UMaine History Lecture Series Begins with Look at 1704 Raid on a Colonial Community
Contact: Liam Riordan, 581-1913; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — On Feb. 29, 1704, more than 200 French soldiers and Native American Indians from five tribes descended upon English colonists in Deerfield, Mass., killing 50 and capturing more than 100 men, women and children who would be taken to Canada for resettlement among Native and French families.
The raid involved many parties, multiple motives and had varying results. The incident and its aftermath now stand out as the symbolic manifestation of the struggle between the French, English and Native Americans in colonial North America.
The event and its many intriguing complexities are the subject of the first in the UMaine Department of History’s fall symposium series, scheduled Friday, Sept. 22 at 3:30 p.m. in the Bodwell Lounge at the Maine Center for the Arts. Co-sponsored by the Canadian American Center, the lecture and slide presentation by two historians is open to the public at no cost.
Authors and historians Evan Haefeli, assistant professor of history at Columbia University, and Kevin Sweeney, professor of history and American studies at Amherst College, are co-authors of the award-winning Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (2003) and Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid (2006). They have collaborated since the early 1990s in studying the intertwined English, French and Native American understandings of the colonial world, and their work has informed the rich website of the Memorial Hall Museum (http://1704.deerfield.history.museum/).
UMaine history professor Liam Riordan, who coordinates the symposium, says the work of Haefeli and Sweeney on the Deerfield raid represents a groundbreaking effort to understand the widely varied perspectives of the many different groups involved in the raid.
“They are the first ones to look deeply at both English and French documents and to integrate that material with insights about diverse Indian actors by drawing on ethnohistorical techniques and oral traditions,” he says. Haefeli and Sweeney present a rich intersection of political, cultural, religious, economic and military forces that influenced the actions of the various parties involved in the raid.
For instance, for some tribal raiders, the attack was considered a “mourning war,” in which it was customary for tribes to seize hostages to replace tribal loved ones who had been killed or died. And for the French, the disruption of settlers in the Northeast was a way to slow colonization by the English and also to control the fur trade. There were also intense religious rivalries and mixtures among French Catholics, English Protestants, and both traditional and Christian Indians.
The 1704 raid, Riordan says, “has long symbolized the conflict between the English settlements in the Northeast and the Native Americans and colonists in New France (Canada), yet Haefeli and Sweeney also enable us to understand how Deerfield occupied an amazing crossroads of diverse cultures in colonial North America.”
Other history symposium lectures scheduled include “Concerning the Extra-Legal Persecutions of the Nazi Era,” on Wednesday, Nov. 8, with Henry Friedlander, emeritus professor of history in the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. It will be held in the Bangor Room of the Memorial Union at 3:30 p.m., and is co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Endowment Associates, the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, Hillel, and the UMaine Department of English.
On Wednesday, Dec. 6, John Laband, professor of history at Wilfred Laurier University, will present “Towards an Understanding of the Nature of Zulu Warfare During the Nineteenth Century” at 3:30 p.m.
For more information, please contact Riordan 581-1913 or email: riordan@umit.maine.edu.