The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Lepore
... and they can not try and understand what their motives are. The Indians realize that they are not literate and must learn to communicate with the English so they go about learning English. Because they do not write in their culture they learned the oral language but do not learn to read and a write. Some Indians did choose to learn the written language but it was a select few. They began using English to communicate with the Colonists and some were also converted to Christianity. Many Indians adopted the English ways of life and even began to dress like the English, and they lived in the same towns as them. Not all of the Indians chose to make this change; they simply did not trust the English and their ways of life. This caused conflict between the different tribes because those who converted could not be trusted. In the beginning this conversion was a good thing, because the two sides were able to communicate somewhat with each other. But in the end this was a bad thing because the literacy of some people killed them. John Sassamon was a converted Christian Indian and his literacy killed him. Sassamon often confused people about his identity and was questioned a lot. When he was questioned about his identity he responds with great violence. A group of Pequots noticed Sassamon and questioned if he was an Indian or Englishman, he told them to come closer and he would tell them, and when they did he “pull[ed] up his cock and let fly at one of them, and without question was the death of him”(29). Sassamon could not be trusted and by the Indians and even some English. When writing about the war colonists almost always explained Indians in the worst way possible, even if they were Christians or non-Christian they were always described the worst. In the beginning the colonists just wanted to use the Indian goods and tried to get along with them in order to get what they wanted. This led to the Indians sensing themselves being taken advantage of and they were not going to let that happen. Their attitudes did change over time and they only got worse. The colonists did not like the Indians and began to think of them as less than human that felt that the Indians were truly inferior to Europeans because they were extremely different from the colonists. Even those like John Sassamon who converted to Christianity and tried to become more like the English were not fully trusted by the colonist or by the Indians. It was a huge struggle to live between the two cultures and be trusted by both sides. The two colonists that were forced to live with the Indians had a somewhat difficult time keeping their culture, for example, Mary Rowlandson lived with Indians for three months. She was forced to eat their food, learn their ways, and sleep in wigwams. Rowlandson’s way of dealing with this was to write. She wrote what began “America’s first best-seller,” (125). She did not want to die and so instead of resisting the Indians taking her captive she just went with them. She knew that “‘if I were willing to go along with them, they would not hurt me.’ To be taken captive is to be taken by force, against one’s will, but Rowlandson, curiously, admitted she was ‘willing to go along with them.’” (128). She survived the three months with them while she wrote about her experience daily. She was redeemed by a twenty pound ransom that was paid for her to be released from the Europeans and when she went back home to her family, she was not treated any differently be the English or the colonists. From her descriptions she did not say anything about being hurt or raped while she was with the Indians. This was the most violent war in American history, the Indians and colonists did their part to make this true. The Indians knew that the Europeans were very close to owning land and keeping their land. The Indians way of hurting the Europeans was by totaling ruining their land and all possessions. They set their homes on fire and killed the people inside, no matter who was in their. The Indians burnt more homes down than they did people because they knew that ownership was the most important to the colonists. The Indians liked the land as it was before the Europeans came over and “chopped down trees, built houses, erected fences, and planted crops,” (77). The Indians knew this would get to the colo...