ABSTRACT
In the late eighteenth century, New England town “fathers” and individual Native Americans dealt with each other repeatedly across the space of a council table. In these encounters, British-American officials used English poor laws to regulate a remnant of conquered and colonized people. Native women suffered particularly from the actions of officials who applied the poor law, with the result that poverty became not only racialized but feminized. This chapter argues that despite the gender-neutral and colour-neutral character of the laws, Indian women were among those least likely to benefit from the safety net deployed by town officials to rescue the poorest inhabitants in eighteenth-century Rhode Island. Town leaders’ treatment of Indian women reveals official sensibilities about race and gender. When the town leaders spoke of “the poor of the town” or “the town’s poor”, they were referring to a smaller group of dependent people distinct from the larger group of the independent poorer sort.
