51 pages • 1 hour read
John Putnam DemosThe Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Eunice Williams and Identity Fluidity in Colonial New England
The figure of Eunice Williams takes center stage in Demos’s re-telling of the Deerfield massacre. Using her story as a focal point, Demos is able to explore themes of cultural identity and transformation more deeply. As Eunice is the daughter of a widely respected Puritan minister, her transformation and nearly full assimilation into Mohawk culture underscores the fluid nature of identity, and it draws attention to the numerous, crisscrossing cultural currents that characterized colonial New England.
Eunice’s assimilation into Kahnawake culture began almost immediately upon her capture, when she was just seven years old. In Chapter 4, Demos talks about the practice of adoption that was commonplace in the captive process: “And there was the matter of ‘adoption’—of incorporating (some, not all) captives into particular Indian families. This […] was an old practice among native peoples of the North American woodlands, and clearly it survived among the ‘French Indians’ of Canada” (81). Eunice, by all accounts, was embraced by her new family very quickly: “But she belongs now to the Indians—to the Mohawk residents of the mission ‘fort’ near Montreal called, by the French, St. Francois Xavier du Sault St. Louis, and, by the residents themselves, Kahnawake” (36). Demos finds a primary source document written by John Williams that affirms the family’s embracing of Eunice: “But when they arrive at the mission, ‘the Jesuit’ in charge informs them ‘that I should not be permitted to speak with or see my child…and that the Mohawks would as soon part with their hearts as my child’” (36).
Chapter 7 goes through the known facts of Eunice’s life with her new Mohawk family, pieced together through the little that is gathered from French, Jesuit, and Protestant visitors who were allowed, even briefly, into the Mohawk community. Eunice was given a new name (A’ongote); she had a close matriarchal mother-figure within the community; she forgot the English language within a few years; she was given yet another name (Marguerite) to mark her rebaptism into the Catholic Church; she married a Mohawk man named Francois Xavier Arosen; she gave birth to at least two children; she acquired a second Mohawk name (Gannenstenhawi) later in life; she was a godparent to newly baptized members of the community. Eunice clearly was fully assimilated into her new culture. Her origins as the daughter of an eminent Puritan minister underscore the fluidity of identity, particularly around religious and racial lines.
That Eunice had so many names—her Puritan birthname, her initial Mohawk name, her Catholic re-baptism name, and then her second Mohawk name—is emblematic of the numerous cultural currents coursing through the communities in colonial New England. Native American, French, Canadian, and English cultures all intermingled to cause numerous potential shifts and hybrids within what we consider an “American” identity.
Boundary Crossing and Racial Conflict in American History
Through the story of the Deerfield massacre, Demos shows the numerous cultural forces at play in colonial New England. The events leading up to the massacre, as well as the aftermath, highlight how cross-cultural conflict/assimilation is built into the foundation of American history. The Deerfield massacre, on its surface, is the clashing of two cultures—the Kahnawake (Native Americans) and the residents of Deerfield (British colonists). Upon closer examination, however, Demos identifies various other players: the French and Canadians, who were allied with many Native American tribes at the time, as well as the English government, which influenced the English settlers from afar.
In telling Eunice’s story, The Unredeemed Captive shows how these sweeping cross-cultural forces play out on a smaller scale. Chapter 7, which tells the facts of Eunice’s life among the Kahnawake, provides concrete examples of how cultural “blending” occurred for Eunice: She took on a Native American name, adopted their child-rearing customs, socialized in the manner of the Kahnawake, etc. Multiculturalism, and the blending (and colliding) of cultures, is one of the key themes in the story of Eunice and the Deerfield massacre. Also telling is the fact that, even into old age, the Williams family never stopped praying for Eunice’s redemption. Demos remarks of Eunice’s choice to stay among the Kahnawake: “If we pull all this together, it reduces to two things: her [Eunice’s] feeling for the life and culture of her fellow Kahnawakes, and her allegiance to the Catholic church. Or, in the charged language of her New England contemporaries: ‘savagery’ and ‘popery.’ The battle had been lost on both fronts” (213). This, too, evidences a larger cultural trend of the era: Boundaries were continually being crossed (namely, by colonialist forces into native cultures), but not without resistance by the prevailing empire—that is, despite wanting to know and control the Kahnawake, the colonialists did not embrace this sort of cultural affiliation, as embodied by the figure of Eunice. Eunice’s assimilation into Kahnawake culture was a “battle” having been “lost” (213).
Limitations on the Study of History
Throughout The Unredeemed Captive, Demos makes note of how and why the modern-day reader or researcher will not be able to fully “see” the past, due to inaccuracies, incomplete data, or social biases woven into the remaining records. For example, many of the surviving written documents concerning Native American life at the time came from Jesuit missionaries. Their religious bias, and how that might skew their writings on the Native Americans, is self-evident.
The Unredeemed Captive begins with a statement from Demos on the limitations of the study of history, which sets the tone for the story to follow. In the Introduction to the book (entitled “Beginnings”), Demos asks a seemingly simple question: “Where does the story begin?”—referring to Eunice’s story and the story of the Deerfield massacre (3). Demos also tries to show throughout the book that history in non-linear. Even Eunice’s story, with its roots in colonialist history and Native American pillage, does not really have any “one” single beginning: “To this list of five [beginnings] could certainly be added others—indeed, an almost infinite number. As with all the stories that together form ‘history’” (10). Indeed, throughout the book, Demos will offer up multiple “beginnings” to show the different social and cultural forces that culminated in any one event.
