Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England

Abstract

Ann Marie Plane takes an original approach to the subject of EnglishIndian relations in colonial America by focusing on marriage. Plane arg ues that Eng lish settlers in New Eng land considered marriage (the pairing of men and women sanctioned by law and religion) central to an orderly household, society, and polity. They recognized that American Indian family and gender practices were different from their own, but over t he course of the next 150 years they developed two ways of dealing with this cultural variability. As rapidly expanding English settlements in New England incorporated and subordinated the dwindling Indian population, missionaries expected Christian converts to embrace Englishstyle marriages. English settlers also developed a double standard toward Indians by anticipating and forgiving them their unEnglish behavior. Though increasingly likely to become embroiled in the bureaucracy of English courts haggling over indentures and land disputes, Indians were not expected by those same courts to marry legally or to share in the English dread of polygamy, bastardy, and other marital taboos. Thus, Plane reinterprets colonial New England's history by concluding that the English cultivated the idea of Indians as culturally different to keep Indians on the margins of English civil society, initially as outsiders to English society and later as an underclass within English society.