Abstract
Historians of the early American northeast continue to produce compelling scholarship on the region’s indigenous polities, European colonists, environment, and conflicts. In utilizing archival research and document analysis, prosopography, literary criticism, and ethnohistorical methodologies, various works emphasize the significance of understanding the seventeenth-century northeastern borderlands as a contested space. The intersection of war, indigenous sovereignty, and European settler colonialism remains a valuable starting point in this pursuit. However, the colonial archive’s limitations and the need for innovative research methods remain. This thesis contributes to the field’s current state as it aims to further develop the historiographical understanding of indigenous and European women’s experiences in the seventeenth-century northeastern borderlands. It seeks to mediate archival silences and recover Abenaki and Anglo-American women’s voices through assessing where captivity narratives fall short and investigating what stories material objects might tell, acknowledging that seventeenth-century colonial and indigenous women were not monolithic. Drawing from material culture methodology, this thesis contributes to a richer understanding of the early American northeast as a contested space in which women were critical actors. The project’s original approach to the intersection of material culture, colonialism, and violence demonstrates how indigenous and Anglo-American women’s roles were more nuanced and varied than captivity narratives and colonial documents reveal. Assessing how material objects reveal women’s agency in seventeenth-century northeastern Massachusetts mitigates some of the colonial archive’s limitations and highlights women’s presence despite their diminished agency in captivity narratives.