Book Reviews 511

From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 16001830. By William A. Starna. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013, 320 pages, $60.00 Cloth.

Reviewed by David Hoogland Noon, University of Alaska Southeast

Sometime in 1980 or 1981, I wrote an assignment for my fifth-grade class about the Stockbridge Indians of western Massachusetts dur-ing the late colonial and Revolutionary War era. My father, who grew up in Stockbridge, had composed a similar project when he was in high school, and I quite likely borrowed most of my material from the work he had done more than two decades earlier. After reading From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 16001830a book that

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tells, among other things, the story of how the Mahican came to gather in StockbridgeI wish that I could find those old reports and subject them to William Starnas historiographical scrutiny. I would certainly have lots of company. As much as anything, From Homeland to New Land is a fascinat-ing and highly detailedand I would imagine for some readers, somewhat frustratingaccount of the gap between what historians believe they know about the Mahican people and what the documentary record supports.

The book provides a depressingly familiar narrative about the corrosive effects of disease, land loss, resource depletion, and missionary interference on the ability of small, decentralized native communities to control their own future. Starna chronicles the efforts of the Mahican to pursue their interests in a region where relationships with other native peoples (espe-cially the Mohawk) as well as Dutch and English newcomers presented an almost endless sequence of complications, leading eventually to relocation and removal to western Massachusetts and then, later on, to Wisconsin. He offers a thorough description of the natural and human worlds that would have shaped Mahican existence from the pre-contact period through the early nineteenth century, and he surveys the economic and politi-cal changes that followed in the wake of European encroachment and American independence. Drawing on a vast body of sources from Dutch, English, and American records as well as more recent archaeological work, From Homeland to New Land greatly improves our understanding of the Mahican history.

Yet Starnas exhaustive command of the geographic, archaeological, and historical evidence enables him not only to relate as much as can be told about the Mahican, but it also allows him to systematically dismantle the suppositions, contradictory assertions, and baseless speculations that have somehow passed through the scholarly record from one generation to the next. The chapters on Mahican Places, Native Neighbors, The Ethnographic Past, or The Mahican Homeland consistently frustrate a readers nave wish for clear statements about the size of Mahican commu-nities, the geographical reach of their settlements, the particular features of their cultural experience (including religion and kinship practices), and the nature of their relationships with surrounding native communities. Starna helpfully identifies the shadows and absences in the literature of contact; he demonstrates that the most frequently-cited contemporary works on the

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Mahican past contain largely unsupported, if not invented, constructions based on inappropriate comparisons with other Algonquian and Iroquoian societies; and he carefully picks apart one source after another in order to sift out what we can know of the Mahican with any degree of confi-dence(61). Even as Mahican history sharpens somewhat with their resettle-ment in Stockbridge, Starna reminds us that Native life . . . is not easily reconstructed there because there was little ethnological interest in people that whites regarded as objects of a civilizing mission(186).

Readers of New York History will appreciate the care with which Starna reviews the literature on Mahican history and raises probing questions about the presumptions that have shaped the scholarly consensus. As Starna acknowledges at the outset, one of his aims with this project was to follow Francis Jennings advice to open the field rather than to close it. From Homeland to New Land fulfills that mission admirably.