American Indian Languages and the Law of Property in Colonial America

This paper argues for a new view of land transfers in seventeenth-century New England that attends not only to the Puritans' conception of land but also to the competing conceptualization of land by the Indians. To get an historically accurate picture of land transfers, I argue, we must look beyond the existing archive of deeds, charters, and patents, to the artifacts of culture that reside not only in the written language used by the Puritans, but in the spoken language used by the Algonkian Indians as it was represented by writers like Roger Williams and John Eliot in phrase books, grammars, dialogues, and translations.