Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer

Reviewed by: Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer Caroline Wigginton (bio) Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer Harvard University Press, 2021 who were the susquehannocks? Most scholars of seventeenth-century eastern North America have encountered the name of this Indigenous confederacy—whose territories during this period were primarily in what is now Virginia—in colonial records, but no contemporary tribal nation self-identifies using this name or any of its other endo- and exonymns, such as Minqua, Gandastogue, or Andastes. Today, Susquehannock descendants live among Lenape, Haudenosaunee, and other peoples rather than constituting an autonomous tribal nation. Yet, as Matthew Kruer’s deeply archival historiography Time of Anarchy shows, Susquehannock was a small nation which, through its network of relationships, held influence “out of proportion to its numbers” (4). As he explains, from 1675 to 1685 (the titular “time of anarchy”), Susquehannocks “connect[ed]” to “dozens of peoples and colonies in a spasm of conflict that washed over eastern North America” (4). Kruer asserts that his “book tells, for the first time, the history of the Susquehannock migrations and their ramifications in the English colonies” (6). Time of Anarchy begins with Virginia and the region’s seventeenth-century Native and colonial context, including an overview of the limited knowledge scholars have regarding the Susquehannock. Subsequently, the book becomes what is often a martial and political history of the late 1600s, one that explains the role that mid-Atlantic Indigenous peoples, especially but not only the Susquehannocks, played in conflicts as well as social and political realignments. Of the events Kruer narrates through a Susquehannock lens, Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–77), which pitted factions of Virginia’s Black and white newcomers against each other and against Native peoples, is arguably the most studied; one of its early signal incidents was an assault by Nathaniel Bacon’s Volunteers on Occaneechi Island and its Native inhabitants, a battle that led to what Kruer evocatively terms the “Susquehannock Scattering.” Chapter 3 and beyond follow the trails and effects of the scattering south, north, and west as well as within Virginia. Through the Susquehannock Scattering, Kruer connects far-flung events from Carolina to New York, Quebec, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. These events parallel [End Page 84] those of Metacom’s War (1675–78) in northeastern North America, as brilliantly narrated by Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) in Our Beloved Kin: Remapping A New History of King Philip’s War (2019). Though the title refers to settler colonial descriptions of this decade (6), the thread that may interest NAIS readers who research this period and region is Susquehannock maintenance of order in the midst of cataclysmic disorder. Though fragmented, the Susquehannocks continued by relying on a network of relationships. Even as they scattered, they merged, transformed, and confederated. NAIS readers may also be interested in the many other interconnected Native peoples and figures, one of which, in another parallel to Our Beloved Kin, is an influential and savvy woman leader, in this instance Pamunkey weroansqua Cockacoeske (156–63). So far, this review might suggest that Time of Anarchy is a book about the Susquehannocks. And it is. But it is simultaneously a book about Bacon’s Rebellion, late seventeenth-century Virginia and mid-Atlantic colonial politics, and the region’s Indigenous peoples. Methodologically, it is an historiography, organized chronologically, which relies on an astounding array of documentary sources compiled from dozens of U.S. and British collections. But with each chapter, it also “employs a different mode of analysis”—for example, emotional cultures, conspiracy theory, racial thinking—in order to activate diverse bodies of “interdisciplinary literature” and delineate how different “phenomena . . . drove different phases of the Time of Anarchy” (7). In addition to these modes—mostly drawn from outside NAIS—the book “interpret[s]” primary sources “through the lens of ethnohistory and the methods developed by scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies” (9). For Kruer, this dual ethnohistorical-NAIS methodology means “using sources produced by Natives whenever possible and reading them with an eye toward Indigenous epistemologies.” “It also requires,” he continues, “using colonial documents without privileging...

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