Red Brethren

Silverman (history, George Washington Univ.; Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871) explores the history of Brothertown and Stockbridge, two Native American communities established in the 1780s in New York. The inhabitants originally hailed from New England and had adopted Christianity in the early 18th century, believing that their conversion would allow them to become equal to whites through cultural accommodation. Never truly accepted because of their ethnicity, the Native Americans developed racial attitudes of their own toward Africans. Despite becoming "civilized," the residents of the two towns were forced to migrate to Wisconsin in the 1820s. Efforts were soon underway to seize their lands by forcing them to Kansas. In response, the Brothertown people renounced their native identity and, in their own eyes, became white through U.S. citizenship in 1839. They quickly rediscovered that they continued to carry an inescapable racial stigma.