The middle ground

Ann Marie Plane: Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England

The author discusses the interactions between Indians and the English Colonists in Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Plymouth, Connecticut, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in the late 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. She focuses primarily on the vastly different understandings of conjugal union. For the Indians in the pre-colonial world the most important and enduring links between adult men and women were those of clan affiliation and kinship, whereas the English regarded marriage as the most important factor. In their view marriage and hence household and family mirrored the larger society in miniature. They feared that Native practices such as premarital sex, polygyny and easy divorce imposed a threat to destabilize the orderly communities central to the Puritan agenda.
I assume that Plane wants to reveal how intimate relationships "not only reflected the influence of European colon...