Rebecca Kellogg Ashley

Rebecca Kellogg Ashley (December 22, 1695[1] – August 1757) was an English child captured by allied French, Canadian militia, Iroquois, and Algonquin soldiers in the 1704 Deerfield Raid.[2][3] The Deerfield attack was part of the decade-long Queen Anne's War (the 1702-1713 War of Spanish Succession on the Continent). Rebecca was eight years old when she was taken to Kahnawake with her sister Joanna across the Saint Lawrence River. Eunice Williams was captured in this same raid, as was her father, John Williams who wrote about his captive experience in The Redeemed Captive.[4] Like Eunice and several other children from Deerfield, Rebecca Kellogg was adopted by Haudenosaunee Mohawks in the town of Kahnawake.[5] She married and raised children in the Mohawk Community but later remarried Ben Ashley.[6]

Unlike Eunice, Rebecca Kellogg returned to British colonial territory as an older woman. She married Ben Ashley, and she translated for several Congregational missionaries in Indian missions, including Jonathan Edwards at the Stockbridge Indian Mission.[6] Edwards expressed his admiration for her faith and interpretation skills in many letters.[7] Although she had left Kahnawake, she often lived with the Haudenosaunee and identified as a member of the Mohawk. Rebecca Kellogg Ashley is notable for being an interpreter of early eighteenth-century borderlands and a hybrid individual who mediated cultural exchange on the borderlands. [6]

  1. ^ Notes on Some of the Descendants of Joseph Kellogg of Hadley
  2. ^ Coleman, Emma (1925). New England Captives Carried to Canada Between 1677 and 1760, During the French and Indian Wars. Portland, Oregon: Southworth Press. p. 43.
  3. ^ Haefeli, Evan; Sweeney, Kevin (2006). Captive histories: English, French, and Native narratives of the 1704 Deerfield raid. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 9781558495432.
  4. ^ Williams, John (1989). The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books.
  5. ^ Demos, John (1994). The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred Knopf. ISBN 9780394557823.
  6. ^ a b c Howard, Joy A. J. "Rebecca Kellogg Ashley: Negotiating Identity on the Early American Borderlands, 1704-1757". In Tom Foster (ed.). Women in Early America: Transnational Histories, Rethinking Master Narratives. New York University Press.
  7. ^ "Rebecca Kellogg Ashley". Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University. Retrieved July 20, 2014.