The Atlantic Northeast emerged as a distinctive region between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Its largest tribal groupings were the Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Penobscot, and other Wabanaki peoples; the Delaware and other Lenape peoples; and Mohegan, Mohican, Munsee, Narragansett, Pequot, and Wampanoag Indians. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these peoples struggled to survive in the face of depopulation from diseases, warfare, emigration, and other effects of European, particularly English, colonization. Thereafter, they and their communities persisted, despite further marginalization in non-Native law, society, and discourse in the United States and Canada. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Native peoples have begun to resist such marginalization through greater public visibility as celebrities and activists, by regaining some lands and rights, and by proclaiming their own perspectives on their history.
Finding home: Black queer historical scholarship in the United States Part II