Quite a few books have appeared over the past two decades dealing with enterprising-but-often-marginal individuals who used performances of identity and authority to access power, privilege, or wealth in the American past. Many of these people attained some level of fame or have received sustained attention from subsequent generations of scholars, despite their frequently obscure and underprivileged origins. The newest entry in this catalog of “slippery characters,” as literary scholar Laura Browder termed them, is Jenny Hale Pulsipher’s Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. Taking as her subject the little-known figure of John Wompas (alias White), a 17th-century Nipmuc man, Pulsipher has produced an elegant and revealing microhistorical study that tells us as much or more about the English empire in Native North America as it does about the crafty individual at its center. While we might quibble with the author about whether Wompas was, in fact, an “ordinary Indian” (p. 7), given his central role in a startling number of land transactions and legal maneuvers in New England and Old England, we can certainly appreciate that his life and legacies have been largely ignored or misunderstood. And through her careful analysis, Pulsipher offers a clear and compelling portrait of a man who was “at the heart” of Indian land sales but simultaneously appears to have played a key role in “preserving his homeland” (p. 6). She argues that although his strategic use of both “Native and English political and legal structures” benefitted him personally, he also deftly maneuvered to preserve Native lands in Native hands. Through Pulsipher’s detailed reconstruction, based on what must have been maddeningly fragmentary records, we learn that John Wompas was born around 1637 to Nipmuc parents from the town of Hassanamesit. His mother and father were early converts to Christianity and took pains to ensure that their children would receive religious and educational instruction from area

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主题和“野蛮人”

在过去的 20 年中，出现了相当多的书籍，讲述了在美国过去利用身份和权威的表现来获取权力、特权或财富的有进取心但经常处于边缘地位的个人。这些人中的许多人获得了一定程度的名气或受到了后代学者的持续关注，尽管他们的出身经常晦涩难懂。正如文学学者劳拉·布劳德 (Laura Browder) 所称，这本“狡猾人物”目录中的最新条目是珍妮·黑尔·普尔西弗 (Jenny Hale Pulsipher) 的骗子萨赫姆：卖掉了自己的长子权利、从哈佛辍学并被骗了英国国王的美洲印第安人。以 17 世纪 Nipmuc 男子约翰·沃姆帕斯（化名怀特）的鲜为人知的人物为主题，Pulsipher 进行了一项优雅而富有启发性的微观历史研究，它向我们讲述了北美原住民的英国帝国，就像它对位于其中心的狡猾个体的了解一样多或更多。考虑到他在新英格兰和旧英格兰的大量土地交易和法律活动中发挥的核心作用，我们可能会与作者争辩说 Wompas 实际上是否是“普通印度人”（第 7 页），但我们当然可以意识到他的生平和遗产在很大程度上被忽视或误解了。通过她的仔细分析，Pulsipher 清晰而引人注目地描绘了一个男人，他是印度土地销售的“核心”，但同时似乎在“保护家园”方面发挥了关键作用（第 6 页）。她争辩说，虽然他对“土著和英国政治和法律结构”的战略性使用使他个人受益，但他也巧妙地将土著土地保存在土著人手中。通过 Pulsipher 的详细重建，根据肯定是令人发狂的零碎记录，我们了解到约翰·沃姆帕斯 (John Wompas) 出生于 1637 年左右，父母来自哈萨纳姆西 (Hassanamesit) 镇。他的父母很早就皈依了基督教，并煞费苦心地确保他们的孩子能够接受当地的宗教和教育指导。