UBC: The Unredeemed Captive

[truepenny]

Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

---

I'm in the middle of Christopher Browning's monumental Origins of the Final Solution (where by "middle" I mean I'm on page 133 and I'm less than a quarter of the way through the book), and I suddenly couldn't take the Nazis for one more second.

I picked up this book for two reasons.

1. John (Putnam) Demos, as the author of Entertaining Satan, has a great abundance of author points with me. I believe I actually said, "Ooh, John Demos!" when I found this book in the used bookstore.

2. I'm interested, partly sui generis and partly because of this crazy American fantasy that seems to think I'm going to write it, in the phenomenon of Indian captivity.

One of the things The Unredeemed Captive cemented for me is that my interest is in the phenomenon of Indian captivity, not the captivity narratives themselves. As conditions of their production, these narratives are written by Puritans who have rejected the alien culture (it's clear in The Unredeemed Captive just how alien the culture of the Kahnawake Indians¹ was to the early eighteenth century Puritans they captured, and that, at least, I suspect generalizes across the experiences of Puritans taken captive by other tribes) they have been exposed to and as such, they are invested in demonizing Indians and extolling the virtues of Puritans and Puritan culture. Captivity narratives, in other words, are all about reinscribing the boundaries between cultures and reinscribing the hierarchical and moral judgments the Puritans made about cultures other than their own, and I find this project deeply, deeply unsympathetic. (Yes, this is my own twenty-first century hierarchical and moral judgment about a culture other than my own. But honestly. The Puritans just infuriate me and nowhere more so than in their conviction of their own rightness. Puritanism is a strange mixture of self-righteousness and self-condemnation, and both of these characteristics make it particularly blind to the possibility of other cultures having anything valuable to offer.)

This book is also, I think, an experiment, born out of John Demos's desire to rehabilitate narrative history. As he says in the first line of the book, "Most of all, I wanted to tell a story." By which he does not mean he wants to write a novel. He wants to tell a story--in this case, the story of Eunice Williams, later named Marguerite, A'ongote, and Gannenstenhawi, who was captured by the Kahnawake Indians at the age of seven and who chose to remain with them all her life, despite the quite extraordinary efforts of her family, birth culture, and even the government of Massachusetts to "redeem" her. (The title of the book is a play on The Captive Redeemed, her father John Williams' account of his own captivity.)

In fact, the story Demos tells is the story of the failure to "redeem" her, as his principal primary sources are the writings of her father and of her brother Stephen. He does his best to reconstruct the other side, but as a historian rather than a novelist, he is constrained by the circumstances of evidentiary survival. Not surprisingly, the two Puritan men (both ministers and therefore of high status in their society) both wrote more and had more of their writing preserved than either Puritan women or Indians of either sex. Only one document ascribed to Eunice² remains, a letter to her brother, and since she could neither read, write, nor speak English as an adult, it is an intensely mediated document--and the fact that it is banal and personally unrevealing is really not surprising. Eunice Williams remains an absence at the center of the narrative.

There are several things I wish Demos had done more explicitly. One is to address the issue of the historical record, what it means that we have one letter from Eunice and four thousand pages of typescript of her brother Stephen's diary. Another is to talk at greater length and with great explicitness about the differences between Puritan and Kahnawake culture. (He points out, for instance, that while male captives would generally go to any lengths to return to New England, female captives were overwhelmingly likely to stay and become Kahnawake, and to stay despite the fervent appeals of their (male) kinfolk. And he addresses the surface issues of why that might be so. But he doesn't dig into it the way I wish he would have.) And the third is to stop and explicitly deconstruct the idea of "captivity." Because it's quite clear from what he writes that "captivity" is the wrong word. Eunice/Gannenstehawi refused to leave. She is adopted by the Kahnawake, converts to Catholicism, marries a Kahnawake man, lives and dies in Kahnawake, despite visits to Massachusetts and entreaties, blandishments, and actual bribes to remain. The fact that her (male) relatives and the rest of her birth culture persisted in framing and describing the experience as "captivity" is in itself a matter that cries out for careful exegesis.

In other words, I suppose, while I appreciate Demos' desire and efforts to tell a story, I would have liked those efforts to be balanced by equal efforts to unpack and unpick the terms of the story he wants to tell.

---
¹Kahnawake was a settlement of converted Catholic Indians near to Montréal. They were mostly Iroquois, and their culture reflected a hybridization of Iroquois tradition and French influence.

²It's difficult to know how to refer to her. Demos calls her "Eunice" throughout, as her family did. Presumably, as an adult, she used either Marguerite (her French Catholic baptismal name) or Gannenstehawi (the name bestowed upon her as an adult Kahnawake), but which? Or both? And this letter to her brother is in fact signed, "Eunice Williams."

Her husband seems also to have had a shifting plethora of names; Demos refers to him as Arosen, (one of) his name(s) as an adult Kahnawake, rather than François Xavier, his French names. He was Indian by birth--but he wasn't native to Kahnawake any more than Eunice/Marguerite/Gannenstehawi was, and presumably Arosen was bestowed upon him as an adult just as Gannenstehawi was bestowed on her. That is, it would clearly be wrong to refer to him as François, but is it right to refer to her as Eunice?

It's a thorny issue, and I don't actually have a better answer than the one which Demos chose.

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I may be missing a point you were trying to make - always a good chance of that - but I'm wondering if you meant 'Puritans' when you wrote 'Nazis' in your first paragraph about the book.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um, no. Because the first paragraph is about a different book.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

More importantly - wow. Yes. I don't think I'd be able to read that, either, and you articulate what would make it intolerable perfectly. Some of it seems understandable, but for the author not to examine the use of the word "captivity" in a situation like this strikes me as...either egregious or bizarre. I don't have enough context to know which.

There is, of course, a novel crying out to be written inside that void at the center. I assume, however, it's not exactly your Indian captivity novel, or you would have said.

[shana.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to digress, but what does UBC stand for?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Unread Book Challenge (a challenge I gave myself to read some of the dozens and dozens of unread books in the house)>

[romp.livejournal.com]

Unread Book Club, as I recall

[papersky.livejournal.com]

They're still there. I mean Kahnawake is still there, and still a home of the First Nations.

I did a post on Tor.com the other day called "A wish for something different at the frontier" about those books which recapitulate a "stolen by Indians" narrative with aliens and new understandings with aliens. There are a lot of them.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. (It makes me even sadder that Worldcon this year looks highly unlikely.)

And yes.

a possibly left-field pointer to the literature

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

that sounds like a very interesting book.

if you are interested in a sort of triangulation of perspectives, you might consider reading about marie de l'incarnation, a frenchwoman who founded a convent and school for girls in canada. she left behind many lettters and an actual autobiography (which i have not read, but read about, in nz davis' book "women on the margins"). she worked among both algonquian- and iroquoian-speaking people. in particular she was present for the 1650s and 1660s, when the league of the iroquois and the french royal institutions held power in turns. she discusses "the freedom" of "savage" life, and also many of the contrasts between her native culture and that to which she had travelled, such as ways of song and the relative freedoms of movement that women were considered to hold in each social context.

i realize that in many ways this is far, far outside your interests as described in the above. there are no puritans here, only catholics and various native peoples. the pull-and-push are not between iroquois rearing and puritan family of origin, but between the convent (a static place; people had to *go* there) and life outside those confines, with religion and other behaviors penetrating in both directions. but it does offer a long, wide-eyed look into the differences in lifestyles (the native girls who arrived at school naked and smeared with grease by their parents, only to be washed and dressed in french undergarments and tunics by the nuns), languages (although sr marie's translations, which included catechisms and other religious instructions, have been lost), and (just once, when asked directly by her son) religious views.

it is my thought that this material, written by a female observer of women, might shed some angled light on "eunice"'s experiences of iroquoian catholic life, for which we do not have her firsthand documentation.

good luck & enjoy your reading :)

Re: a possibly left-field pointer to the literature

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That does sound interesting.

[romp.livejournal.com]

Neat! I was never able to wrap my head around the Puritans: salvation being predetermined, self-observation leading to knowledge of whether or not you were a Chosen One,... But I did read enough about wilderness as a place of spiritual danger to get they were truly frightened of it. It was as if the forests were filled with agents of evil, seen and unseen.

Okay, I don't *get* it because it's so alien to us but I did try. I hope you get to write your version!

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Tangentially, are you familiar with the story of Quanah Parker's mother, Nadua, born as Cynthia Ann Parker?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Nope.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

One of the things I found myself more and more aware of when I was still engaged in university teaching (I'm a mediaeval historian of the Celtic speaking countries) was the degree to which female silence and the absence of direct female agency is normalised and elided in academic and historical writings. Their absence is so normative as to have become invisible and unremarkable, and thus went unconsidered in terms of its meaning and effects. This led in turn to considerable quantities of writing and research in which male accounts of women were accorded the status of unquestioned primary evidence: the voices of those past men and their assumption that they know about women's experience and so on thus remain not only dominant, but their dominance goes unquestioned and unremarked. Pointing this out tends to get the answer 'But that's all the evidence there is, so we have to use it', which is true, but misses the point about unconsidered assumptions. It may be that Demos may have ended up in that position without actually realising.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, he's well aware of the gaps in his knowledge. There's a chapter that's a list of the known facts about Eunice/Marguerite/A'ongate/Gannenstehawi Williams' life (it is not a long list), and then expansion and extrapolation from what is known (again from European accounts) of life in Kahnawake, and Demos is always very careful about separating what the Europeans observed from how they interpreted. It's not that he doesn't talk about the difficulties of being responsible towards the experiences of women and non-Europeans; it's just that I wanted him to talk about them more.

He wants to tell a story; I think what I want is more an examination of the reason telling that story is difficult in the first place. And the fact that he's not giving me what I want is not actually a flaw in his book.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

and I suddenly couldn't take the Nazis for one more second.

This is why I could not conceive of writing a Holocaust book; the closest I think I could ever get is the possibility of writing a Blitz book set in London. I could not possibly do it without researching exhaustively, and the research would crush my soul. I had a hard enough time dealing with the Great Plague in London, and that wasn't malicious.

The Puritans just infuriate me and nowhere more so than in their conviction of their own rightness.

Yes, yes, yes. It inescapably colored my readings on the English Civil War and (more to the point) what followed afterward; even when I agreed with the political project, I could not agree with the tactics, and I could not like the people behind it. Not all of them were Puritans, obviously, but that's one of the big fat threads in the tapestry.

It's difficult to know how to refer to her.

My knee-jerk reaction is to go with "Gannenstehawi," because she seems to have firmly chosen to identify herself as Kahnawake, and I default to privileging an individual's self-identification. But in Demos' shoes, I also think I would have played code-switching games -- calling her "Eunice" when speaking of her from her family's perspective, switching to Gannenstehawi when problematizing that perspective.

female captives were overwhelmingly likely to stay and become Kahnawake

<sarcasm> Gee, I wonder why? </sarcasm>

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I could not possibly do it without researching exhaustively, and the research would crush my soul.

The funny thing is...I suppose I have exhaustively researched the Holocaust, in the sense that between the ages of four and fourteen I attended a religious day school and it was a topic of recurring and frequent and unending discussion, to the point that there's really nothing new to say to me about it. And I've found one's head sorta just makes room. You'd completely think it wouldn't, that it should change or scar you in ways to know those things? But...it just makes room and keeps on going.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

I read this book last year and really enjoyed it. You make some good points that I didn't think of. I didn't know much about the Puritans and found it interesting partly for that reason; I read the witchcraft one next.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Well! I'd love to say that seeing this jerkwadian attitude was prevalent there as well as here in America, (Manifest Destiny anyone?)is something of a relief-but it's not

I just love it when history details just how much us light-skinned folks ~loved~ to look down on the cultures of any one with darker skin colors or having too different a culture and religion.

Oh well; I suppose we can say that at least the Puritans (and yes, their superiority complex irritates the crap out of me to), didn't do what the Americans did. They didn't kidnap ~all~ the Indian children, force them into 'American' schools, strip them of their clothing and replace it with quote unquote 'normal American' clothing, cut their hair and forbid those same children to speak their native tongue or practice any of their native religion-which was punished by way of corporeal punishment-and keep them in said schools until they were 21 years of age.

Then, just to complete the brainwashing, they sent those 21 year olds back to the reservation, and just as they planned those children couldn't speak their parents tongue, couldn't communicate with them, and were aghast at the reservations' living conditions. Oh, and if they decided to stay, they were 'no longer considered American citizens'. As wiping out an entire culture, it was, sadly, extremely effective.

Still, that being said...those Puritan white males being all butthurt about their women liking the Kahnawake culture better than the Puritan up-tight one...and the fact that their side is better represented than either the Kahnawake or the women in question...yeah, that would piss me off in the reading.

So in the end...it's like choosing between green muddy water or brown muddy water; one might be worse than the other, but neither is what you would call drinkable -_-

fictional narratives

[dancing-crow.livejournal.com]

Several years ago a local group produced an opera of the captivity of Eunice Williams. My friend's daughter was the young Eunice. The opera was performed in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the place the Williams family lived at the time, and then travelled to Quebec for a set of performances with the descendants of the First Peoples that had "captured" Eunice.

The most striking thing I got from my friend's discussion of the show was that the captives were taken to replace tribe members that had died in the wars and plagues brought by the whites. I had always assumed, incorrectly, that captives were taken for some form of slavery/drudgery. Most captives were adopted into families and treasured, which is a very different view from that held even 30 years ago.

Re: fictional narratives

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's very cool.

[(Anonymous)]

when you say "captivity narratives" that demonize the Native Americans do you mean ones written by people who did return to the Puritans? because while obviously demonizing another culture is an awful thing, i do have some if not sympathy then understanding of it if you were taken away from your family be members of that culture. you've got people like Eunice who decided to stay but you also have people who really were captives.
sounds like a fascinating book, though, and the thing about more girls staying and more boys trying to leave makes a lot of sense.
M.C.
(sorry to comment anonymously, haven't got a journal)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, it's more complicated than that--and, yes, it's more complicated than the irritation I expressed in my original post.

1. The Puritans who came to New England saw themselves, very explicitly, as having a mission to tame the wilderness, by which they meant the native inhabitants as much as the actual land. Some of them, sometimes, thought of that in terms of conversion and education, but

2. Much Puritan thought, as reflected in their writing (and not necessarily the writings of former captives) quite literally demonized Indians. Witchcraft victims frequently conflate Indians and devils, and Puritans often accuse Indians of devil-worship.

3. The particular situation of the Williams family is made more complicated in turn by the fact that the Kahnawake were Catholics, and I'm not sure there's a way to convey how monstrous Catholics seemed to Puritans. Eunice's conversion to Catholicism was at least as bad, from her father and brothers' perspective, as her adoption into Kahnawake. And that part isn't a persecution fantasy: John Williams himself was much beset by Jesuits when he was a captive; they were as determined to convert him as he was determined to remain true to his faith.

4. And, no, I certainly don't mean to argue that all Puritans should have thrown off their buckled hats and joined the Indians (although certainly the history of our country would be radically different if they had). I don't blame those captives who wanted, desperately, to go home and I don't blame them for their refusal to embrace a culture that was alien and frightening to them. What I object to (and, yes, this is an utterly pointless objection and, as I said, rank with my own prejudices and value-judgments) is the way that they wrote that rejection into the overarching Puritan narrative of the triumph of the godly over the wiles of Satan. I might object less if we had any narratives from the Indians' side, but we don't.

[roisindubh211.livejournal.com]

This is kind of surreal to read about, because I'm pretty sure I read about the missionaries who originally converted this group in Canada. I'm terrible with names, one of the men was Rene something- I just remember the descriptions of the various tortures inflicted on them, either when their interference seemed to the Iroquois to have caused harm or when they were interrupting the power structure of the group. The men kept going back and trying again though, which is kind of amazing.

This was in a "57 Saints for Boys and Girls" which I was given for my first communion, at age 8.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Wow.

And, yes, the Jesuit missionaries were tortured and killed. So were Indian converts.

(One of the things Demos sort of addresses that I wish he'd done more with was the place of ritual torture in Iroquois society. Another addition to my infinitely expanding list of books to look for is books on Kateri Tekakwitha, whose fanatical Catholicism seems (from what Demos says) to have been at least partly an adaptation of Iroquois tradition.)

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't mean to oversimplify either, and I'm sorry if that comment came off as snippy. I didn't realize your objection was as much to the over-arching Puritan self-mythology as the specific captivity narratives, which is a really good point.
And I'd somehow failed to connect the Puritan views of Catholicism with Eunice/Marguerite/Gannenstehawi and her family, so thanks for pointing that out.
My frustration had as much to do with people in one of my classes going on and on about how much better the Transcendentalists were than the Puritans, etc., and so I kind of went- oh not again- when reading this.
M.C.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, I dislike the Transcendentalists, too. :)

And, no, you weren't being snippy--you were making a perfectly reasonable objection to an over-simplification.

assistance

[(Anonymous)]

Good Day,

Perhaps I can be of some assistance in this matter, as I am a Mohawk of Kahnawa:ke and hopefully may be able to assist in some of the more culturally driven questions which have been raised.

Firstly, I suppose in terms of proper nomenaclature, the following elements should be addressed:

The inhabitants of Kahnawa:ke refer to themselves and are referred to as, "Mohawks". Alternatively, the term, "Kanien'keha:ka" may be applied.

While these two words are of distinctly different origins (and by extension, literal meaning), they are generally accepted by Kahnawakeh'ro:non (residents of Kahnawa:ke) as fairly interchangable in the course of everyday life.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that common in Kahnawa:ke Mohawk life is the practice of assigning more than one name to a person, particularly so during what can be regarded as the "Early Christian" period, begining in the mid-1600s.

With that said, a person may be born and assigned a name in the Mohawk language (Kanien'keha), but upon baptism also be assiged a French/English name. Because of the great dissimilarities in the sounds contained within French/English and the Mohawk language, and the need to approximate sounds contained within the original English/French form, it would not be uncommon to refer to a man assigned the French/English name, "Joseph" as "So:se".

Consider that while Kanien'keha has its own lush and rich complexities, it was originally transcribed by the Jesuit Missionaries using only 13 of the 26 Roman characters.

By extension, "Mary" becomes "Wa:ri" (no "M" sound in Kanien'keha),
Angus is pronounced "Nyahs", Paul becomes "Kor" (pronounced, "Gor") and Jonathan becomes,"Shawatis".

Ultimately though, whether one is called by their French/English name, "Corrupted" French/English name (see above) or by their given Mohawk name it is generally understood and accepted as common practice amongst Kahnawakeh'ro:non.

(Without going on at length, the practice may become a bit more confusing when considering other matters such as the adoption of adults not originally born into Mohawk culture, but that is for another day.)

To drive home this point, often a typical Kahnawa:ke Mohawk household may have 2 inhabitants that use their Mohawk names, one who employs their French/English name, another who uses a deviation of the French/English name and finally a 5th who is known by a "nickname" assigned by their peers (typically associated with the person's behavior, family or a reference to a misadventure).

As far back as our current story-telling goes, such has always been the practice since the establishment of the village of old Kahnawa:ke, so I would not expend too much energy attempting to decode the system of usage and assignment of names in the case of Eunice Williams.

Tho Niiowennake.
These are my words.

Kennikesto:sara'a

Re: assistance

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this exceedingly insightful comment.

Through Williams

[(Anonymous)]

Your interpretation is highly from 20th century ingraining. The word captivity is proper from John Williams' context because he viewed her as captive to the "heathen" ways of the natives. It was almost as if Williams, as well as the community, viewed her brainwashed by native culture and Catholicism, just as he had been held captive. Whether Demos agrees with that or not, what Williams entitled it in the first place was 'captive'. Williams viewed Eunice at the mercy of the same subjection he did though she did not view it as such. Demos tells in his preface that he was basically mixing story with history; throwing in facts and generally redeeming a voiceless "captive".

Also, give the Puritans a break, their strictness and exclusivity may be infuriating but as their various town covenants showed: they had the right idea (unity, peace and law) but went about it a little crazily =]