Colonial Intimacies
Subtitle: Indian Marriage in Early New England
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: June 22, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780801432910
Subjects: American history: c 1500 to c 1800; Indigenous peoples; Marriage; Social history; c 1600 to c 1700; c 1700 to c 1800; Native Americans - Northeast; United States - Colonial Period; Social Science; Ethnic Issues; History: American; USA; Marriage customs and rites; Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies; Sociology - Marriage & Family; Sources; Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; History; Indians of North America; New England
Description: "Native American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English Christians: elite native men frequently took more than one wife, while other men and women could dissolve their marriages and take new partners with relative ease. Native marriage did not necessarily involve cohabitation, the formation of a new household, or mutual dependence for subsistence.

Couples who wished to separate did so without social reproach, and when adultery occurred, the blame centered not on the "fallen" woman but on the interloping man. Over time, such practices changed, but the emergence of new types of "Indian marriage" enabled the legal, social, and cultural survival of New England's native peoples.".

"The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice are treated with subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously neglected history."--BOOK JACKET.