An American Protestant theologian, Matthew Tuininga tries his hand at describing Native American–colonist relations in seventeenth-century New England. Although excellent studies exist of the wars and kindred situations that figure in this book, his is a good overview and, when he arrives at King Philip’s (or Metacom’s) War of 1675–76, the narrative is enriched by an attentiveness to the military services (and tragedies) of the Christian Indians. In addition, the book includes several maps that locate the numerous ‘bands’ that populated southern New England, a useful list of ‘Indian communities’ and another list indicating place names of villages or sites where several of the major groups – Wampanoag, Massachusett, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot and Mohegan – had settlements.

The narrative begins with the ‘first encounter’ (not actually the first), when the ‘pilgrims’ who arrived in November 1620 in the vicinity of Cape Cod went ashore and stumbled upon nearby Native Americans. As we know from historians of the long-term relationship between colonists and indigenous peoples, four circumstances shaped how they would treat each other. The first was socio-economic. Within a few years, the colonists ceased to depend on Native Americans for food. The value of the indigenous-manufactured commodity known as wampum was also short-lived. Thereafter, the Native American economy became one-sided once the Indians sought muskets, alcohol, clothing and other commodities from the colonists, whereupon deeds of land and labour emerged as the principal means of financing these purchases. Second, rivalries among indigenous bands ensured that any alignment of colonists versus Native Americans never included all the indigenous peoples in southern New England – or, for that matter, all of the colonists. Third, as Anthony Pagden and others have shown, the colonists had absorbed a cluster of assumptions fashioned by humanists in the sixteenth century, among them the assumption that indigenous people were ‘barbarous’, to which some (including the colonists) added the assumption that these people had become servants of Satan. On a happier note, the major bands retained a significant degree of agency in protecting boundaries and the like, an aspect tellingly narrated by Jenny Hale Pulsipher in Subjects unto the same king: Indians, English, and the contest for authority in colonial New England (2005).

These politics do not figure in Tuininga’s narrative. However, he does acknowledge the missionary outreach that began in the mid-1640s, after the minister John Eliot mastered enough of a local dialect to preach to small groups of Native Americans. Simultaneously, the same programme unfolded on Martha’s Vineyard. By the 1650s, the Massachusetts government was providing grants of land to Christian-leaning groups, grants that brought into being seven ‘praying’ towns largely administered by converts and their families. Meanwhile, the various colonial governments were prohibiting the sale of muskets and alcohol – laws of dubious efficacy – and trying to regularise the transfer of land from Native American hands to the ever-expanding population of colonists.

Remarkably (and in sharp contrast with the story of New Netherland), peace prevailed between colonists and Native Americans, with two exceptions, each of them much studied but narrated afresh by Tuininga: the brief ‘Pequot war’ of 1636–37 and the far more devastating war of 1675–76, which pitted two major bands and scattered allies against Massachusetts, Plymouth and Rhode Island. (Connecticut-based bands sided with the colonists.) Tuininga’s retelling of the latter benefits from his careful reading of a much-ignored text, the Massachusetts colonist Daniel Gookin’s ‘The sufferings of the Christian Indians’. Appalled by the violence directed at the ‘Praying Indians’, Gookin assembled evidence of this violence in a book-length manuscript that disappeared until 1837, when a copy found in England was published by the American Antiquarian Society. Tuininga is the first to incorporate the evidence that Gookin preserved of the services of indigenous Christians as scouts and soldiers and, more tellingly, of the violence directed at them, violence that severely damaged most of the praying towns. (A critical edition of this book, together with another Gookin wrote, will be published in 2026 by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts: Adrian Weimer and David D. Hall (eds), The writings of Daniel Gookin and allied documents.)

Sadly, missteps abound. The title is outrageously inaccurate, coupled as it is with the assertion that the colonists committed genocide and were racist. Many thousands of Native Americans survived the war of 1675–76, which (with minor exceptions) did not reach the bands that lived in present-day New Hampshire and Maine or (as already noted) the indigenous communities in Connecticut and the islands. Thanks to their presence, the missionary project persisted into the eighteenth century.

Genocide usually signals a state-driven policy of exterminating a particular group of people, as has happened most recently in Gaza. But the colonists did not wish to destroy, or succeed in destroying, the Native Americans with whom they shared New England. They lacked the means of doing so: the farm boys who were pressed into military service in 1675–76 had no weapons of mass destruction and, as the defeats in battle they suffered indicate, no tactics were available that would have enabled them to accomplish this goal. As for race, the colonists regarded the Native Americans as descendants of Adam and Eve, although lacking the customary modes of ‘civilisation’. This is a book, then, that allows near-useless words to shape the information it contains.