Abstract for Creating New England, Defending the Northeast: Between 1500 and 1700, diverse mapmakers depicted the Northeast (specifically present-day New England). To name a few: a Portuguese navigator who sailed on behalf of a blood-soaked English general, the devout Puritan governor of Massachusetts Bay, a Wabanaki man held captive in London by an English lord, and the most powerful Wampanoag sachem (community leader) in New England. Their maps’ disparate style, purpose, and content highlights the fundamentally different ways in which groups of English and Algonquians understood, described, and experienced the landscape. For example, while many English strove to imprint imagined boundaries on the land, Algonquians drew on their deep cultural knowledge of the land and its history to make sense of it. Ultimately, New England had been marked and made through Algonquian action, bewildering the English, who came to depend on Algonquian information and aid to navigate the region’s swamps and survive its winters.
Creating New England, Defending the Northeast asserts that Algonquian knowledge of the landscape represented a powerful and persistent alternative to English surveying and mapmaking in the Northeast. When English colonists and explorers recognized the unsuitability of their techniques for understanding New England’s unfamiliar landscape, they attempted to appropriate Indigenous knowledge and maps. Sachems used this as an opportunity to manipulate and benefit from their new English neighbors. However, the English constantly felt insecure in their dependence on Indigenous people, and beginning in the late 1630s, they began to remake and mark the landscape in a way they understood. Algonquians adapted, remaining important knowledge providers even in a place no longer entirely of their making.
