Although there are points throughout Captivity and Restoration which Mary portrays the Indians favorably, her overall opinion is that they are savages. Most of the book has to be read before an example of Indian kindness is provided. Mary is freezing and starving for almost all of her time as a captive. One night she meets an old woman who provides her with food, blankets and a seat near a fire, and tells her to come around whenever. This positive representation is by and large the exception. Constantly in Mary’s depictions of events, her captors are described as cruel, unstable and violent. In one instance, Mary was told to leave a wigwam but she refused because she thought it was not a good decision. Then immediately a man stood up and “drew his sword and told me he would run me through if I did not go presently.”(41) Mary goes on to say that she saw this same man walking around Boston years later “Under the appearance of a friend Indian”(41).
Clearly based on the amount of negative representations of Indians, Mary believes them to be savages, incapable of living harmoniously with whites. She does however believe that some Indians are capable of acting in an appropriate way. She refers to them as “friend Indians”. It took much of her time in captivity to meet a friend Indian but this doesn’t have to signify that most Indians are cruel. Perhaps the Indians that kept her were just less good hearted because they saw her as nothing more than a prisoner.
I think she is more hostile to her “master” for the very reason that he is her master. The rotation of the power dynamic of American Indians and colonists, in the mind of Rowlandson, was completed flipped on its head. The Indian family that kept her came to directly represent this change and I think Rowlandson deeply resented them for that. Whereas other American Indians were not directly referred to as her “master” so she was more likely to see them in a positive light.
I am impressed about the fact that she actually changed her mind in the end to some extent, as her attitudes towards the Indians altered from “completely barbaric pagans” to eventually “some of them are friendly”. I guess the Indians did not go harsh on her because she was just a powerless woman with no threats. The situation for a prisoner could be much worse
At the beginning of the book, when the town is destroyed and its people are either killed or captured, the line between “savage” and “civilized” is quite clear in the eyes of Mary. As we follow her through her time in captivity, that line does in fact become blurred. She realizes that the Indians really are not savages at all. Instead, they too are humans, with the only difference being their lifestyle and culture. They are still people, capable of the same things the colonists are. Mary realized that she and the colonists are not much different. All humans are capable of being friendly and compassionate, but also violent and ruthless. By the end of the book, Mary respected the Indians and at the same time realized that her society and culture are not perfect.
I think one detail in particular that shows that she- at least at times- doubts the ability to have harmonious relationships with American Indians is in her portrayal of “Praying Indians” people who supposedly had already been lightly assimilated into European culture by converting to Christianity. Rowlandson does not depict these Praying Indians with the same love and positivity she does with her Christian neighbors. The Christians from back home helped her get her children back and assisted her family in a time of need, supposedly out of love, whereas the Praying Indians are seen as possibly the most aggressive and savage of the Native Americans she encountered.