Cultures in dialogue

In his 1710 characterization of Praying Indians as “Divided in the[ir] Desires” over culture change, New England Company official Samuel Sewall captured an important dynamic of community life in early eighteenth-century Natick. Indians drew upon both Indian and English cultural practices in shaping their community, as they had from the beginning. Though Sewall emphasized language as a central point of contention, which it surely was, cultural debates involved a full range of social institutions in the community. But it was the outcome of cultural negotiations about land, in particular, which stemmed from the Indians’ divided desires, that both magnified crucial divisions within the Indian community, and created the fault lines that eventually eroded Indian autonomy by facilitating English landownership in Natick.