What Is The Main Thesis Of The Unredeemed Captive By John Demos

In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will

Upon coming to New France, the prisoners were sold to the French, and later exchanged for release by the governors of the English and French colonies. For John Williams, he was redeemed by the French governor. There would be no hope of his children being released for a while. Not until Mr. Williams made his way back to New England, which ended up being almost three years he eventually got the French governor to release all of his children after a negotiation. Only one was left captive, her name was Eunice. She ended up staying a captive for many years at the starting age of six-years old. The Kahnawake Indian tribe took her and refused to sell her to the French.

This primary source, John Rolfe’s Letter to Thomas Dale about marrying Pocahontas, is from the settlement era and was written in 1614. The European settlers in this era, early 1700s, wanted land and to displace the natives not intermarrying with them. Most settlers remained separate from the Indian society. Some settlers married Native women as a way to gain access to the native societies. It was a way to gain an economic relationship. Indians were being forced off their land because they had no real claim of it. Settlers would establish their towns on sites previously cleared by the Indians. The marriage of John Rolfe and Pocahontas was a rare and unique circumstance in the 1700s. The letter to Thomas Dale is a window to a period of uncertainty between the white settlers and the Native Indians in North America. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the importance of this letter and its effects to the society in the time period after it was written. John Rolfe’s decision to marry Pocahontas proved to be vital at the time. John Rolfe’s letter to Thomas Dale for approval on marrying the Indian Princess Pocahontas reflects on how much society in the early 1610s depended on such thing as intermarriage between a white man and an Indian woman to help keep peace between the white settlers and Native Indians in North America.

Throughout the course of history there have been numerous accounts regarding Native American and European interaction. From first contact to Indian removal, the interaction was somewhat of a roller coaster ride, leading from times of peace to mini wars and rebellions staged by the Native American tribes. The first part of this essay will briefly discuss the pre-Columbian Indian civilizations in North America and provide simple awareness of their cultures, while the second part of this essay will explore all major Native American contact leading up to, and through, the American Revolution while emphasizing the impact of Spanish, French, and English explorers and colonies on Native American culture and vice versa. The third, and final, part of this essay will explore Native American interaction after the American Revolution with emphasis on westward expansion and the Jacksonian Era leading into Indian removal. Furthermore, this essay will attempt to provide insight into aspects of Native American/European interaction that are often ignored such as: gender relations between European men and Native American women, slavery and captivity of native peoples, trade between Native Americans and European colonists, and the effects of religion on Native American tribes.

Mary Rowlandson was a prime example of a colonial Puritan woman. She kept her focus on God, family, and the home. Her and her husband, Rev. Joseph Rowlandson, had three children in the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts. The Rowlandsons were living at a time where interactions between colonists and Indians were wrought with strife and this strife developed into King Philip’s War. Because of this war, a series of raids, or attacks, were conducted by Indians on many colonial towns. Thus, the life of this innocent colonial family was thoroughly changed on February 10, 1676. While her husband was away in Boston, a group of Indians attacked and destroyed the town of Lancaster. Rowlandson, along with her three children, were taken as captives. Rowlandson was held captive for eleven weeks and five days. She shared her experiences with the world and wrote a captivity narrative after she was returned to her husband. The subtle change that Rowlandson goes through in her description of the Indians cannot be attributed to her being in the moment because she was not in captivity while writing. Therefore, Rowlandson’s rhetorical change towards the Indians can be attributed to the fact that she knew her audience, the Puritan society, and set out to convince them that she was still the same innocent Puritan woman that she had always been before, during, and after her captivity.

Puritan beliefs reflected in Mary Rowlandson’s “A Narrative of the Captivity, Suffering and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson”. The beliefs are depicted in her eleven weeks of captivity after being captured by the Wampanoag tribesmen.

“The Indian presence precipitated the formation of an American identity” (Axtell 992). Ostracized by numerous citizens of the United States today, this quote epitomizes Axtell’s beliefs of the Indians contributing to our society. Unfortunately, Native Americans’ roles in history are often categorized as insignificant or trivial, when in actuality the Indians contributed greatly to Colonial America, in ways the ordinary person would have never deliberated. James Axtell discusses these ways, as well as what Colonial America may have looked like without the Indians’ presence. Throughout his article, his thesis stands clear by his persistence of alteration the Native Americans had on our nation. James Axtell’s bias delightfully enhances his thesis, he provides a copious amount of evidence establishing how Native Americans contributed critically to the Colonial culture, and he considers America as exceptional – largely due to the Native Americans.

The American desire to culturally assimilate Native American people into establishing American customs went down in history during the 1700s. Famous author Zitkala-Sa, tells her brave experience of Americanization as a child through a series of stories in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Zitkala-Sa, described her journey into an American missionary where they cleansed her of her identity. In “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Sa uses imagery in order to convey the cruel nature of early American cultural transformation among Indian individuals.

The circumstances of captivity were as varied as the number of people involved on both sides. Prisoner redemption was the process of prisoner exchange that had long been unfair. Captives were subject to ransom, trade for other key people, and sometimes prisoners decided to remain in captivity since escape was very dangerous. Acculturation which included adoption and repatriation were choices for some of them as well. For example, "Eunice's inability to speak English and her personal appearance announce her loyalty to other standards" (Demos 146). "She had been fully integrated or Indianized" (Demos 142). Eunice comes of age in her adoptive community, secure, and increasingly well integrated. The trauma of capture including as it did the deaths of her mother and

“The Unredeemed Captive” by John Demos is a novel written as a story to describe the conflicts that existed between the Puritans and the Jesuits The way he portrays that conflict is through the telling of John Williams’s life during the encounters of a French and Indian War Party. In the first chapters we see how the Mohawk Indians allied with the French to attack Deerfield (a small village in Massachusetts) were John William was the minister of the city and where his family got separated. His children that survived the attack were redeemed except for his seven-year-old daughter Eunice. She was the only one kept by the Mohawk Indians. During this time of Eunice young age, she was still being thought the Puritan way of life, but as a result

There are many great stories to be told from American Literature up to 1890. Hannah Dustan and Mary Rowlandson are both key figures when it comes to such American Literature. Both of these women shared their own personal experiences of being held captive. They both have a lot in common as they both were captured by Native Americans; both were puritans and both lost members of their family. While Rowlandson chose to write her story in a first person narrative, Dustan’s story was told in the words of Cotton Mather based on what he had heard from Dustan herself.

Mary Jemison had a markedly different captivity experience. In the late 1750s, when Jemison was just fifteen years old, her family was captured by the Seneca Indians. Soon after they were captured, Jemison saw her family murdered and scalped. Like Rowlandson and Cabeza de Vaca, she was initially in fear for her life. She expected at any moment that she too would be scalped by her captors. At the same time, like Rowlandson, she was just as frightened by the idea of escape. She lamented that should she sneak away that she would be “alone and defenseless in the forest, surrounded by wild beasts that were ready to devour” her (Seaver).

This can be described by the idea that British colonists and thinkers were changing their views of Native Americans by pushing the “universal belief that there was no such thing as a good Indian.” The accounts of these captivity narratives helped to lend perspective to the area and to attract readers back in London, but it remains to be said who the captive writers were? American captivity narratives in North America were more feminized, and regularly included large numbers of women. We see how the accounts of women often being more sympathetically viewed with the account of Jonathon Dickenson who traveled to the New World with his wife and six-month year old baby. Upon arrival, Dickenson and his family were seized where his wife become horrified when one of the Indian women took their baby and suckled him. This forced the Dickenson family, and many other whites, to see how their children would become assimilated into Native American society, showing how colonists became fearful that they would lose their ties to

The Mohawk’s family shows that the men were breadwinners and women were homemakers, which reflects that such cooperation in family has started so early before. And the great cruelty to their enemies shows that they were so enraged by the intrusion upon their peaceful life. However brutal they were to their captives, though without laws and punishments, they did not commit murderer or crimes much. Because their innocence did not lead them to think of getting drunk nor stealing, when John Megapolensis preached the gospel to them, they could not feel its necessity.

The circumstances of captivity were as varied as the number of people involved on both sides. Prisoner redemption was the process of prisoner exchange that had long been unfair. Captives were subject to ransom, trade for other key people, and sometimes prisoners decided to remain in captivity since escape was very dangerous. Acculturation which included adoption and repatriation were choices for some of them as well. For example, "Eunice's inability to speak English and her personal appearance announce her loyalty to other standards" (Demos 146). "She had been fully integrated or Indianized" (Demos 142). Eunice comes of age in her adoptive community, secure, and increasingly well integrated. The trauma of capture including as it did the deaths of her mother and siblings might call forth its own repression (Demos 147). Forgetting everything that happened to her would be a type of defense. Whatever her sources for change, the result