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This chapter deals with the Native subjects and political situations William Bradford and Edward Winslow encountered. Prominent among the Native persons and groups the two describe are the Nemaskets, Corbitant, Wituwamat, the Tarentins or Micmacs, Uncas, Sassacus, the Narragansetts, the Pequots, and the Pequot massacre. The chapter furthermore delineates the actions of John Winthrop, William Brewster, John Oldham, and John Stone and events leading up to King Philip's War. Included also are comments concerning the Native words Bradford chose to set legal land descriptions and official boundaries. The author describes how that usage decision impacted subsequent American letters.

Chapter 2 explores the ways the early-nineteenth-century ascendance of (white) marital privacy as a metonym for national identity was contested by non-natives. Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) utilizes figures of captivity (both by and of Indians) to illustrate native traditions of generosity and community. Set in the early seventeenth century, it juxtaposes the supposedly expansive forms of kin-making among the Pequots with the authoritarianism of the patriarchal family. English colonists are depicted as learning from native models of kinship, which are less privatizing and couple-centered. In this way, a possibility for settler-native union is posited that rejects the contemporaneous discourses of blood difference addressed in the previous chapter. However, the novel’s idea of a native pedagogy that can reformulate non-native publics ignores the ways that native kinship networks are less a form of interracial bonding than a mode of geopolitical boundary-making and diplomacy. The chapter demonstrates this dynamic through a reading of Hendrick Aupaumut’s “Short Narration of My Last Journey to the Western Country” (1792), which provides a mapping of ongoing native diplomatic networks structured around kinship whose ordering principles cannot be encompassed in the logic of U.S. Indian policy.

This chapter discusses Robert Child's confrontation with Massachusetts, which ultimately led to his leaving New England, and Uncas's resistance to John Winthrop, Jr.'s protection of the Pequots, which limited and ultimately forced a redefinition of Winthrop's original conception for the alchemical plantation. The difficulties these crises posed undermined much of the original vision with which Winthrop had started his project. Establishing the riverine plantation, Winthrop came to realize, would take decades, not days. The black lead mine, too, would take years to adequately test. To be sure, Child, who had retested the mine's ore samples and this time found silver content, remained enthusiastic about its potential, even while under house arrest in Boston, and he remained so once back in England.