North Country Captives
Colin Calloway has contributed so much to the understanding of the Abenaki people and one of the best examples is North Country Captives, his collection of Selected Narratives of Indian Captivity from Vermont and New Hampshire. He has put a spotlight on the clash of multiple cultures from different continents during one critical but nearly-forgotten part of our history. He has collected not one story, but eight stories as told by the people involved. This last part is the most important and the most informative. Calloway further organized them in chronological order which is also telling, as we see the progression through the French and Indian Wars moving through the eventual start of the American Revolution. The first stories are about abductions by the Abenaki, aligned with the French, and the last two by the Caughnawaga (Mohawk), allied with the British.

Indian raids had been conducted since at least fifty years previous to the first story, when my two relatives (that I know of) were involved in raids. One of them, Mary Neff, survived, but Daniel Hudson did not. It is important to understand the back story, that the Native Americans were manipulated by both colonial forces, the French and the British, to fight their battles for them, bribing them and rewarding them for driving the interlopers off their claimed territories, requesting scalps as proof when they doubted the numbers allegedly killed. The Natives were on board with this fight as the new settlers had already proved their savagery during the previous century, driven them off or tricked them out of their ancestral lands, and taken them as slaves before enough African imports were available. Third party storytellers used some facts and some embellishments to justify their actions across the new continent for the next 300 years. Cotton Mather, firebrand preacher, was only one who framed the struggle for the land as a battle between good and evil, between God and the devil(s), finding new and creative epithets to drive home his point and incite retaliation. The Natives already had a tradition of adopting captives when one of their own had been killed. This was viewed as a horrific thing to the colonials who could see nothing of value in the native culture, but Native American grief at having to give up their adoptees after negotiation and the reluctance of many captives to rejoin their “white” families gives us an indication of some different realities. This relinquishment of adoptees is sometimes played out in our courts today, usually without the racial overtones.

But back to the book. Calloway starts each narrative with a short summary of events and background and allows the narrator to tell his or her own story in their own words. I found them all to be compelling with several facts being obvious: The captors did their best to care for their prizes, perhaps because they were kind, as is mentioned in some of the narratives, but also because they might be used in prisoner exchanges between the French and English. One captive was taken from New England to Canada, to England and back to New England again. The victims who were killed on the spot seemed to be those who offered the most resistance or who might slow them down or cause them to be discovered by pursuing family members: the men, the sick, the elderly or infants, as captives were reminded that they would be killed if they made any noise to alert those who sought to rescue them. One woman even gave birth in the first few days of the retreat northward and the child survived to adulthood. The captives were given more food and the best food although they deemed the Indian food disgusting. We don’t have written records as to what the Indians thought of colonial settlers’ food. What is most striking in the book is the much worse treatment captives usually received when they were turned over to the European governors and confined in their jails, awaiting prisoner exchange or ransom. It is important to remind ourselves that food, warmth and sanitation were luxuries that were usually not provided in prisons at that time, even to “their own kind”. Days were consumed with finding enough food, creature comfort of any sort, and finding ways to escape. If their journal entries are boring, it is because their lives were not exciting, as many who have been incarcerated or quarantined can affirm. A notation of the weather was not just an entry; it was a declaration that you were still alive and still fighting for survival. One man tells of his plot to escape, as intriguing as any World War II narrative. Unsung heroes in these stories are Nehemiah How, Phineas Stevens and Colonel Pieter Schuyler.

The story ends with mixed results for the captives, some of whom went on to live long lives and others who had less happy endings. It is a somewhat sad ending for the Abenaki, though. I have been to The Village and to Trois Rivieres in Canada where captives were taken. The Abenaki have not been recognized as a sovereign nation by the US government due in part to their being more nomadic in nature than the Iroquois and unable to point to a single location in the US as their ancestral land. Their alliance with the French went against them too, since they had never forgotten their friendship with and loyalty to Samuel De Champlain 150 years before these narratives. Coming back from the brink of cultural extinction, they are now renewing their language and traditions and are now recognized as one of the First Nations (Premieres Nations) in Canada. If you have an interest in reading modern stories of personal tragedy and triumph from the people who survived (“In my own words…”, “My story…” etc), especially if you are able to put yourself into that long-ago time and foreign context, this is both spellbinding and enlightening. As for my own family, the aftermath of the American Revolution brought like-minded people from every background together and today I am proud to claim English, French and Abenaki ancestry as many of my North Country neighbors do. ( )

Remember the old days when sometimes if you really wanted just one awesome song, you had to buy an entire album by the band in question? And you always thought, "Well, if I like this song by them, maybe some of the other ones are good, too?" And the album always, ALWAYS turned out to consist of that one really good song, one song that turned out to be pretty good, and ten tracks of boringness?

(Someone please explain to my younger readers what an "album" is. Thank you.)

Okay, this book wasn't exactly like that. But I did only buy it for the captivity narrative of Susanna Johnson. Years ago I read the YA novel Calico Captive, and the author included a little afterword about how she based her book on a true story of a woman and her family being captured by Indians. So I looked and looked and finally found a collection of such captivity narratives that included the one I wanted.

And it turns out that her story was really interesting, and one other story in the collection was pretty interesting, and the rest of them were okay but frankly kind of hard to read. Especially the one that was a diary, and some of the entries were just one or two sentences, and some of them were really boring things like, "The Sabbath day. It rained at night," and some of them shouldn't have been boring given what they were describing but still were, like, "Had the news of the Indians killing and taking four of our people." And I'm all, "Dude, I know you're a pioneer and all, but couldn't you show a little more emotion than that, considering what just happened?"

So I wouldn't recommend this to the general reading audience. I'll be reviewing Calico Captive soon, and will try to give more details as to just how closely the author stuck to the truth.
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