This study examines the perceptions and treatment of older Native American adults in colonial New England (1620-1783). Social scientists have found that varying degrees of persistence and change have historically characterized Indian attitudes toward older adults in communities located in the central and western United States. In regards to northeastern North America, historians have learned that, during the colonial period, older Europeans dealt with a variety of attitudes and experiences. This study examines how English colonists and Indians viewed and treated older Native American adults in part of northeastern North America. Available documents show that while indigenous persons valued and respected older adults before and throughout the colonial period, English colonists, particularly among the clergy, held more mixed views of older Native Americans, including notions that they were frail and stubborn.

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Chapter 1 introduces the elderly in non-Western societies. Specifically for this text, Cliggett addresses support systems in rural Africa and the role that gender plays in one's ability to strategize and obtain support. At one time, old age homes were closed due to the overriding belief that caring for the elderly was a duty and privilege that should be the responsibility of the clan rather than the government. Chapter 2 discusses not only her fieldwork experience itself but also her argument that ''personal interests, theoretical models, data collection methods, and lived experience inform each other; they do not exist separately or in a linear path of intellectual development'' (p. xiii). Chapter 3 details the history of Zambia in addition to the Gwembe Valley. The author also touches on vulnerability and the evolution of how the older men and women have divergent access to crucial resources for support and survival.Chapters 4-6 discuss varying aspects of village life experienced by the Gwembe people including gender differing relationships between relatives and neighbors. Chapter 4 focuses on the village economy and livelihoods, whereas Chapter 5 focuses on domestic units and gender specific preferences for living arrangements. Chapter 6 concludes the overview of village life discussing the elderly role in ritual and supernatural activity affecting the ability to control or manipulate resources. The text concludes in Chapter 7 with the migration of younger family members moving away from the clans and homesteads and the effects that distance and time have on relationships of the elderly and their support structures.Grains From Grass is unique and valuable in that it not only offers anthropological snapshots of the times that Cliggett was present and studied in the Gwembe Valley, but also provides a longitudinal study rich with census detail for over six decades. Rich insights are available from the current struggles of the people of the area, including the elderly, and the historical perspective that is used, which allows one to mark the evolution of how genders have changed through the years in their ability and ingenuity to rally their own support for survival. The lessons learned from this text are many-it is not just a study of the impoverished and aging in Africa. Grains From Grass broadens a Western mindset about clan kin relations in Africa and the transferable hardships that the elderly face whether in a land where famine and survival of will and limited resources are the norm or in a developed country that allows its elderly to slip through the cracks.