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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

        This history of "The Tribes and the States" is not to be regarded as the work of any individual. There runs through the entire history, as a continuous thread, the mention of the Tribe of the Okamakammessets, whose version of  American history this claims to be. This organization is supposed, according to the version of history described in this work, to have been originally an actual tribe of Indians inhabiting Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and forming an important unit of the Penacook Federation; and later, without losing its continuity of organization, gradually becoming a sort of group working quietly, and without showing its hand, for the restoration in modern America of the same principles for which the Penacook federation once stood. Whether, and to what extent, such a society is acting as a nucleus in modern America, or whether it has any claim to continuity with the old Indian tribe whose name it bears, is, for the reader's purpose, irrelevant: it is of interest to see the new point of view towards America that can be presented from that angle.

        The function of the editor of this history is merely that of a compiler. The material is partly the legends and traditions of the tribe itself, some of which are embodied in its poems, which are freely quoted throughout this history; partly well-known historical facts and dates, as interpreted from this different point of view; partly facts which are definitely known but which the ordinary history fails to bring out because varying from the standard "patriotic" point of view―all originally presented by the "tribe" as isolated material, but in this history for the first time woven into continuous whole.

        There are certain definite departures from the common and well-known points of view regarding America and its past that the reader will notice. At the opening, it is obvious that the beginnings of American history are sought not in Europe but here in America, among the peoples who originally inhabited this country, and the characteristics of the various parts of the country are treated as directly traceable to the varying characteristics and customs of the early tribes in the same regions. The tribes of Indians are considered, not as savages or barbarians who created nothing of importance, but as the real founders of the best and most important parts of modern American institutions: federation, democracy, postal service, written constitutions, the idea of individual rights, are among the many things which, according to this version of history, modern America owes to its red predecessors. And, as a corollary, the coming of the white people to America, which, from the standard point of view, starting American history in Europe, was a series of discoveries, is here treated as a series of invasions from Europe by a barbarous people who understood nothing of American institutions, but who, in the very process of overrunning the continent, acquired, at least partially, many of the ways of doing things that they found on this side of the ocean, and civilized themselves, and even their original home countries, in the process.

        On account of this point of view of the origin of American history, it might seem to the reader at first that he is dealing with a history of the Indian tribes; but nothing could be further from the truth. There is no attempt to deal with Indians as such, but rather a history of the American people from early times down to the present―that is, Indians when they were inhabiting America, then following the invasions and the consequent changing nature of America's population, but at all times dealing specifically with the people of America. The history is thus not a history from the point of view of ancestry, but rather of locality. The idea developed is that in each locality there is a certain continuity of tradition that persists in spite of the changing character of its population―not that the geographical characteristics compel this, as some have supposed, but rather that each successive wave of invasion or immigration acquires the traditions from the previous inhabitants of the region.

        To those who have been used to reading into American history the idea that the administration is always right, or that the people always follow the governing power, or that it is un-American for the people to take the law into their own hands, this version of American history might prove somewhat of a shock. And yet the compiler of this "tribal version of American history feels that this version is more truly American than that which promotes governmental versions of patriotism, in that it revives and represents much more nearly the principles of the Declaration of Independence in which lie the real foundations of the world's greatest Federation. And it can surely be no disparagement to trace this federation to the world's first federation, and to the first democratic federation, both of which originated within the very same country.