Description
Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696–1780) used to be captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like every other young girl within the tribe. At age twelve, she used to be enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the remainder of her life, in the end becoming the order’s only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North The us, Wheelwright’s life used to be exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. This meticulously researched book discovers her life throughout the communities of women and girls around her: the free and enslaved women who raised her in Wells, Maine; the Wabanaki women who cared for her, catechized her, and taught her to work as an Indian girl; the French-Canadian and Native girls who were her classmates within the Ursuline school; and the Ursuline nuns who led her to a spiritual life.