Raid and Remembrance

There are two mistakes we can make about life in North America in the first century of English colonization. The first is the common one which many, if not most, of us grew up with, that the English settlers of the Atlantic seaboard at first lived happy and fraternal lives with the tribes of that coastline until something led to the outbreak of conflict, after which the tribes lost, lost, and lost, and then conveniently melted away. The second mistake is to rush to the other end of the spectrum and paint an idyllic portrait of precolonial life that is only disrupted by the intrusion of arrogant and aggressive Europeans, with the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay taking the prize as the most arrogant and aggressive. As in most movements of interpretation and then reinterpretation, the truth usually lies somewhere between the spectrum’s ends, and even then is generally more of a zig-zag than a fixed point. The long history of the human species itself is a story of incessant movement, displacement, assimilation, absorption, intermingling and—not the least—genocidal conquest, in which the number of saints is perilously small and the percentage of sinners depressingly great. Taken together, it gives historians little reason to be optimists, much less partisans.