that had been cast out of the upperparts of heaven would be gathered

and put in a place that God had chosen” (ibid., 14). Williams tells his FALL 2009 readers that he drew strength from these passages and thought that this would “restrain the wrath of the Adversary, that the greatest number of us

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 111111 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM left alive, should be carried through so tedious a journey” (ibid., 14–15). Accordingly, he tells us, his youngest daughter, age seven, was spared; his youngest son, age four, was spared (this boy’s life was spared four times, specifi cally); and his son Samuel and oldest daughter were also spared. His oldest son, Stephen, eleven, was “wonderfully preserved from death, in the famine where of three English Persons dyed” (ibid., 15). Eunice still remains nameless but is referred to as “my youngest.” After the arduous and wearying journey through ice, ice water, and snow, in which Williams’s feet affl icted him so that “his bones seemed to be misplaced” and he “wrung blood out of his stockings” every night (ibid., 15), he arrived with his master(s) at Chambly, at the Fort at St. Francois, and then on to Mont Royal (Montreal). His arrival at Mont Royal was at the eighth week of his captivity (ibid., 27). He was then redeemed from his Indian captors by the Governour de’Vaudrel. While in captivation with Indians, he lived in “wigwams” but, upon ar- riving at Chambly, he dined with a former captive and French offi cers, slept on a feather bed, debated politics with his French hosts, and managed in various ways the continuous attempts to get him to attend Catholic Church by the Indians, Jesuits, and French offi cers. He noted every detail, it seemed, of debates within himself and with others regarding the relative superiority of his own religion over Popery, or Catholicism. This would be a theme of his text, one shaping the conversion of whites into Indians, English into French, and, at times, the most unconscionable to him, Protestants into Catholics, which enfolded the previous two conversions of white into red, English into French, Civilized into Savage. The value of Eunice Williams emerges about one-third of the way into the text, when he details the diffi culty in redeeming her out of the hands of the “salvages.” After hearing of the various conditions of his children, dispersed in different places, John Williams attempts to meet her where she is “amongst the Magua’s” (ibid., 29). His attempts are rebuffed, even as they are negotiated by the Governour himself, as the “Macqua’s would as soon part with their hearts, as my child” (ibid.). It is only when the Governour accompanies Williams to Fort St. Louis (early Kahnawake) that Eunice is taken to her father. There, he speaks to her for “near an hour” (ibid.) and she is still able to read. It is noted that he asks after her catechism and reminds her to pray, and she tells him that she wishes to be redeemed from them. Here we see that she is on the precipice of something; in her father’s text, she is holding on to

112 WICAZO REVIEW SA her father’s religion, when she says, “They force me to say some prayers in Latin, but I don’t understand one word of them, I hope it wont do me any harm” (ibid.). The next time he sees her is in the city. It is a quick encounter, and he had “ . . . not many Minutes of time with her, what

FALL 2009 time I had, I improved to give her the best advice I could” (ibid., 30). A monetized form of Eunice Williams’s value starts to emerge at this point in the text as the Governour of Quebec attempts to exchange

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 112112 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM her for an “Indian girl in her stead. This exchange fails. He then attempts to buy her, or to offer a “ . . . hundred pieces of Eight for her Redemption” but is refused (ibid.). He then sends his “lady,” or wife, to beg for Eunice and learns that “its there still; and has forgotten to speak English” (ibid.). There are invocations to God to protect those who are “cast upon god from the womb, and are now Out-cast ready to perish, might be gathered from their dispersions, and receive Sanctifying Grace from God” (ibid.). Eunice, we learn, remained an outcast from God for the rest of her life, as she was never redeemed from her Indian captivation and “turned” fully to savagery and Popery. John Williams was asked to convert to “Romishness” twice and was offered a house and a pension from the king to do so. We are made to understand that he simply could not lose his soul in such an exchange (ibid., 39). He was offered his children but could not expect to have them on any other terms except that of his own conversion. He instructs his readers and listeners then that he put his trust in God, who would and will perform all things for him. As a consequence, his eldest daughter was redeemed, along with his son, Stephen, who had been whipped by a Jesuit at the behest of “squaws” who said he had not worked hard enough for them (ibid., 44). Williams’s struggle is not with the temptation of his own conversion but with the conversions occurring all around him, namely of the captives “turning” to Catholicism, to savagery, and to uncivility and all of the anxiety and melancholy that it induced within him (and perhaps his listeners and readers) in those moments. Although his was not a per- sonal struggle that was manifest with temptation (his move, rather, was toward melancholia and a tempered outrage), the horror of conversion as loss was made real to him when he spoke of his son, age fi fteen to six- teen, who had “turned.” His son Samuel was 200 miles from his father and was being held by the French; he dared not write his father, lest he get caught writing about religion and be put with the Indians (again). His fi rst missive to his father, embedded within the text, tells us that he would not “turn.” “Turn” here signals a move to Romishness, or Popery. When he does “turn,” it incites pages of exposition in epistolary form from his father on the benefi ts of his religion over that of the “Romish wolves” whose religion will carry his son only to hell. John Williams and two of his children were redeemed to the English and arrived in Boston in November 1706. He ended the narrative of his

captivity with a tally of the number of captives remaining as ﬁ fty-seven, WICAZO REVIEW SA 113 two of which were his children, and most notably it seems, as she closes this narrative as an alien in peril, “I have yet a Daughter of Ten years of Age, and many neighbors, whose case bespeaks your compassion, and prayers

to God to gather them, being Out-casts ready to perish” (ibid., 85). FALL 2009 Eunice Williams’s life, embedded as it is in this primary account of her father’s captivation, moves beyond the structuring presuppositions

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 113113 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM of war and settlement in the Northeast and Europe, which makes it more than noteworthy for historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars. The value of Eunice Williams was solidifi ed by this textualization of an account or a memoir. Her value takes its form and its meaning from this rendering of events, but also from the broader industry of refl ection and analysis on captivities and captivity narratives that were in play at this time. These narratives appealed to a larger readership whose tastes were structured by competing empires as well as the project of domestica- tion and the gendered relationships of power and privilege that afford forms of political recognition to strangers by both Indigenous and non- Indigenous protagonists in this story. I want now to move to a discussion of those relationships of power and how they correspond to projects of making space livable in new worlds or, rather, their political effi cacy. In her aforementioned discussion of the dialectics of captivity, Turner-Strong argues that, for the Puritan colonists of New England, who were continually looking for signs of Providence in the New World, “captivity” came to epitomize the spiritual trial posed by the American wilderness, its savage inhabi- tants, and, perhaps most importantly, the savagery within themselves. The “experience of captivity” and its representation had a critical role in constructing what was “an American self“—a self that was undergoing assault and transformation.14 Captivities have been treated in different ways in the literature but, in their elemental form, are representations of experiences that sought to document and re-tell times of encounter and transformation. However, like the Jesuit Relations, they are more than their elemental form and had more than an ethnological or literary purpose; they did the important ideational and ideological work of popularizing the experience of cultural difference and “contact” to a larger audience. These narratives bolstered support for politics in the colonies and, as Turner-Strong persuasively argues, the narratives constructed a notion of difference, which then “did things” to the notion of an American (as civilized and civilizing) self.15 In order to think about captivity narratives as forms of rhetorical (and political) possibility, I will turn briefl y to Carole Blackburn’s analysis of the Jesuit Relations.16 Her argument helps us to not dwell entirely on what texts mean, but what they can do, through time. Her analysis moves Jesuit narratives and the colonial dreams that informed them into histories

114 WICAZO REVIEW SA of the present (even where hers is clearly a history of the past), and it is much in time with the “structure of invasion” that Patrick Wolfe discusses in the context of Australia. He argues that within settler societies “invasion is a structure not an event” because within settler societies they never left.17

FALL 2009 Because of this constant presence of foreign-ness, the work of settlement must be sustained through time in order to naturalize and justify the ongoing process of land expropriation and cultural transformation that colonialism

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 114114 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM requires. This is itself the ideational “state” of the colonial condition in settler societies, since the axiomatic relationship for Native social systems is to land, which necessarily had to be alienated from them (as opposed to Africans, whose labor was alienated from them) to “make way” for others. The ideational work and material work of this alien- ation require the labor and the discursive formations, such as literature, law, and policy, as well as the force of war. Wolfe discusses the way in which notions of the “wild man,” of “savage and civil,” are not discrete spaces of difference, or cultural wholes that have come into collision, but are critical, border-like articulations of slippage, and slippage that articulated to hierarchy and domination even where it cannot have it. And this is because they were required. In the context of New France, Blackburn explains, “The Jesuits wrote of dominance and dreamed of hegemony, but . . . the former was diffi cult if not realizable and the latter was impossible during the fi rst half of the seventeenth century.”18 There was a disjuncture between what was happening and what was desired. What these “dreams” did do, however, and do through narrative work, is put into action the possibili- ties of Indigenous disenfranchisement, from land, from labor (in other racialized contexts), and from each other. Captivity narratives are, for Blackburn, a discourse of domination that must be teased apart from the work that they do elsewhere and examined for what they do at home. We make take from her work and that of postcolonial thinkers such as Said the question of how representation does the work of expropriation, or of structural re-confi guration? How does it affect relationships of power and access to resources in ways that affect everyday life? In their popularization, these narratives did so by creating an ideological space that could authorize social and political reversals, such as those found in the Indian Act.

WHITE INTO RED

The Governour labored much for her redemption, at last he had a promise of it, in case he could produce for them an Indian girl in her stead. Accordingly he sent up the river some hundred leagues for one, but it was refused. His lady went over to have beg’d her from them but all in vain; its

there still and has forgotten to speak English. WICAZO REVIEW SA 115

—TRC, 30

It is now prudent to turn to the inter-related and shifting triad of citi- FALL 2009 zenship, race, and gender. How did the gendered axioms of rights and citizenship move through time, and how are they tied to the interests

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 115115 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM of imperial and later, colonial powers? The process of making white women into Indians, a process that was actually quite unsuccessful,19 was enormously popular as text-making. Nonetheless, the work of representation, I wish to argue, forms some of the foment that then made it possible for Indian women to become white, and legally read-able as such, although not socially so. As well, this story helps to make Indian men into patriarchs vis-à-vis the white women they married (although perhaps not socially so). Eunice Williams’s story, grounded as it is in Kahnawake and the native and non-native Northeast, is both an empiri- cal and a mythical moment of awakening within non-Native readership of the horrible possibility of transformation, of a Protestant girl being taken by savages and made into a Catholic Indian, but then, if not to add insult (and disbelief) to this injury, is the social horror of this girl’s unwillingness to return to her natal family. If we are to take notions forwarded by Turner-Strong (and other captivity scholars), Eunice Williams incited horror in a readership because she was a metaphor for them and, as such, gave settler anxiety a textual locus for reﬂ ection and articulation. That she was a woman and thus a double metaphor for both their entries (and exits) and their virtue as a forming nation20 may also explain, empirically, their documented desire for her return as well as the continued popularity of her tale, as reﬂ ected by the popular success of John Demos’s fairly recent history, The Unredeemed Captive.21

Captivated by Law

The people who captivated Eunice Williams (and whom, perhaps, she captivated) were those understood to be “Macqua,” or Mohawk, people belonging to the Six Nations, or Iroquois Confederacy, a pre-contact Indigenous military and philosophical alliance predicated on their own law, the Kaienerekowa, or “great law of peace.” In spite of their long and deep history in the Northeast and a strong presence that persists there, Iroquois history and people have been deﬁ ned and delimited by a very small cadre of anthropologists and historians who have rendered them exemplary ethnological subjects and, in doing so, have removed them from a self-authoring and authorizing role in their own cultural and historical production.22 This delimited role in cultural, historical, and textual reproduction is symptomatic of the imperial and colonial project, one in North America that required an especially silent Indigenous

116 WICAZO REVIEW SA subject—one that was intermittently innocent, fearsome, fearful, piti- able, and possessing that which was lacked and desired. Ethnology is more than a collection of scientiﬁ c observations and literary tropes; it is a vehicle for social processes and attitudes that are articulated to

FALL 2009 the settlement project that, in this case, helped to alienate Iroquois from their territories and then naturalized those processes and attendant identities through history-making,23 violence, and other forms of

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 116116 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2210:51:22 AMAM ideological and corporeal work. This “work” contained and managed Iroquois cultural (and necessarily raced and gendered) differences within certain spaces.24 Law is the handmaiden to these processes, and it is to that handmaiden that we will now turn. How was the state able to use law to do the work of settlement? By being readied through sentiment, through fact, and through narratives that convey those sentiments. Here the history that I have presented becomes necessarily speculative, as I do not have the exact moment of correlation to assert that there is a direct link between the narrative of Eunice’s father and the moment in which white women could become legally recognized as Indian in the eyes of Canada. However, I wish to suggest that narratives such as that which was abstracted from above added to the social and political imaginary that would become Canada and would afford rights, would instantiate foreign-ness as natural and just (via law), and would make white women Indian and Indian women white in the eyes of the law. So it was, by all accounts, that Mohawks took Eunice Williams from Deerﬁ eld, Massachusetts, as a white child and eventually naturalized her as an Indian. Evidence for the depth of her incorporation lies in her well-documented refusal to return to her birth family as a young adult, the loss of her native language, and the presence of her name and descendants in Kahnawake today. This cultural conversion tale speaks simultaneously of the triumph of culture over race and the willingness—not only of Williams herself to live as a Mohawk but of the Mohawks at Kahnawake to live with her as she was—to incorporate difference at the level of kinship, the social and political foundation of their community. How could Eunice do all that? She managed to, it seems, and with great acceptance and effect, as she did not desire a return home. Eunice had choices and these choices were owing to her role as a replacement for a lost child and her marriage to a Mohawk man. Where Eunice had choices and may have been naturalized as a Kahnawake woman, Mohawk women did not. Their juridical recognition as Indians and their involun- tary enfranchisement as Canadian citizens occurred precisely because of marriage: their marriage to non-Indian men signaled their loss of rights within Indian communities and corresponded to a different ﬁ eld of social value that was being worked out in a settler society that was fomenting itself, and is still fomenting itself. Both marriage and con-

sent, or lack thereof, are the threads that both the stories of Eunice and WICAZO REVIEW SA 117 Mohawk women share. Now what is the contemporary captivity, this gendered citizenship of grief, and how do Indian women and white women belong to the

same logic of recognition/misrecognition/belonging/not-belonging? FALL 2009 Well over a century would pass between Eunice’s captivity and the captivity of Indian women to the state in 1850, when Indian identity was

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 117117 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM fi rst defi ned for the purposes of political recognition (in the form of protection) and the proto Indian Acts25 came into being. It was at that point that any person who married someone with Indian blood was recognized as Indian. This was an Act that was immediately amended to race and gender recognition, so that white women who married Indian men became Indians in the eyes of the state, and Indian women that married white men became non-Indian women in the eyes of the state. I consider this process of “making new racial and national subjects” to be a form of colonial alchemy, since it may, through legal proscription, engender social alchemy. However, like most things we might think, or want to think are simply unthinkable, there is law or policy and distributions of power that underwrite and the story of Eunice Williams and the attention that it received (and still receives) is part of that template of making things thinkable. How, then, does an Indian woman become a captive, so to speak, of the state? She does so through the interplay of consciousness, law, policy, and the distributions in power that can affect the social lives of communities. The story of Eunice Williams is testament to the fact that outsiders from other nations and races were integrated into the Mohawk community of Kahnawake and that she was “made” Mohawk through their commitment to Mohawk family and culture. In such cases, the cultural and racial differences of these “outsiders” were not problematic until the construct of race became important to insiders, to Kahnawakero:non. I assert elsewhere that “race” became important to the community (or ideas about race, or racialized forms of difference) at the time when being “Mohawk” became being “Indian” and being Indian carried rights gendered along the father’s line.26 These rights, derived from “status,” required a refi guring of incorporation and political membership beyond the mastery of language and “culture.” It is at this point that colonial patriarchy and bureaucratic con- trol converged in the consciousness of Kahnawakero:non, when the 1850 Act was vigorously contested by Indians (people from Kahnawake, in particular) for making white men into de jure Indians.27 For a brief time in the 1850s, there was the possibility of white men acquiring status upon marriage to an Indian woman, a time that ended when the Act was amended to recognize patrilineal descent exclusively. In that moment we see the ascendancy of race consciousness hinging on the sex (and the perceived threat and power) of other people. From this we can infer that

118 WICAZO REVIEW SA white men were perceived as threatening but white women were not, and those men were perceived as threatening in a context of profound land loss, continued encroachment, and the settler state’s attempts to further transform Indigenous action to allotted spaces in Canada.28

FALL 2009 Iroquois women were the primary caregivers in the community; they raised the children, taught them their language, and ran the households when men were away working, as well as when they were home. They

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 118118 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM also advised men on what to do in terms of the formal politics of the community. We can hypothesize that, within the colonial scene where land, identity, and place become enframed in juridical and rights-based language and legislation, this imperative would have been maintained, but through the sieve of status.

WHITHER EUNICE AND THE WOMEN THAT FOLLOWED HER?

White women were viewed as less threatening to both Indian women and Indian men within the distributive space of power because they were viewed as less threatening than white men. White women were less threatening because they then occupied a space of status Indian, which meant on some level that they were actually disempowered as status Indian women, who could not vote, own property, or run for elected council. As status Indian women, they were not a challenge to the new, colonially imposed governance systems on reservations, since they were not po- tential landowners, band councilors, or voters unless they were widowed or divorced. Under the provisions of the Indian Act, white women were permitted to marry and settle on the reserve, whereas white men married to Indian women were not. As Iroquois women receded in institutional power, the presence of white women (as de jure Indians) must have been profoundly aggravating to the Indian women who had to leave, but not threatening to the broader community in terms of property or land owner- ship. What might this tell us about Kahnawakero:non of that time? And what will this tell us about the very important discussions that are happening in Kahnawake right now and have been happening since the middle of the nineteenth century around issues of membership and incorporation? “Race” and “sex” as meaningful categories for determining membership impressed themselves upon the consciousness of Kahnawakero:non when resources were threatened and Mohawks became “Indians.” Initially, the extinguishment of the rights of Indian women who married non-Indians was less to protect the power of Indian men than it was to protect reserve land. From the perspective of Kahnawakero:non in 1850, white men outside the reserve had power and inﬂ uence that superceded the power and inﬂ u- ence of a Mohawk outside of his community. Beyond the boundaries of the reserve was white society, and Kahnawakero:non did not want white men to affect distributions of power within the Mohawk society in Kahnawake.

The extinguishment of the rights of Mohawk women, therefore, was less WICAZO REVIEW SA 119 an attempt at discriminating against their own people than an attempt to protect the community from a possible takeover by non-Indian men. After 140 years, the Indian Act was woven into the consciousness

of many Kahnawakero:non.29 Kahnawake enforced the rules of Canada in FALL 2009 respect to the women who married non-Indians because the rules had become their own and perhaps because the power of white men, represented

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 119119 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM through the Seaway debacle, the person of the Indian agent,30 and other media, was still threatening to the internal autonomy and land holdings within the community. These rules served their purposes in resource allo- cation and in “culture.” Therefore, women who married non-Native men were still viewed as relatives, but as relatives who were “polluted”—who had gone outside the conceptual and legal borders of the reserve and, in doing so, had acquired the stigma of betrayal. The stigma was imprinted on them by Kahnawake’s fears of the world outside, the fears of the power white men may carry, and fears of the dissolution of Mohawk culture. “Indian” in the 1850s gained ascendance as a legal category of per- sonhood that was transmitted through the father’s line. However, Mohawk women have traditionally done the “culture work” of the community, trans- mitting values through raising children, teaching children, and advising and directing men in political affairs. How could Mohawk women, who were so important to the Mohawk Nation, appear to have abandoned it through their marriage to outsiders? The combination of these elements presented a recipe for discrimination. Abstracted to the contemporary era, women were then held responsible for their own predicament of disenfranchisement. They were considered unworthy of sympathy and unworthy of membership on the band list. After 1985, these women were reconcep- tualized and reduced in the imagination of Kahnawakero:non to the legislation that restored their enfranchisement to Indian status; they were called “C-31’s,” as were their children. The bill that legislated their return to Indian status has become their categorical identity within the community. What do we make of this genealogy of policy, law, and sensibility and the ways in which they inform and surround contemporary issues around membership? How might we read Eunice through the present or understand her incorporation in relation to contemporary debates around questions of rights, sovereignty, jurisdictional authority, and citizenship itself? A feminist analysis grounded in Indigenous sensibilities will require that we ask questions of temporality, of rights, of the ordinal relationship between the two and the ways in which these “re- veals” tell us something of settlement, not in the past but as it unfolds in the present. How, then, do discursive formations issued from the different sources I have been discussing form historical logics that can tell us something about the present? I have here two contemporary narratives from my ethnographic research that speak from these processes and complicate the legacy of Eunice in different ways.

120 WICAZO REVIEW SA WHITHER EUNICE NOW?

Mohawk Council of Kahnawake Meeting 1998 FALL 2009 My sister and I are at “Candidates Night” for Mohawk Council of Kahnawake elections and we are sitting with my

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 120120 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM Auntie. It is 1998. It is question period for the candidates. I can’t remember what people were asking but what I do remember clearly was the sight of the Duchess as she marched herself up to the mic that was positioned in the middle of the ﬂ oor. “Excuse me,” she said, “but have the rules of these meetings changed?” There was a pause, people looked at each other. “What?” said the Grand Chief 31 and the councillors. “I asked you a question. . . . Have the rules of these meetings changed?!” She was adamant, silence ensued, but then she answered her own question. . . . “. . . because there is a non-Native person here and the last I knew these meetings were for Indians.” Well, people starting looking around. . . . Who is she talking about? I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, but who am I to say? I am not a regular. The Duchess’s Auntie then stood, she was sitting at the other end of the table. She yelled across the Knights of Columbus hall to her niece, “What is the problem here?! She doesn’t bother nobody!? She just wants to come here and sit!! How is she bothering you?!” (Now I am really confused, who is she talking about, what is she talking about? and why is she yelling at her niece? This seems really bad) “She is bothering me because she is not supposed to be here.” Our questions were then answered by the subject of her affection. The woman stood up. She was sitting in the same section as the battling niece and auntie. She waited until the Duchess marched, belly ﬁ rst, back to her seat and she marched up to the mic, She said, “I am so and so and I am married to so and so (she says his Mohawk name really well, it seemed) and my children are so and so. . . .“ “You know, I have been in this community for XXXXX amount of years and I have done a lot for you people. I delivered food during the Oka crisis,

I drove a truck. I was married for XXXXX amount of years, WICAZO REVIEW SA 121 I came here last year, nobody said nothing, I don’t do anything, I don’t ask for anything. . . .“ Who is this woman?

(She is everywhere, it seems) FALL 2009 She is the one . . . who makes us laugh, reminds us of other places. . . . She (and sometimes “he”) is a part of us

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 121121 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM and a part of this community. We all have at least one in our family and well, you know how this goes because you might love one too. And so this one here, this one at the band council meeting, she is familiar to me and she is well- meaning. . . . I am thinking “why can’t we give her a break?” My dreams of interracial harmony come to a grinding halt, though, when she said, “I am more Mohawk than some of you here, you don’t have to treat me like I am black.” The line then, was drawn. And that angel that sits on those lines, and on our shoulders, the angel that helps us to bite our tongues . . . and makes us over as Indian princesses with White in them, the angel that whispers into our ears and makes us sympathetic and kind in moments such as these then opened up her wings and ﬂ ew away.

Everywhere We Go We Are Getting Slapped in the Face

I mean life is hell there! I mean, it is not the best, I’ll be the ﬁ rst to say it, living there, you gotta be damn tough to live there. And in order to survive there you have to be really tough, now some people might have gotten tired by it, and decided “I’m gonna go live off the reserve where I won’t have to deal and face those things on a daily basis, where somebody’s telling me, “leave, you don’t belong here”—facing the discrimination on a daily basis. Which is what we encounter. . . . I mean at every turn we are getting slapped in the face, every single turn, which should be normal things that we should be entitled to for the past 17 years. And the federal government has been “well, sorry.” Now if anybody is going to try to lead to a trust or want us to trust them, they have to jump over a lot of loops to do that now, and hurdles, because there is no more trust. There is no trust in the Councils and there is no trust in the Federal government because both have reneged on their responsibilities. So, now we are sitting back and this is why we are

122 WICAZO REVIEW SA taking the position that we are taking, and this is why we are angry I mean, I lived hell for X years, my whole entire life getting slapped in the face at every turn. I grew up in the city, them telling me go back to where you come

FALL 2009 from, I go to the town,32 they tell me go back to the city you don’t belong here, where the hell do you go? And then when you do decide to make your decision—your

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 122122 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM stance on where you are going, you still get slapped in the face daily. So life is not a bed of roses over there but I choose to live there because it is my right. I didn’t get the land that I am living on by buying it, it was passed down from generation to generation within my family and I am being told I am third generation, I am white, and I have no right. That is what I am being told and yet I inherited that land, I never bought it, it has been passed down from generation to generation.33

What are the constituent elements of these stories? Racial difference, rights, entitlement, un-entitlement within a space of recognition. These differences are governed by a system of value that is three hundred years after the captivation of Eunice, in process, as both the “state” and the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (which some would argue is also “the state”) attempts to bestow or accord rights to different parts of their community. Although clearly one of these protagonists is white, she truly seems to feel that she belongs in the space she occupies. This is certainly a contested moment (and one must think back to Eunice—it could not have been easy for her at fi rst). But she is also upset, one must think, about the ways in which her privileged place within the community is being challenged, about lines that are being drawn. These lines pushed her to move a horizon of difference defi ned perceptions of bodily signifi cation, where (for her?) the limit of toleration and perhaps value is defi ned by blackness (itself a relative construction vis-à-vis indigeneity, vis-à-vis whiteness), which she invokes, it seems, to elevate herself or to denigrate others. Our second interlocutor is concerned with being excluded based on the marriage decisions (or perhaps non-decisions) of people who came before her, about the arbitrariness of law, the misrecogntion inherent in that arbitrariness, and the price she has chosen to pay to make a home for herself in Kahnawake. Whether, she likes it or not, she is a captive, like Eunice, but a captive to the state. Hers is a citizenship of grief. And her subject position, as we can see from the narrative, is a vexed one.34 In the gendered provisions of the Indian Act (1876) in Canada—an Act that was advanced initially to “protect” Indians from settlers—legal identities and access to resources and rights were defi ned and regulated and surveilled by the Canadian state. The Indian Act became an authorizing horizon and, judging from these narratives, may still be a horizon

for differentiation and enunciations of social value and worth. Recall that WICAZO REVIEW SA 123 within the Indian Act were regulations regarding marriage, and, like all marriage laws, marriage gendered a legal claim, but it did so through the conferral of rights along the patrilineal line. I now want to take an ana-

lytical cue from Mark Rifkin’s recent consideration of Zitkala-Sa’s writ- FALL 2009 ings on boarding school education in order to think about the colonial alchemy that is achieved through enforced patriliny in the Canadian case

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 123123 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM that Williams’s life anticipates. In Rifkin’s piece, we see Zitkala-Sa critique Indian education while instantiating and celebrating Yankton Sioux forms of romance and affection. Zitkala-Sa’s critique and celebration orients her reader to the larger techniques of colonial power at play in Yankton Sioux lives. Thus, we see that she was concerned also with compulsory gendering and the privatizing of land, processes that are linked directly to compulsory heterosexuality, a form of gendering that is linked directly to the re-fashioning of Indigenous families along patriarchal, white, and Victorian fantasies and structures of polity.35 By pointing to the legal compulsion to gender in this way, Rifkin urges us to examine the ways in which “kinship, residency, and land tenure like at the unspoken cen- ter of the heteronorm,” a norm that operates as a hegemon, is “already bound up in racializing and imperial projects.”36 This was an imposition enacted through compulsory education of Indians in the states but is found squarely within the Indian Act, which recognized only one form of coupling and raced that coupling in particular ways. As well, the Act demeaned and supplanted all Indigenous modes of descent. In this case, Iroquois modes of descent and property and land holding were especially violated, as these determined and conferred along the mother’s line. The state recognized the union between an Indian man and a white woman as a legitimate one and conferred status to it in accordance with the Indian Act, by the conferral of Indian status upon her. In this way white women were able to become “status” Indians, and in the ﬂ ip side of this conferral, Indian women lost their Indian status upon their marriage to non-status men, through the state’s unilateral conferral of citizenship upon her. Her citizenship within the nation-state of the settler society, however, also carried her disenfranchisement from her Indian community. These forms of political recognition and mis-recognition are forms of “citizenship” that have become social,37 and citizenships that incurred losses, in addition to gains, and thus are citizenships I wish to argue, of grief. In this moment, they share a transhistoric logic and space of recognition and mis-recognition that predicated upon an apparent loss of their membership in a natal community that is differently experienced along race and gender lines. White women do not lose their citizenship in the Canadian state— or access to their home territory upon their out-marriage to Indian men—but Indian women lost their Indian “status”—a deeply colonial and strangulated form of citizenship–membership, or recognition by the colonial state in theirs,—upon their out marriages. The Canadian

124 WICAZO REVIEW SA state made all Indians in its jurisdiction citizens in 1956; however, the marriage of Indian women to non-status men would alienate them from their reserves, their families, and their rights as Indians until the passage of Bill C-31 in 1985.38 Thus, one can argue that these status losses, and citizen-

FALL 2009 ship gains, would always be accompanied by some form of grief. The most pressing argument that was made in this article is that the life of Eunice Williams and the ways it has been treated in literature are a

WWSRSR 224.24.2 105-130105-130 Simpson.inddSimpson.indd 124124 99/15/09/15/09 10:51:2310:51:23 AMAM factor in the logics of political recognition today. Her life is important for feminist analysis grounded in Indigenous sensibilities for the historical logic that it starts to pronounce. This is a logic that recognizes so that it may then neuter. What it will then neuter is Indigenous governmentality. In the Iroquois case, and in the case of all presently recognized status Indians in Canada, this was attempted through the Indian Act, and in the enfranchisement of women located outside of Indigenous genealog- ics as status Indians. For Iroquois people, who are matrilineal people, this is an especially difﬁ cult process, as white women are not, by birth, clan bearers and thus cannot transmit to their children a place in the order of things unless they are adopted. This serves to disassemble the social structure of Iroquois society. Williams was, without a doubt, “accepted” as a Mohawk and lived that acceptance within her adopted clan and family. The circulation of her story, rather, and what it did to those who read it, enunciated the logic of becoming—key ideational work for what would later become possible in Canada, when white women “became” Indian in the eyes of the state through the conferral of status upon them. In that, Indian women became “white women.” Exiled from this speculative history and logical conﬁ guration is the Mohawk woman’s life that brought Eunice (as a Mohawk) into being. Her life, along with that of many others, remains exiled from this story. The terrain I have covered on captivity, on Canadian Indian policy, and on the juxtaposition of these two narratives illustrates, in some very loose ways, the importance of the Williams tale as groundwork, of a sort, for things that were yet to come. It is no coincidence in the contemporary frame of settler society that this story, which is of a white woman success- fully becoming Indian, would enjoy the kind of attention that it receives. Its attention articulates and evidences, in an empirically meaningful way, the desires and designs of a settler society to incorporate and settle in out-of-the-way spaces, places, and families. As scholars who articulate our work to the problematics of power and gender, and as concerned citizens of several nations, we might also continue to use events such as 1704 as an occasion to think critically about the gendered and racialized historical logics that enable or disable certain forms of recognition through time, through place, and through bodies.

NOTES

I am grateful to Kehaulani University of Illinois–Urbana, WICAZO REVIEW SA 125 Kauanui, Andrea Smith, Jennifer Cornell University, and Historic Denetdale, and Mishuana Deerﬁ eld, where the earliest ver- Goeman for their excellent sion of this paper was presented in editorial suggestions, as well commemoration of the 1704 raid. as to audiences at the Native I am grateful to close readings by FALL 2009 American and Indigenous Studies Vera Palmer, Chris Andersen, and Association meetings in Norman, Mark Rifkin, as well as two anon- Oklahoma, Columbia University, ymous reviewers whose questions

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and suggestions greatly improved 5 There is not yet a book-length my argument. Cori Simpson and study of The Indian Act in Canada, Jim Struthers provided me with but for a brief history and com- archival direction. The histories parative analyses see John Milloy, and families that constitute the “The Early Indian Acts: Devel- Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake opmental Strategy and Constitu- inspired and informed this tional Change,” in Sweet Promises: analysis, and it is to their words A Reader on Indian–White Relations in and lives that I am most indebted. Canada, ed. J. R. Miller (Toronto: Any mistakes are my own. University of Toronto Press, 1991), 145–54; and Bonita Lawrence, 1 The Redeemed Captive, Returning to “Gender, Race, and the Regulation Zion: A Faithful History of Remarkable of Native Identity in Canada and Occurrences, in the Captivity and the the United States: An Overview,” Deliverance of Mr. John Williams . . . Hypatia 18 (2003): 3–31. Who . . . Was . . . Carried Away, with His Family, and His Neighbourhood, 6 For an autobiographically unto Canada . . . Boston in infl ected analysis of this issue, see N.E.: B. Green, for Samuel Phillips Lynn Gehl, “The Queen and I: at the brick shop, 1707, 15 (hereafter Discrimination in the ‘Indian Act’ cited in text as TRC). Continues,” Canadian Woman Stud- ies 20 (2000): 64–69; and Joanne 2 This “raid” was infamous for its Barker, “Gender, Sovereignty, perceived brutality and com- Rights: Native Women’s Activ- plexity of purpose, with Mohawk, ism against Social Inequality and Abenaki, and Huron warriors Violence in Canada,”American fi ghting alongside the French, Quarterly 60 (2008): 259–66. all for very different reasons, all acquiring English captives in 7 For an exception to this litera- Massachusetts to take back to ture, see James Brooks, Captives “Canada” for their own political and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and and social purposes. See Evan Community in Southwest Borderlands Haefali and Kevin Sweeney, (Chapel Hill and Omohundro In- Captors and Captives: The 1704 stitute of Early American History French Raid on Deerfi eld (Amherst: and Culture: University of North University of Massachusetts Carolina Press, 2002). For a Press, 2003). For general context robust historicization and critique on the northeastern landscape of of that analysis, see Ned Black- war and exchange, see Linda hawk, “Review of ‘Captives and Colley, Captives (New York: Cousins,’ ”American Indian Culture Pantheon Books 2002), 137–98. Research Journal 28 (2004): 85–90.

3 Haefali and Sweeney offer the 8 Turner-Strong, Captive Selves, 4. most detailed discussion of Williams’s Mohawk mother in 9 For an analysis of the ethno- Captors and Captives. The loss of her graphic valuation of two daughter rendered her “so much eighteenth-century captivity nar- borne down with [her grief] that ratives, see Yael Ben-zvi, “National

126 WICAZO REVIEW SA some of her relations predicted Appropriations and Cultural Evo- that she would not survive long,” lution: The Spatial and Temporal 72–73. US of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Na- tive America,” Canadian Review of 4 Pauline Turner-Strong, Captive American Studies 33 (2008): 211–29. Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics FALL 2009 and Poetics of Colonial American 10 Frances Roe Kestler, ed., The Indian Captivity Narratives (Boulder, Captivity Narrative: A Woman’s View Colo.: Westview Press), 119. (New York: Garland, 1990), xiii.

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11 See Rayna Green, “The Pocahon- 16 Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions tas Perplex: Images of American and Colonialism in North America Indian Women in American (Montreal & Kingston: McGill Culture,” Massachusetts Review 16 University Press, 2000). (1975): 698–714. And, more gen- erally, see Phil Deloria, Playing 17 Settler Colonialism and the Transfor- Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale mation of Anthropology: The Politics University Press, 1998). and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 12 The most exhaustive treatment of 1999): 2–3. her life and the effort to have her “redeemed” to her natal family 18 Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 14. is John Demos, The Unredeemed 19 The French had more success in Captive: A Family History in Early securing captives than the Indians America (New York: Alfred A. did; consult appendixes F and G Knopf, 1994). Augmenting this for tallies. Haefali and Sweeney, is Haefali and Sweeney’s Captors Captors and Captives, 211. and Captives and Turner-Strong’s discussion of her life and analysis 20 See Sarah Carter for a treatment of her father’s narrative in Captive of this from the Canadian Prairies Selves, 135–43. See also Marius in Capturing Women: The Manipula- Barbeau, “Indian Captivities,” tion of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Proceedings of the American Philosophical Prairie West (Montreal & London: Society 9 (1950): 522–48. McGill Queen’s University Press, 1999). 13 This clearly concerned John Williams, who later on in the 21 Demos’s The Unredeemed Captive is text relays his horror at hearing occupied with the struggle to get that his captivated son Samuel her back. had converted to Catholicism, a horror that required that pages 22 For a detailed examination of within his narrative be expended this, see Audra Simpson, “To the on arguments and invocations in Reserve and Back Again: Kahn- favor of their faith. These argu- awake Narratives of Self, Home, ments were embedded in his text and Nation” (Ph.D. diss., McGill as reprinted letters to his con- University, 2003): 103–42. verted son. TRC, 59–75. 23 For an excellent analysis of the 14 Turner-Strong, Captive Selves, 1–2. assumption of Indigenous, and speciﬁ cally Iroquois, territory 15 For a departure from this mode, through ethnology and through Srikanth reads the captivity mapping, see Yael Ben-zvi, narratives of white women as a “National Appropriations.” critique of patriarchal conﬁ gurations through the empower- 24 For a discussion of “outbreak” as a ment that self-representation governing fear in the determina- conferred to these women. See tion of settler behavior and policy Rajini Srikanth, “Ventriloquism toward Indigenous peoples in

in the Captivity Narrative: North America, see Philip WICAZO REVIEW SA 127 White Women Challenge Euro- Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places pean Patriarchy” in White Women (Norman: University Press of in Racialized Spaces: Imaginative Kansas, 2004). Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature, ed. Samina Najmi and 25 Royal Commission on Aboriginal FALL 2009 Rajini Srikanth (Albany: State Peoples, An Act for the Better Protec- University of New York Press, tion of the Lands and Property of the 2002): 85–103. Indians in Lower Canada, Statutes of

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the Province of Canada 1850, in Kahnawake” (master’s thesis, chapter 42; and An Act for the Trent University, 2008). For a Protection of the Indians in Upper book-length study, see Robin Canada from Imposition, and the Prop- Jarvis Brownlie, A Fatherly Eye: erty Occupied or Enjoyed by Them Indian Agents, Governmental Power, from Trespass and Injury, Statutes of the and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario Province of Canada 1850, chapter 74. 1918–1939 (Toronto: Oxford These were proto Indian Acts that University Press, 2003). were then consolidated in 1876 as the Indian Act. RCAP Final 31 “Grand Chief” is not to be con- Report: The Indian Act fused with the traditional, Long- Chapter 9 (pdf. version, cf. house government of the Iroquois, note 30). www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ which is a system of hereditary ap/pubs/sg/sg-eng.asp (accessed chiefs and clan mothers. This January 24, 2009). ethnographic scene takes place within the space of the elected 26 “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indi- “band council” government. The geneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial elected councilors are referred Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (2007): 73. to ofﬁ cially as “Grand Chief and “Chiefs” and/or “Councillors.” 27 For a discussion of similar gen- See www.kahnawake.com/council/ dered concerns at Six Nations, (accessed January 27, 2009). see Deborah Doxtator, “What Happened to the Iroquois Clans? 32 People in Kahnawake refer to the A Study of Clans in Three Nine- reserve community as “town.” teenth Century Rotinonhsyonni Communities” (Ph.D. diss., 33 These narratives are from University of Western Ontario, Simpson’s “To the Reserve and 1996), 191–94; and for a similar Back Again,” 167–69, 233–34. examination of land holding and Both have been edited for length. membership issues at Kahnawake 34 See Tracey Deer’s documentary see Gerald Reid, Kahnawà:ke: ﬁ l m Club Native. DVD. (National Factionalism, Traditionalism, and Film Board of Canada, 2008) for a Nationalism in a Mohawk Community contemporary examination of this (Lincoln: University of Nebraska issue from multiple perspectives Press, 2004), 25–49. within the community. 28 Kahnawake’s original 1680 land 35 Mark Rifkin, “Romancing Kin- grant was over 40,000 acres. By ship: A Queer Reading of Indian 1890 that land grant had been Education and Zitkala-Sa’s reduced to 12,328 acres, less than American Indian Stories,” GLQ: A one-third of its original size; see Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 12 Reid, Kahnawà:ke, 21–22. (2006): 27–59. 29 For an analysis of similar pro- 36 Ibid., 28. cesses at Navajo, see Jennifer Denetdale, “Chairmen, Presi- 37 See Audra Simpson, “Paths dents, and Princesses: The Navajo toward a Mohawk Nation:

128 WICAZO REVIEW SA Nation, Gender, and the Politics Narratives of Nationhood and of Tradition,” Wicazo Sa Review 21 Citizenship in Kahnawake,” in (Spring 2006): 9–28. Political Theory and the Rights of In- digenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivison, 30 For a detailed examination of Paul Patton, and Will Sanders the power of the Indian agent in

FALL 2009 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- Kahnawake, see Cori Simpson, sity Press, 2000), 113–36; and “To “In the Eyes of the State: Indian the Reserve and Back Again” for Agents, Agency, and Resistance ethnographic analyses of the ways

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in which membership issues and Canada for more than ten years, the Indian Act are deconstructed and such person is deemed, for and lived within Kahnawake. the purposes of Section 19, to have become a Canadian citizen 38 Of the 1947 Canadian Citizen- on the fi rst day of January, 1947. ship Act (CCA): “Section 9 if the The 1947 Act was amended in said Act is amended by adding 1956 to harmonize it with the the following subsection: “(4) An excluding provisions of the In- Indian as defi ned in the Indian dian Act, which “ . . . contained Act, or a person of the race of a defi nition section that defi ned aborigines commonly referred a ‘person’ as ‘an individual other to as Eskimos, other than a than an Indian.’” Richard Bartlett, natural-born Canadian citizen, is “Citizens Minus: Indians and a Canadian citizen if that person the Right to Vote,” Saskakasawan (a) had a place of domicile in Law Review 44 (1980): 190; the Canada on the 1st day of Janu- CCA at http://66.29.197.250/ ary, 1947, and (b) on the 1st day documents/1956-06-07_Act.pdf of January, 1956, had resided in (accessed January 26, 2009).

WICAZO REVIEW SA 129 FALL 2009

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