Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Jean M. O' Brien. Series: Indigenous Americas. Copyright Edition: NED - New edition.
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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. In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M.
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Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. She is the author of Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, — This book is a vivid example of what it means to do history that is immediately relevant to the present.
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As a white person descended from settlers from New England, I recognized the narratives in this story immediately: This means that these histories, rather than being isolated events that pertain at most to the New England context, are actively working to be narratives defining the American nation. Others in this field have done important work defining how conceptions of nation and state are dependent on land and Indigeneity: Jodi Byrd, for example, in Transits of Empire tracks the ways that notions of indigeneity are employed in the expansion of empire and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in The White Possessive, argues for the way that logics of possession are central to the ways that white first world states operate and practice their work.
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Most immediately, if you live in a settler-colonial nation like the United States or Canada, Firsting and Lasting will change the way that you look at your country and city. When it comes down to it, this is an excellent book, and it should be widely read, for its relevance to history and to many other interdisciplinary fields.
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O'Brien's analysis brilliantly demonstrates the way colonists--and the generations who followed them--used language to rhetorically place Native Americans continually on the cusp of extinction. To claim that O'Brien is not "objective" enough is to miss the now-mundane point that the writing of history is never "neutral," and that claims of neutrality are often used to serve those who have power. There is, I believe, a cliche about this: If I were to choose a single book to powerfully illustrate that truism, it very well might be O'Brien's.
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English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. Having analyzed over four hundred local texts that elaborate histories of town founding and the acts by which revered English ancestors "introduced the arts of civilization"—as one nineteenth-century Anglo historian put it 17 —that transformed the "savage" environs of northeastern North America, O'Brien guides us through a carefully contextualized reading of New England narratives of "firsting," as she identifies them, which performed the "political and cultural work" of appropriating "the category 'indigenous' away from Indians" 6.
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Contemporary New Englanders inculcated with the notion that there are no longer "real Indians" indigenous to the region would do well to read O'Brien's book, which deftly tracks the nineteenth-century genealogy of this myth and the racial discourse with which it is infused, documenting along the way the "strategic blindness" to borrow Robert Young's phrasing of local chroniclers who asserted the demise of the Native peoples in their midst. In its broadest significance, Firsting and Lasting is about history and power.
It investigates the ways they are imbricated in the local, quotidian narrative practices that enshrined versions of the past in which Europeans are cast as the sole history makers and producers of culture in New England. Ruminations on Indianness are absolutely essential to such nineteenth-century constructions of history commemorations are key among them; see chapter 2.
Throughout the book, readers encounter numerous examples of what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo called "imperialist nostalgia": This sentiment, and the assertion that European supposedly "superior" cultural and economic [End Page 94] institutions are the very instantiation of history, are neatly encapsulated in this passage from an History of the Town of Manchester, Massachusetts:.
The history of America begins with the advent of Europeans in the New World. The Red Men in small and scattered bands roamed the stately forests and interminable prairies, hunted the bison and the deer, fished the lakes and streams, gathered around the council-fire and danced the war-dance; but they planted no states, founded no commerce, cultivated no arts, built up no civilizations. They made no history.