Native American Reading List

Dr. Paul Robinson’s recent lecture on Native American sites now under investigation in Rhode Island drew a crowd of over 100 people. For those who would like to read further on the topic, Dr. Robinson strongly recommends the following two books:

Pocohontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat, by Paula Gunn Allen, Harper Collins, NY, 2004.

Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, by Melissa Fawcett, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2000.

Additional books and articles are listed on the RI Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission’s website, here.

For a bibliography in list form, contact our librarians: reference [at] RIHS [dot] org

Native Villages of Rhode Island

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.*

RIHS invites Dr. Paul Robinson, Principal State Archaeologist at the RI Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, to report on Native American sites now under investigation in Narragansett and Cumberland. Dr. Robinson will interpret findings from recent research on village settlements from the pre-contact period, and discuss what it tells us about relations between local Indian people and colonial settlers in the years before King Philip’s War (1675-1676).

This talk follows a December lecture by visiting scholar Christine M. DeLucia, on the aftermath of King Philip’s War, which stimulated a lively discussion and elicited some unanswered questions about local sites under investigation today.

With the hope of learning more, we have turned to local expert Dr. Paul Robinson, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College and author of several authoritative papers on Native relations in Rhode Island, including “A Narragansett History form 1000 B.P. to the Present,” “The Wampum Trade in 17th-century Narragansett Country,” and “The Struggle Within: The Indian Debate in Seventeenth-century Narragansett Country.”

Join us for “An Archaeology: Village Life in the Narragansett Country up to 1680″, Wednesday, May 18, 2011, 6:30 pm, at the Rhode Island Historical Society, 110 Benevolent Street. The program is free and open to the public. For more information, or to R.S.V.P., contact Natasha: (401) 273-8107 x12 or libprograms@rihs.org

*The plate, an engraving by Theodor Debry based on a watercolor by John White, is from “The Tovvne of Secota,” from Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, Frankfurt, 1590. Secota was a Native village similar to a Rhode Island village Dr. Robinson will discuss.

Memory Frontier

Christine DeLucia, a NERFC scholar who carried out research at the RIHS Library last fall, has recently been given the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best essay on an American history topic by a graduate student. The essay, “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast after King Philip’s War (1675-78),” is scheduled to be published in the Journal of American History in spring 2012.

According to Christine, the essay is closely connected to the talk she gave at RIHS in December and it draws considerably on the RIHS collections for its discussion of “the Narragansett Country.” RIHS materials used by Christine in her research include materials on the 1975 Narragansett Indian tribe suit filed suit in federal district court to regain lands in southern RI which they claimed were illegally taken from them in 1880 in the Paul Campbell Research Notes,  Abigail’s Sprague’s History of Cumberland, the Great Swamp Oration in the Rowland G. Hazard II and Mary P. (Bushnell) Hazard Papers and a copy of a manuscript by James N. Arnold titled, “The Honor of a State; or the Faithless Guardian, a Story of Monstrous Wrong,” a narrative account of efforts of developers to swindle land from the Narragansett nation from 1879-1896 in the James N. Arnold Papers (MSS 9001-A.)