Julia D.  James  ABD  

This dissertation is a localized examination of culture through the perspectives of women on the move during King Philip’s War and the series of wars between the French and British from 1675 to1763. I study the complicated everyday lives of Native women of the northeastern woodlands as wars and the threat of violence ensured that many women, both European and Indian, were taken captive, and otherwise forced to move from their homes either by enemies or kin. Captivity, slavery, religious conversion, and war, more generally, all created willing and unwilling mobility across spaces and across cultures. I argue that women, in these moments of dislocation, both retained and reexamined cultural traditions. I explore what effects that flux had upon not only women, but families, communities, and cultures at large.