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Hilary E. Wyss, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 495–496, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486249
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David J. Silverman has written a compelling and original history of the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard using extensive archival research, personal interviews with contemporary Wampanoag residents of Martha's Vineyard, and a firm grasp of the secondary scholarship available on the Algonquian peoples of New England. Silverman is most astute in his choice of the Wampanoags of Martha's Vineyard as a research subject. Until now their history has only received sporadic attention despite the existence of a rich archive and extensive documentation of Indian lifeways, most specifically through Experience Mayhew's 1727 text, Indian Converts, which documents the lives of Christianized Natives on Martha's Vineyard through the early eighteenth century. Silverman uses his sources expertly, reconstructing individual lives and experiences to paint a far more complex picture of Indian life on the island than has hitherto been available.
In some of the strongest chapters of what is a generally excellent book, Silverman complicates notions of the role of Christianity in Wampanoag culture (chapters 1 and 2), analyzes the changing, and at times paradoxical, role of the sachemship in the eighteenth century (chapter 4), and explores the cultural implications of indentured servitude (chapter 6). In the process, we are drawn into the lives of Epenow, seventeenth-century captive of an English trading ship, and Wuttununohkomkooh, a Native woman despairing of ever having a child to live to maturity, and even of Tobit Potter, the eighteenth-century son of an indentured woman and eventually an indentured servant himself, who at thirteen returns to his Wampanoag community only to die in isolation, having lost any understanding of the Wampanoag language. We learn of the complex series of maneuvers of community leaders such as Zachariah Howwoswee and his father, Zachariah Hossuet, to keep their land, and we see the shady dealings of figures such as Keteanummins, Elisha Amos, and eventually even Howwoswee. The result is a powerful amalgamation of narrative history and social history that makes for compelling reading.
