Misconception: Land deed contracts demonstrate how Native peoples were not effective negotiators

For context:

Emerson W. Baker, "A Scratch with a Bear's Paw: Anglo-Indian Land Deeds in Early Maine," Ethnohistory, 36, no. 3 (1989): 235-256.

“Finding the Almouchiquois: Native American Families, Territories and Land Sales in Southern Maine.” Ethnohistory, 51, no. 1 (2004): 73-100.

Peter Leavenworth, “The Best Title that Indians Can Claim: Native Agency and Consent in the Transferal of Pennacook-Pawtucket Land in the Seventeenth-Century,” New England Quarterly Vol.72 (1995): 275-300.

Website: Historic Ipswich “That we may avoid the least scrupulo of intrusion” – The Colonists and Indian Land, Part I, Mary Ellen Lepionka

Purchasing of Nahant as recorded in Quarterly Courts of Essex County VII, 1678-1680, 126. Found online:

http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/Essex/vol7/images/essex126.html

Petition of Samuel Belcher of Newbury to the Massachusetts General Court, 1711 from Massachusetts Archives, Massachusetts Archives, Vol.45, Doc.388. Petitioning the court to recognize that his father purchased land along the Merrimack River from an Indian to establish a towne but that the Indian Wars have interfered with this process. Found online at Native Northeast Portal:

https://nativenortheastportal.com/digital-heritage/petition-samuel-belcher-newbury-massachusetts-general-court