In an Early Republic period defined by expansion and concurrent policies such as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, national narratives seemed to have no place for Native Americans. But the novelist and activist Sedgwick offered a different vision of that foundational American community, creating in her historical novel
Hope Leslie a case for what she called (in the book’s preface) “their high-souled courage and patriotism.” And her character Magawisca, a young Pequot woman who narrates to an English audience her own account of the 1637 massacre at Mystic, offers a “new version of an old story,” what Sedgwick calls “putting the chisel in the hands of truth, and giving it to whom it belonged.”