This dissertation explores the active engagement of an American Indian culture with the early modern Atlantic world. It argues that the Wabanaki of the American northeast were a quintessentially maritime-oriented people who time and again looked to the Atlantic as an essential means of mitigating the quotidian rigors of their society and enhancing its overall welfare. This process had sustained native life long before the arrival of Europeans, and afforded it valuable cultural and material resources to assuage the disruptive effects of colonialism from the early sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries. In their exchanges with Euro-Americans, these people increasingly cultivated an array of novel Atlantic opportunities to enrich, augment, and protect their vision of this pelagic world in the face of increasing pressures to redefine its meaning and significance. By shrewdly engaging in trans-Atlantic gift-giving networks, astutely exploiting European imperial conflicts, carefully manipulating economic exchange complexes, respectfully invoking European monarchical authority, and strategically appropriating Euro-American sailing technology, Wabanaki consistently reinforced their presence on the high seas and elaborated their longstanding notion of the Atlantic world: the ocean was a profoundly generative and life-sustaining locus of power.

Yet over the course of the colonial period, Wabanaki came to recognize that their Atlantic vision did not stand alone. As it ran up against European - and later primarily British - efforts to forcefully consolidate the Atlantic into a coherent and far-flung imperial network, Indian marine-warriors decimated and plundered the Euro-American maritime presence to fortify their conception of the Atlantic's opportunity and their command of its waves. Countless imperial and colonial architects struggled relentlessly to rationalize and reign in this corner of the world, but the economic, diplomatic, and martial pursuit of a Wabanaki Atlantic constantly defied their efforts at cohesion. Ashore and afloat, a brutal contestation of oceanic spaces ensued in the northeast, and endured throughout much of the colonial era. British attempts to render the native Atlantic amenable to their own imperial designs gradually made headway in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. By the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the imperial equilibrium that long afforded Indians control of their seas, and nourished so much of their Atlantic vision, had dissolved, and with it the world that sustained their culture for countless generations.