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Voices Of Resiliency And Persistence: Native Americans In Southern New England In The Seventeenth Century, Debra Taylor

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

During the early seventeenth century, the Algonquian Indians of Southern New England demonstrated courage and resilience as their societies survived a "massive depopulation" from diseases introduced through European colonization (See Fig. 1). It is a credit to the strength of their core values that Native Americans successfully combined remaining clan members and reconstructed stable communities. However, these communities became threatened as increased numbers of English colonists arrived believing that the devastation of Indian numbers was the divine hand of God paving the way for colonial settlement and supremacy. As contact increased between two vastly different worlds, colonists minimized Indians and …