M&D tangent

[Peter Petto]

At 09:52 AM 12/30/98 -0800, Doug Millison wrote about John Demos' op-ed piece
in the New York Times, "History Beyond Data Bits."

I was intrigued by the title of John Demos' most recent (?) book, cited in the
bio blurp at the end: _The Unredeemed Captive_. It looks to be a very
interesting book. Here's a review from Kirkus Reviews , March 1, 1994:

>From an obscure and isolated event, Demos (History/Yale), a Bancroft
Prize-winning historian (Entertaining Satan, not reviewed) explodes the easy
oppositions between Christian and savage, Indian and white, nature and
civilization--oppositions on which the narrative of colonial American history
has traditionally been built. In 1704, Mohawk Indians, converted to Catholicism
by Jesuit missionaries, allied with the French settlers in Canada, attacked the
frontier village of Deerfield, Massachusetts, killing 50 of the very young and
old and kidnapping 112 more. They then marched the prisoners to Canada, killing
20 more women and several children along the way as acts of mercy, including
the wife and infant son of John Williams, a Puritan minister and a prize
hostage. While he and his surviving sons were ultimately released, his
daughter, Eunice, who was seven at the time of her capture, remained with her
captors, converted to Catholicism, and at the age of 16 married an Indian, with
whose people she chose to spend the rest of her life. Among Demos's narrative
achievements is his representation of the religious, cultural, political,
economic, and psychological orientations that collided in this episode, the web
of fears, justifications, and powers revealed in the process of encounter: the
Puritan fear of the wilderness, the English fear of the French, the Jesuit
missionary fever, the French-Canadian greed, the Indian interpretation of
Christianity, and the arrogance with which Puritans interpreted a massacre as
an expression of God's will, of redemption and resurrection. This
thought-provoking study explores the multiple communities to which apparently
simple people belonged and how their domestic lives were overtaken by political
events. Fascinating, lively, and especially timely to an age struggling to
understand the implications of its own cross-cultural encounters.