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

ometime in 1980 or 1981, I wrote an assignment for my fifth-grade

class about the Stockbridge Indians of western Massachusetts during 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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NEW YORK HISTORY

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 fascinating 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 (especially 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 political 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 communities, 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 confidence(61). Even as Mahican history sharpens somewhat with their resettlement 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.