Colonial Intimacies

Native American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English Christians in colonial Massachusetts. The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice is treated with subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously neglected history. Plane's careful reading of fragmentary sources yields both conclusive and fittingly speculative findings, and her interpretations form an intimate picture, moving and often tragic, of the familial bonds of Native Americans in the first century and a half of European contact. Book jacket.

Ann Marie Plane is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara.