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Lisa Brooks, Tom Arne Midtrød. The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1512–1513, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1512a
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In the preface to his book, Tom Arne Midtrød argues “that much insight might be gained from examining how Indians interacted with other Indians, not just with Europeans, which has tended to be the focus of most research on Indians in the colonial period.” Midtrød's statement begs the question, how do we foster a history of colonial America that centers the interactions among Native peoples?
One of the first books that answered that question was Colin Calloway's The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (1990). There was urgency and rigor in Calloway's approach, and a palpable sense of deliberateness and deliberation. In addition to Calloway's contributions, one thinks of Jean O'Brien's Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (1997), David Silverman's research on the Aquinnah in Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among Wampanoag Indians in Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871 (2005), and Ned Blackhawk's exploration of violence in the Great Basin, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006). All have given us models that enable one to see the complexity of the question. Their efforts have been so successful in part because of their engagement with the broad field of Native American history.
