Murder on the Saltwater Frontier


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The article Murder on the Saltwater Frontier: The Death of John Oldman by Andrew C. Lipman seeks to explain the causes of the Pequot War. Traditional literature paints Native Americans as land dwelling people who generally stayed off of the water. I assume the perception that they were not seafaring people comes from their lack of grand ships, similar to those that carried the Europeans across the Atlantic. This article shows that they were in fact capable of travel on the sea and were skilled navigators. Although they did their travel in small ships and row boats, they were able to use the seas to create an inter-tribe trading network. A popular belief is that the Native Americans lived on the land and the Europeans came from the sea. This establishes a barrier between land and sea that divides the two groups of people. The existence of a sea trading network not only proves that Native Americans were capable of traversing across the water, but it erases the rigid border between land and sea that has divided the cultures for so long. “Saltwater Frontier” was a fantastic term used by Lipman to describe this interactive area. He explains the use of this phase, “The phrase ‘‘saltwater frontier” is meant to evoke the fluid, shifting, and stormy quality of colonial and Native relations in the area” (272).

In her review of this article, Viktoriya had a interesting point in the way that she saw this as a rejection of the thought that the land was Indian territory while the sea was European territory. She continues by saying that the sea was a contested area with both groups competing for all the same things they were competing for on land. I think this analysis is fantastic and shows exceptionally well that the sea, just like the land, was very much an inter-cultural battleground. Accepting the entire coastal area as a new frontier completely changes the way we look at the interactions between Native Americans and early European Settlers.

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