Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts

In the first biography of Ninigret, Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman assert that he was the most influential Indian leader of his era in southern New England.

Julie A. Fisher received her PhD in history from the University of Delaware and is currently consulting with the National Park Service’s Roger Williams National Memorial site. David J. Silverman is Professor of History at George Washington University and the author of Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America, also from Cornell, and Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871.

[T]he authors, convinced of the sachem's importance, follow every possible path in the materials and have produced a volume of great insight and historical ingenuity.... These historians succeed in their task, almost more than the limitations in their material should really allow.... This work deserves a wide audience, one interested in native biography, native–imperial interaction, and the tactics, strategies and deployment of political and military power in the seventeenth century.

Jonathan DeCoster:

This volume's unique contribution is a reinterpretation that puts Indians at the center of how we look at the politics and conflicts of New England in the seventeenth century. It not only shows diverse interests among Indians, but as a corollary, highlights diversity among the English as well. The evidence is substantial and convincing, and the authors have thankfully added Ninigret to the woefully short list of Indians from the colonial era whom we can say that we know in some detail Fisher and Silverman’s biography is written as crisply and clearly as the complicated and ambiguous story will allow. The first chapter especially would make an excellent introduction to eastern Native societies and early colonial contact for undergraduates.

This is a good book about an extremely difficult and important time in the history of this country. Buy it and read it. I am very grateful to the authors for having written it.

Linford D. Fisher:

This book is a sympathetic political and diplomatic biography of an important sachem who has rarely received adequate historiographical attention. It is an important contribution to our understanding of Indian diplomacy in southern New England between the Pequot War and King Philip's War. Students of colonial New England will find the nuanced understandings of Native community and kinship networks illuminating, and scholars of early America at all levels will discover in its pages a model for a Native-centered interpretation of on-the-ground colonial diplomacy.

J.C. Arndt:

Fisher (graduate student, Univ. of Delaware) and Silverman (George Washington Univ.)... provide an excellent study of the region's politics and diplomacy from the Pequot War to King Philip’s War. They carefully detail Ninigret’s role as a skillful leader who forged strategic and often shifting alliances during this period.The authors’ meticulous examination of diplomacy and war is accompanied by a wealth of insight into Native American society and culture. This book makes an important contribution to understanding early New England and Native American history, and reveals Ninigret as an active and skillful agent in shaping the history of the period. As such, this book takes its place as essential reading for scholars of 17th-century New England. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Christine DeLucia:

Ninigret adds layers to a crucial period in regional and early American history, and it invites future conversations about cross-cultural power brokers and the nature of indigenous authority and adaptation in the midst of English settler colonialism.

Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts sheds powerful new light on a major figure and the tumultuous world he helped to shape. It is a must-read for anyone interested in colonial and/or Native American history.

Brett Rushforth, author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France:

This engaging and nuanced biography illuminates the life and career of one of the most important political figures of seventeenth-century North America. Often an enemy to the English colonists, but finally their reluctant ally, Ninigret lived through—and significantly shaped—a period of dramatic historical change. In Julie A. Fisher's and David J. Silverman's hands, his life yields powerful insights.

Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Brigham Young University, author of "Subject unto the Same King": Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England:

The field of early American biography is almost entirely populated by white men—those most likely to have left a documentary record that survives to the present. In Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman's new book, we have a rare opportunity to read a deeply researched and richly imagined biography of a seventeenth-century Native American man. Using contemporary court records and other public papers, as well as archaeological records, the authors evoke Ninigret’s personality as well as his political and diplomatic purposes. This finely-drawn character study is also an excellent history of seventeenth-century New England in general. The pages of this book are packed with insights on early New England and Native America.