Algonquian Diasporas

This chapter examines how King Philip’s War gave rise to a significant but often ignored or misperceived history of bondage, enslavement, and diaspora that took Native Americans far from their northeast homelands, and subjected them to a range of brutal conditions across an Atlantic World. It focuses on Algonquians’ transits into captivity as a consequence of the war, and historicizes this process within longer trajectories of European subjugation of Indigenous populations for labor. The chapter examines how Algonquian individuals and families were forcibly placed into New England colonial as well as Native communities at the war’s conclusion, and how others were transported out of the region for sale across the Atlantic World. The case of King Philip’s wife and son is especially complex, and the chapter considers how traditions around their purported sale into slavery in Bermuda interact with challenging racial politics and archival traces. Modern-day “reconnection” events have linked St. David’s Island community members in Bermuda to Native American tribes in New England. The chapter also reflects on wider dimensions of this Algonquian diaspora, which likely brought Natives to the Caribbean, Azores, and Tangier in North Africa, and propelled Native migrants/refugees into Wabanaki homelands.

Protesting the “Perfect City”

This chapter follows Native and Euro-American communities in eastern Massachusetts through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining a series of commemorations and counterprotests that unfolded in urbanizing areas and related sites. It analyzes how Bostonians’ conceptions of the city and modernity tended to exclude Native peoples from both, instead relegating them to the past—despite the presence of numerous “Urban Indians” in the growing metropolis, who were seeking employment and social opportunities. It considers a series of pageants and historical markers erected across the Commonwealth, as well as Native pushback against dominant Euro-American narratives about history, such as a 1970 gathering in Patuxet/Plymouth, Massachusetts that foregrounded Indigenous perspectives and inaugurated an annual National Day of Mourning. The chapter also details how tribal communities challenged plans to build a sewage treatment plant on Deer Island, on grounds considered intensely sensitive for their ties to the incarcerations of King Philip’s War. Finally, it illuminates a recent series of memorial journeys along the Charles River and Boston Harbor Islands in which mishoonash (Native dugout canoes) have played important roles in reconnecting Native descendants to the landscapes of ancestors, as well as providing avenues for Indigenous solidarities into the future.

The Gathering Place

This chapter focuses on the “Great River” (Kwinitekw or Connecticut River) that runs the length of the Northeast, and the multi-layered histories involved at its midpoint. At Peskeomskut, Algonquians from multiple tribal communities had gathered for thousands of years for fishing, planting, and socializing. This important waterfall came under attack in May 1676 in the latter stages of King Philip’s War, as colonial troops endeavoured to subdue and displace Algonquians who had not surrendered by that point in the conflict. These tensions arose from several decades of colonization in the river valley, which entangled Natives and colonizers in fur-trading relationships that sometimes spiralled into coercion and violence. Following the massacre of 1676 (led by William Turner), many Algonquian survivors regrouped with Native communities in other parts of the Northeast or followed a widespread diaspora in pursuit of safety. The chapter turns to how colonists at places like Deerfield, Massachusetts engaged in remembrance of the violences at the falls and nearby “Bloody Brook,” through ephemeral as well as more tangible processes. It accounts for the emergence of heritage organizations like the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, which pursued an extensive place-marking campaign in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Monumentalizing after “Detribalization,” and Swamp Discourse from Casinos to Carcieri

This chapter examines evolving Narragansett and Euro-American practices around place and memory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on Native adaptations in the wake of the illegal “detribalization” process. It considers Native responses to colonial monuments such as the one erected at Great Swamp in 1906; a growing set of “pan-Indian” practices and tribal efforts to convey Indigenous identities to Yankee neighbors; and the role of the tribal magazine The Narragansett Dawn in fostering inter- and multi-tribal ties across the region. The chapter then considers late twentieth-century debates over federal recognition, sovereignty, and environmentalism, particularly around issues of potential casino gaming and land-into-trust cases, one of which rose all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and carried repercussions across Indian Country. The effects of a violent raid on a tribal-run smoke shop in the early 2000s are also examined. Additionally, the chapter takes up a recent “battlefields” project in the Nipsachuck area where archaeologists, landowners, and tribal community members are reassessing the character and legacies of a pivotal site from 1675-1676, and creating new opportunities for collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and collective understandings.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the interventions made by the preceding chapters on topics of memorialization and placemaking. It asks what “other stories” remain to be told about this conflict and its protracted legacies, and what kinds of sociocultural work are necessary to change public understandings of the past as well as the present. It briefly mentions a series of additional case studies that shed light on alternative dimensions of the war, including Native migrations to Quebec-area communities, and the recent unearthing and identification of the Monhantic Fort in Mashantucket Pequot tribal homelands. Altogether, it underscores the need to understand processes of commemoration within particular historical and geographical contexts, and the importance of revisiting seemingly “final” understandings of the Native Northeast.

Habitations by Narragansett Bay

This chapter unfolds how Narragansetts understood the areas around Narragansett Bay as vital homelands connecting land and water, focusing especially on conceptions of swamps as valuable, powerful locales that served critical ecological functions. It tracks how Narragansetts interacted with early New England colonizers during the formation of Rhode Island, including the exiled Roger Williams, and experienced difficult pressures in the seventeenth century prior to the outbreak of war in 1675, entailing controversies over land, wampum, sovereignty, and trading relationships. It examines the devastating colonial attack on a Narragansett and Wampanoag encampment inside the Great Swamp in December 1675, and how survivors of that devastating massacre regrouped and navigated new challenges in colonial legal arenas and an emerging tribal reservation system. It then examines a series of colonial monumentalizing activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which developed in tandem with rising attitudes of anti-Indian racism and exclusionary politics, culminating in the forced “detribalization” of the Narragansetts by the state of Rhode Island in the 1880s.

Power and Persistence along a Changing River

This chapter follows the evolution of the Great River valley in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an era when industrialization and modernization created anxieties among many Euro-American populations, as well as opportunities for enduring Native communities. It accounts for the emergence of Turners Falls as a planned industrial community that harnessed the current of the river for hydropower, and provided an impetus for conservative place-marking efforts among area antiquarians. The chapter takes up a resurgence of efforts by northeast tribes and organizations endeavouring to protect and reinterpret key areas along the river, including a “reconciliation” staged in the early 2000s between Natives and non-Natives, and debates over the treatment of “ceremonial landscapes” in the face of infrastructure development. It considers the nature of monuments that have been rethought by poets as well as local residents, and the implications of critical “graffiti” on these stones.

Contested Passages

This chapter examines the area around Boston Harbor and how Algonquians as well as Massachusetts Bay colonists engaged in contestations beginning in the seventeenth century. It begins by unpacking how Wampanoag and Massachusett peoples understood such geographies, including the meanings of rivers, maritime spaces, and islands, drawing upon deep-time oral traditions and archaeology. It then follows the arrival of John Winthrop and Puritans into Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and how that colonial enterprise began to exert pressures on Native people through epidemic disease, land loss, and imbalanced diplomatic relationships. The arrival of Protestant missionaries such as John Eliot also transformed certain Natives’ relationships to kin networks, homelands, and spiritual affiliations. When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, Christian-affiliated Natives around the “Praying Town” of Natick, situated on the Charles River, were forcibly rounded up and removed from Natick to an incarceration site on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where they suffered large casualties. The chapter tracks how survivors of Deer Island navigated a challenging postwar landscape and rebuilt their lives and communities. It also examines New England forms of commemoration in the seventeenth century onward, including literary as well as physical types of memorialization.

Introduction

The introduction establishes the significance of King Philip’s War, called the “great watershed” for the powerful ways in which it reshaped Native and colonial communities, lives, and memories in the Northeast. It provides a general overview of historiographical debates on the topic, including the importance of localizing scholarly studies of North America and the Atlantic World; incorporating material culture and ethnography sources as well as documentary/archival evidence; and pursuing “decolonizing methodologies” in which researchers create more reciprocal relationships with tribal descendant communities. The introduction also stresses the necessity of locally grounded “fieldwork,” and highlights some considerations in choosing to focus on historical violence. It emphasizes that the violences of the seventeenth century continue to reverberate among descendant communities—Native as well as Euro-American—and that these legacies merit serious attention.