Neal Salisbury

1940 - 2022

Neal Salisbury

Easthampton, MA — Neal Emerson Salisbury, professor emeritus of history at Smith College, died on May 27, 2022. It was a good death, coming while he was still optimistic and pain-free; his wife and daughter held his hands. Just the day before, his nurse asked, "Neal, how do you feel?" He replied, "Like a rolling stone."

Neal taught courses on Native American and colonial/revolutionary North America from 1973 until his retirement in 2008. His research and writing centered on Indigenous history as a vital dimension of American history; he was one of the first to acknowledge Native Americans' history before European contact. With a focus on New England, circa 1500–1700, he drew on the work of fellow historians as well as scholars in Native American/Indigenous studies, anthropology, and archaeology. His work presented this history on its own terms, countering narratives established by colonizers that continued to pervade academic scholarship, popular culture, and political discourse.

He was awarded fellowships by the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Warren Center at Harvard, the National Humanities Center, and the American Antiquarian Society. A past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, in 2017 he received the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award. Neal was a founding member of the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Seminar.

Neal's publications include The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson, with Related Documents, edited with an Introduction by Neal Salisbury. (2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2017); The People: A History of Native America, with R. David Edmunds and Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston: Cengage, 2007); A Companion to American Indian History, edited with Philip J. Deloria (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500 1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Neal grew up in the undeveloped, unpaved San Fernando Valley. For a while, his family of eight lived in one room. His mother Carol was a homemaker and his father, Clark, was a draftsman who became an early aerospace engineer. Neal taught himself to read before starting school. He was studious and polite until high school when he realized being smart wasn't cool, and he began, as he put it, "to hang out with the hoods." He graduated with a 2.2 GPA.

Watching his friends fall to drugs and despair, he went back to school. Yet a week after his 18th birthday, Neal was caught driving friends to a rumble. The only one of legal age, he was made an example of, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon—a tire iron locked in the trunk—and sentenced to four weekends in jail, released weekdays for school. At Pierce Junior College, Walter Porges introduced Neal and other young students to the world of ideas. Even so, Neal flunked out of Pierce. Some time later, with Porges' help, he was admitted to UCLA, which was then tuition-free for in-state students. To get by, he took odd jobs, working as a drugstore clerk, cab driver, and interviewer for the psych department. He briefly worked the graveyard shift at a Chevy plant but was fired for falling asleep under one of the machines.

Seeing his promise and intellectual talent, the UCLA history department bent their requirements to admit him into the graduate program. He studied under the young new hire, social historian Gary Nash, whose work influenced Neal to look beyond traditional sources. Until then, early American history had been studied primarily through the writings of white Europeans. Native Americans were typically portrayed as if their history began with the arrival of Europeans. Neal was one of the first scholars to dismantle that idea and to study the pre-contact period from the point of view of Indigenous Peoples. His work proved instrumental in shifting public perception of Native Americans. Over time his work has been expanded on and enriched by Indigenous People, women, and people of color, many of whom he mentored. He encouraged them to enter the field and redefine its terms; he championed respect for their contributions. These ideas have spread from academia to K-12 school curricula.

In December 1968, while Neal was still in graduate school, he met Dana Wallach, a Berkeley undergraduate. Immediately smitten with one another, they were married by the Minister of the Free Church in Berkeley, Calif. in January 1970, taking the simple vow: "I promise to try to love you." Their much-loved daughter, Cleo, was born in Northampton, Mass. in December 1975.

Neal was welcoming, kind, respectful, and loving. Unpretentious, thoughtful, attentive, and steady, he had no interest in competition or pieties and withdrew in the presence of inflated egos. He had a stealth sense of humor. Reserved and slow talking, speaking did not come easily to him; eventually he grew to become an effective teacher. The symposium held when he retired included some of the most respected and adventurous minds in the growing field of Indigenous Studies.

He was passionate about music, especially experimental jazz—he was a member of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares—and he loved film.

Neal is survived by his wife Dana Wallach Salisbury of Easthampton, Mass.; daughter Cleo Salisbury of San Carlos, Calif., her husband Tony Lobay, their children Zeke and Niabelle; brother Clyde Salisbury and his wife Shirlee Read; brother Keith Salisbury and his wife Kim Packard; Dana's extended family of siblings and cousins, and the offspring and grand-offspring of all of the above.

A Memorial is planned for early September in Western Mass.