ABSTRACT
Benjamin Hawes fought for Jacob Seeknout’s political legitimacy by deploying concepts of sexual legitimacy. Hawes’ argument wove European concepts of legitimate paternity together with his understanding of Indian “custom”. Hawes helped to forge one of the earliest instances of customary law in the British colonial experience. The Seeknout case exposes some of the ways in which Indian legal cultures may have been altered and then erased by English colonization. It also reveals the role of legal processes in creating historical narratives of Indian identity and Indian invisibility. Of the literally hundreds of southern New England colonial and county court trials on bastardy and fornication, only a handful involved Indian defendants. Legal prosecutions of fornication and bastardy show that most English officials did not monitor Indian fornication. Hawes, in substituting captivity narratives for local experience, contributed to the erasure of New England’s Indians, an erasure that would eventually culminate in their almost total invisibility to generations of colonial historians.
