Those in Native American studies wrestle with the frequent inability of non-Native people to recognize the presence of contemporary Native Americans: “Why are non-Natives apparently blind when it comes to recognizing their Native American neighbors?” Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting presents a compelling answer as she traces the myth of “Indian extinction” to the very origins of colonial America. In a tantalizing historiography drawing upon New England's local histories, commemorations, maps, monuments, and orations from 1820 to 1880, O'Brien reveals the creation of blinding ideologies that allowed non-Native New Englanders to claim themselves “native,” even while the indigenous inhabitants remained and politically defied New England narratives of “vanishing Indians.”

Firsting and Lasting breaks into four main chapters, “Firsting” and “Replacing,” which depict the rhetorical tactics non-Natives used to declare both the land as their own and themselves as the rightful indigenous inhabitants of that land; and “Lasting” and “Resisting,” contrasting chapters that present the settlers' insistence upon the “doomed extinction” of Native Americans, and Native peoples' “resistance” in the form of continuing Native communities insisting on sovereignty. “Firsting” outlines a New English script that discounted existing Native American “peoples, villages, cultures, polities, economics, and religion,” as remnants of an inauthentic, feudal form of “prehistory,” allowing the settlers to mark their homes, villages, and institutions as the region's authentic, first “modern” and “permanent” achievements (53). The story obscured evidence of established Native American cultures, creating a myth that Native peoples were nomadic, scant, disconnected, and disorganized. Acts of “replacing” take this myth further by celebrating moments New Englanders wished to remember, and silencing what they wished to erase. O'Brien investigates five modes of such cultural production that “argue for the justice of the replacement of ancient Indians by modern New Englanders”: monuments, historical commemorations, excavations of Native American sites, “the selective retention of Indian place names, and claims Non-Indians made to Indian homelands” (57).

In “Lasting,” O'Brien shows how New Englanders' fetishization of Native American blood purity and the concept that Native cultures were by nature static, not modern, blinded non-Natives from viewing Native American individuals who were of mixed ancestry or who operated in contemporary cultural contexts as truly Native American. Such impossible demands for Native American stasis allowed New Englanders to claim that their Native neighbors were becoming extinct, a process they celebrated through commemorations and documents marking “the last of” many tribal nations. Ironically, this process of “lasting” was undermined by ongoing political relationships between Native communities and state governments, as well as census counts that reflected a rise in Native American populations. In “Resisting,” O'Brien demonstrates this evidence in addition to accounts of Native American political activism. In case studies of Pequot minister William Apess and the Narragansett tribe's legal battle against Rhode Island's plan to “terminate” its tribal status, O'Brien presents undeniable examples of Native American agency often written out of American history.

From her focussed investigation into a period of sixty years in New England, O'Brien presents significant perspectives to Native American studies, American history, colonial studies, and critical race theory. Firsting and Lasting importantly addresses not only how New Englanders constructed their views of Native American peoples, but also the ways in which those views continue to hinder non-Native people's current imaginations.