Jean M. O’Brien has written another important volume in the history of American Indians of southern New England, a field she has published in extensively for the past fifteen years. In her first monograph, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Oxford, 1997), she argued that Indians did not disappear from colonial Natick, Massachusetts, as the English extended their dominion; rather, the Indians creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. In the late eighteenth century, Natick Indians experienced a process of “dispossession by degrees” that rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order and enabled the construction of the myth of Indian extinction. In her recent book, she mines deeper into the same vein but focuses instead on nineteenth-century histories, commemorations, historical speeches, Fourth of July orations, and other such productions that worked together to create narratives of Indian extinction. This sophisticated, lucid, and insightful piece is a nuanced addition to the scholarships of both the Indians in southern New England and the construction of discourses of exclusion. O’Brien organizes the book around four categories—“firsting,” “replacing,” “lasting,” and “resisting”—that heuristically help her articulate a complex of issues that went into the creation of this extinction narrative. She defines “firsting” as the claim within white-produced histories and speeches “that non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of social order worthy of notice” (p. xii). By articulating such a vision of development in New England, local historians who privileged English society, culture, and lifeways as the apogee of modernity implicitly defined Indian society as mere preface to civilization. In an absorbing chapter on “replacing,” O’Brien analyzes a dynamic she calls the New England “replacement narrative,” one in which monuments, historical commemorations, amateur archaeological and etymological interests, and the belief of white New Englanders that they acquired Indian lands legally and benignly all emphasized their just replacement of Indians on the landscape. If Indians themselves were memorialized (such as King Philip or Miantonomi), it only reinforced this narrative of extinction. O’Brien also uses the categories of “lasting” and “resisting” to great effect. “Lasting” has a series of meanings. At times it refers to what O’Brien calls the “last of the [blank] narratives,” in which issues that revolved around race, blood, and culture were delineated or sometimes woven together to emphasize the passing of a timeless Indian living outside of history, a kind of dead-man-walking whose fate was pre-ordained. Often these narratives emphasized the nobility of such a destiny, while they also could emphasize the necessity of eradicating a savage presence. But the outcome was never in doubt. At other times, “lasting” refers to the Indians
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