Rebecca Kellogg Ashley

Rebecca Kellogg Ashley (December 22, 1695^[1] – August 1757) was an English child captured by allied French, Canadian militia, Iroquois, and Algonquin soldiers in the 1704 Deerfield Raid.^[2][3] The Deerfield attack was part of the decade-long Queen Anne's War (the 1702-1713 War of Spanish Succession on the Continent). Rebecca was eight years old when she was taken to Kahnawake with her sister Joanna across the Saint Lawrence River. Eunice Williams was captured in this same raid, as was her father, John Williams who wrote about his captive experience in The Redeemed Captive.^[4] Like Eunice and several other children from Deerfield, Rebecca Kellogg was adopted by Haudenosaunee Mohawks in the town of Kahnawake.^[5] She married and raised children in the Mohawk Community but later remarried Ben Ashley.^[6]

Unlike Eunice, Rebecca Kellogg returned to British colonial territory as an older woman. She married Ben Ashley, and she translated for several Congregational missionaries in Indian missions, including Jonathan Edwards at the Stockbridge Indian Mission.^[6] Edwards expressed his admiration for her faith and interpretation skills in many letters.^[7] Although she had left Kahnawake, she often lived with the Haudenosaunee and identified as a member of the Mohawk. Rebecca Kellogg Ashley is notable for being an interpreter of early eighteenth-century borderlands and a hybrid individual who mediated cultural exchange on the borderlands. ^[6]