The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

The figure of Eunice Williams takes center stage in Demos’s re-telling of the Deerfield massacre. Using her story as a focal point, Demos is able to explore themes of cultural identity and transformation more deeply. As Eunice is the daughter of a widely respected Puritan minister, her transformation and nearly full assimilation into Mohawk culture underscores the fluid nature of identity, and it draws attention to the numerous, crisscrossing cultural currents that characterized colonial New England.

Eunice’s assimilation into Kahnawake culture began almost immediately upon her capture, when she was just seven years old. In Chapter 4, Demos talks about the practice of adoption that was commonplace in the captive process: “And there was the matter of ‘adoption’—of incorporating (some, not all) captives into particular Indian families. This […] was an old practice among native peoples of the North American woodlands, and clearly it survived among the ‘French Indians’ of Canada” (81). Eunice, by all accounts, was embraced by her new family very quickly: “But she belongs now to the Indians—to the Mohawk residents of the mission ‘fort’ near Montreal called, by the French, St. Francois Xavier du Sault St. Louis, and, by the residents themselves, Kahnawake” (36).