Ever since its publication in 1991, Patrick Malone’s The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Madison Books) has served as the standard primer on early Native American “ways of war” and their adaptation through contact with European colonists. Although Malone confined his study to New England in the years 1600 to 1677, The Skulking Way of War established a paradigm that many scholars extended across a broader sweep of time and the whole of the Eastern Woodland culture zone. Wayne Lee has had enough.
The Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lee is a leading authority on early Native American military history whose work is distinguished by attention to the cultural and structural underpinnings of military institutions and practices. His objections to The Skulking Way of War are both semantic and interpretive. In the...
