Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD
Saunkskwa, Sachem, Minister: Native kinship and settler church kinship in 17th and 18th-century New England
Political records from 17th-century Massachusetts show that Algonquin people and English colonists defined and valued kinship very differently—civil society for English settlers was based on legal obligations.
Congregational church records, on the other hand, show that the ideal puritan church defined kinship in a way that was astonishingly similar to native kinship. Religious life for English settlers was based on loving bonds of reciprocal relationship.
Bring your knowledge of and questions about Algonquin and English society as Lori shares her work in progress.
Session Handout [59 Pages]
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Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD, (lori.stokes@comcast.net | LinkedIn) is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making thousands of pages of colonial-era Congregational church records available through digitization and transcription. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, particularly the founding decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, during which time the Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands began to preserve and protect their history and identity as English puritans created New England, and forms of church and state that would shape American history for better or worse for centuries to come.