Wabanaki Quarantine, Colonial Conflicts: Rethinking Disease and Colonization in the Early American Northeast, 1676–1766

In my paper, drawn from my ongoing dissertation project, I invert the story of smallpox, Indigenous people, and the settler colonial project. In short, from 1676 to 1763, at least in the early American northeast, smallpox was a much greater threat to settler colonists than it was to the Wabanaki, the Indigenous confederacy who lived across a broad swath of land between Nova Scotia and Vermont. Part of this is the simple fact of how colonists waged war; by massing troops they thought they could strike the definitive blow that gave them the continent, but more often than not all they did was ensure smallpox, one of the most contagious pathogens in human history, had enough susceptible bodies to run roughshod over them. Furthermore, after the Algonquian diaspora—New England Indians who fled from places adjacent to English settlement in the wake of King Philip’s War—brought a smallpox epidemic to the homeland of the Wabanaki, the Wabanaki adapted their lifeways in order to avoid smallpox. From quarantines to blockades and cordons sanitaires, the Wabanaki learned how to protect themselves much better than the colonists ever did. Ultimately, however, with the coming of the Seven Years’ War the British Empire mobilized a vast, largely immune population to bring the fight to them. While thousands of colonists suffered under a hemispheric pandemic, enough British Army regulars were able to exploit differential immunity to, for the first time in nearly a century, threaten the Wabanaki as a whole.