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Living with Whales
Documents and Oral Histories of Native New England Whaling History
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
Series: Native Americans of the Northeast
232 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.70 in, 23 b&w illus.
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Native Americans along the coasts of southern New England and Long Island have had close ties to whales for thousands of years. They made a living from the sea and saw in the world's largest beings special power and meaning. After English settlement in the early seventeenth century, the region's natural bounty of these creatures drew Natives and colonists alike to develop whale hunting on an industrial scale. By the nineteenth century, New England dominated the world in whaling, and Native Americans contributed substantially to whaleship crews.
In Living with Whales, Nancy Shoemaker reconstructs the history of Native whaling in New England through a diversity of primary documents: explorers' descriptions of their "first encounters," indentures, deeds, merchants' accounts, Indian overseer reports, crew lists, memoirs, obituaries, and excerpts from journals kept by Native whalemen on their voyages. These materials span the centuries-long rise and fall of the American whalefishery and give insight into the far-reaching impact of whaling on Native North American communities. One chapter even follows a Pequot Native to New Zealand, where many of his Maori descendants still reside today.
Whaling has left behind a legacy of ambivalent emotions. In oral histories included in this volume, descendants of Wampanoag and Shinnecock whalemen reflect on how whales, whaling, and the ocean were vital to the survival of coastal Native communities in the Northeast, but at great cost to human life, family life, whales, and the ocean environment.
In Living with Whales, Nancy Shoemaker reconstructs the history of Native whaling in New England through a diversity of primary documents: explorers' descriptions of their "first encounters," indentures, deeds, merchants' accounts, Indian overseer reports, crew lists, memoirs, obituaries, and excerpts from journals kept by Native whalemen on their voyages. These materials span the centuries-long rise and fall of the American whalefishery and give insight into the far-reaching impact of whaling on Native North American communities. One chapter even follows a Pequot Native to New Zealand, where many of his Maori descendants still reside today.
Whaling has left behind a legacy of ambivalent emotions. In oral histories included in this volume, descendants of Wampanoag and Shinnecock whalemen reflect on how whales, whaling, and the ocean were vital to the survival of coastal Native communities in the Northeast, but at great cost to human life, family life, whales, and the ocean environment.
Nancy Shoemaker is professor of history at the University of Connecticut.
"Living with Whales demonstrates the importance of whaling, and connections to the sea generally, among New England and Long Island Indians from ancient times up to the present. Shoemaker is one of this field's pole stars. Everything she writes is highly original, important, and seamlessly executed. This special volume is no exception."—David J. Silverman, author of Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America
"The book is very thoroughly researched, and offers a wide range of material."—ProtoView
"Impressive facts surface, including the oral tradition that Native Americans repeatedly rescued slaves by river at Richmond, Virginia. This work provides new, thought-provoking information that will interest historians. Recommended."—Choice
"Oral histories of descendants of Wampanoag and Shinnecock whalemen provide a valuable bridge to past generations, informing us of such subjects as Native participation in returning enslaved Africans to their continent; and the importance of the whale in Native religious practices. The cumulative effect of this book is to both substantiate and valorize 'the vital importance of Native whalemen's labor to both the industry's development and the survival of Native communities" (199). Almost every chapter of the book includes a section "For Further Reading " containing additional sources of study, including both print and electronic resources. After reading this book, readers' appetites will likely be whetted, and they will take the opportunity for further study."—Nautilus Journal
"Shoemaker's work would be of great value just for the painstaking research she undertook to build a register of hundreds of Native American whalers whose work otherwise might well be forgotten. . . . As a skilled historian, Shoemaker makes sure that we keep myriad facets in mind when we contemplate the place of Native Americans among those men who went whaling in their wooden ships two centuries ago."—Environmental History
"While recent oral history projects document crises across the world as they occur and others remain confined to living memory, Shoemaker's work invites us to stretch ourselves methodologically and reach backwards beyond traditional historiographical bounds."—Oral History Review
"Nancy Shoemaker has added immeasurably to the whaling archive and to our understandings of race, its construction, and its history. in Living with Whales her meticulous archival research results in a vast array of assembled documents, which she has read with forensic precision."—Journal of Pacific History
Winner of the 2014 John Lyman Book Award for Naval and Maritime Reference Works and Published Primary Sources
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