Memory Lands: King Philip's War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast 9780300231120

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Memory Lands

the henry roe cloud series on american indians and modernity

Named in honor of the pioneering Winnebago educational reformer and first known American Indian graduate of Yale College, Henry Roe Cloud (class of 1910), this series showcases emergent and leading scholarship in the field of American Indian Studies. The series draws upon multiple disciplinary perspectives and organizes them around the place of Native Americans in the development of American and European modernity, emphasizing the shared, relational ties between indigenous and Euro-American societies. It seeks to broaden current historic, literary, and cultural approaches to American Studies by foregrounding the fraught but generative sites of inquiry provided by the study of indigenous communities. Series Editors NED BLACKHAWK Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University

KATE W. SHANLEY Native American Studies, University of Montana

Memory L ands

 K ing Phil ip’s Wa r a nd t he Pl ace of Viol ence in t he Nor t he a s t

Christine M. DeLucia

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund and the income of the Frederick John Kingsbury Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. “The River Will Not Testify,” from A MAYAN ASTRONOMER IN HELL’S KITCHEN

by Martín Espada. Copyright © 2000 by

Martín Espada. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940588 ISBN 978–0–300–20117–8 (cloth : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For all of my teachers, past and present

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Of all Writings, those that are historical, specially while the things mentioned are fresh in memory, and the actors themselves surviving, had need be pursued with a wary pace. —William Hubbard, Colonial minister and historian at Ipswich, Massachusetts, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England (1677) I have thought it proper to be heard in behalf of my oppressed countrymen; and I now, through the medium of the printing press, and in book form, speak to the understanding and sense of justice of the reading public. —Zerviah Gould Mitchell, Wampanoag, Preface to Indian History, Biography and Genealogy: Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag Tribe, and His Descendants (1878) [M]any things of great Antiquitie are fresh in memory. —Edward Winslow, Plymouth colonist, describing Wampanoag memorializing and place-marking practices, Good Newes from New-England (1624)

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Contents

Preface: Memories of Corn and Quartz—Rethinking Stories of Violence and Survivance xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Placemaking and Memorializing After the Great Watershed 1 Part I | The Way to Deer Island 1. Contested Passages: Coastal and Inland Homelands, Bastoniak, and Internment by the “City Upon a Hill” 29 2. Protesting the “Perfect City”: Reorganizing Native Memoryscapes across Greater Boston 84 Part II | The Narragansett Country 3. Habitations by Narragansett Bay: Coastal Homelands, Encounters with Roger Williams, and Routes to Great Swamp 121 4. Monumentalizing after “Detribalization,” and Swamp Discourse from Casinos to Carcieri 164

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Part III | The Great River 5. The Gathering Place: A Trafficked Waterway, Dawn Massacre, and Material Legacies of the “Falls Fight” 203 6. Power and Persistence along a Changing River: Industrial Transformations, Ceremonial Landscapes, and Contemporary Reconciliations 254 Part IV | The Red Atlantic 7. Algonquian Diasporas: Indigenous Bondages, Fugitive Geographies, and the Edges of Atlantic Memories 289 Conclusion: Reopening History 325 List of Abbreviations 331 Notes

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Preface Memories of Corn and Quartz: Rethinking Stories of Violence and Survivance

A kernel of corn, a chunk of quartz. Timothy Alden, Jr., tried to preserve these objects for posterity by donating them in March 1815 to the newly founded American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Both items, the minister indicated, bore direct connections to King Philip’s War. That crisis constituted one of the most devastating periods in the history of the early American Northeast: it traumatically entangled the region’s diverse Algonquian communities with expansionist New England colonizers from 1675 to 1678, bearing long-term consequences for peoples across the region. It also produced memorial touchstones—or purported ones, at least. The kernel of corn was charred and perhaps still faintly smelled acrid from conflagration. According to the brief details Alden conveyed to the society, the corn came from Scarborough, part of the tenuously colonized coast of Maine. It was linked to the year 1676, when colonial settlements there experienced intensive pushback from Wabanaki forces confronting English pressures. As for the quartz, it had been removed from “MonTop,” or Mount Hope, the homegrounds of the Pokanoket Wampanoag leader Philip and an area later claimed by Rhode Island. After galvanizing and helping lead an extraordinary multitribal uprising, Philip died violently at that same place in August 1676. Connected through stories to these powerful events and places, the corn and quartz supported extensive commemorative labors by Euro-Americans in the United States’ formative years. The objects appeared to signify the terrifying savagery of Indigenous opponents, as well as their eventual resounding defeat, opening the way for unfettered colonial growth across land and water. By that logic, these unsettling mementos deserved to be removed from their original contexts, collected, possessed, and venerated.1

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As I write this, corn is growing higher in fields up and down the Kwinitekw. The Kwinitekw—or Connecticut, or Great River—was an ancient, fertile crossroads for multiple tribal groups, as well as a magnetically attractive corridor for fur-trading and crop-planting European migrants. The river valley fell under intense conflict in the seventeenth century, with shifting coalitions of Natives and colonists actively seeking to destroy one another’s resources and footholds in meaningful places—and to shape the remembrance of those same events over subsequent centuries. Witnessing the harvest cycles here reminds me that corn and stone, like the pieces Alden proudly donated, can open into radically different interpretations than the ones most readily available to him and his Euro-American contemporaries. Objects like these demand alternative accountings, especially if we are to reckon more comprehensively with the Indigenous landscapes that surrounded Alden and other New Englanders over a century after King Philip’s War concluded and still endure in the twenty-first century. Many early Americans were unable, or unwilling, to recognize postwar Indigenous continuance across the Northeast. To do so threatened to undermine entrenched mythologies essential to EuroAmerican existence. The regrouping, adaptation, and mobility of Algonquian survivors and their descendants challenged closely held conceptions of colonial origins, morality, and legitimacy as residents in specific places. These mythologies have maintained enormous traction for more than three centuries. Yet equally critical stories have long existed among Indigenous vantages. Corn was one of the materials highlighted by Frank James (Wamsutta), an Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal community member, in a very public speech of late November 1970.2 He delivered it in the iconic locale of Plymouth, Massachusetts, known in Native geographies as Patuxet. James had been invited to speak at a nontribal Thanksgiving gathering, but his remarks were suppressed upon review of their contents, as he recalled it. Indeed, the narrative James intended to share gave little credence to popular U.S. mythologies of conciliatory Native-colonial relations. He eventually did air this narrative during a countercommemoration that came to be called the National Day of Mourning. Held every year since, this commemoration has revisited foundational encounters from Indigenous perspectives. James noted in 1970 that one of the first actions Pilgrims took upon arrival in Wampanoag homelands was disinterring ancestral human remains, as well as “corn and beans” that tribal community members had deliberately cached within the earth for use during wintertime. Those damages—attested to by colonists themselves—set the tone for tense relationships and repeated attempts at peacemaking for the

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initial decades of “contacts,” until outright violence exploded in 1675, just east of Philip’s homegrounds at Mount Hope. The National Day of Mourning gathering takes place annually on the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday at the top of a prominent hill overlooking the harbor (fig. 1). When I attended in 2014 on a frigid November day, the assembled crowd and I had clear views of two potent stones. Down by the water stands the so-called “Plymouth Rock,” now enshrined under a protective stone canopy. Alden had an abiding affection for this and nearby features associated with early New English colonization, and he donated a “Specimen of the Rock at Plymouth on which our forefathers landed 1620” to the Antiquarian Society. (Similar-minded Euro-Americans amassed many alleged fragments of

Figure 1. A crowd of Native Americans and supporters gathers for the National Day of Mourning in November 2014. This commemoration, held since 1970 in Patuxet/ Plymouth, Massachusetts, recalls Indigenous histories and the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, publicly challenging dominant Thanksgiving Day narratives about supposedly amicable Native-colonial relations. In addition, speakers emphasize the survival and resilience of Native communities and nations within the Northeast and beyond. The event is held atop a high point (Cole’s Hill), by a statue of the seventeenthcentury Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and a memorial stone recognizing the purpose of Day of Mourning activities. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

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these rocks, including an example from my own college’s museum collections,3 fig. 2.) Above, on the hilltop, stands a boulder bearing a memorial plaque installed in response to Indigenous activists’ calls for change. It reminds passersby of the myriad destructive consequences of colonization for Indigenous peoples: “the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture.” If you walk farther into town, you will find another memorial boulder recognizing Philip (also known as Metacom or Metacomet) and his role in fostering regional intertribal unity to “defend their homelands against encroachment.” Altogether, these installations relate intensely divergent accounts of the past and its contemporary resonances, yet they coexist uneasily within a shared harborscape on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

Figure 2. A fragment of stone described as coming from “Forefathers Rock” in Plymouth, Massachusetts is in the foreground, accompanied by the paper in which a collector wrapped it. Many Euro-American antiquarians collected mementos evocative of the early English colonial era and specifically associated with settlement at Plymouth—known Indigenously as Patuxet, part of Massachusett-Wampanoag homelands. Timothy Alden, Jr., deposited one such “specimen” at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. (Many of the society’s object collections have since been deaccessioned.) This example was deposited at the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum at Mount Holyoke College. (Image courtesy of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts)

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Alden made it clear which narratives he endorsed. The year before his donation he published a brief discourse about Mount Hope, characterizing Philip as an intractable obstacle to colonial growth—“one of the greatest scourges, with which the early settlers of New-England ever had to contend.”4 Alden staunchly defended colonists in their expansionist endeavors, insisting they had “paid for every foot of land they occupied.” When he discussed the crest of Mount Hope, which encompassed a formation of quartz, he cast an approvingly entrepreneurial eye over the townscapes and rural vistas spread around it: “The towering spires of Providence in one direction, the charming village of Bristol, the fertile island of Poppsquash, fields clothed with a luxuriant verdure as far as the eye can stretch.” Plymouth and Rhode Island authorities laid claim to much of this space around Narragansett Bay in the war’s aftermath, citing it as fruits of just conquest. In Alden’s accounting, the quartz resonated as a material token of once-powerful indigeneity, linked tightly to the charismatic figure of Philip. But it was indigeneity belonging to the past. Alden and countless others believed Natives had been forcibly vanquished or more benignly dissipated to make room for Euro-American presents and presence. These were useful collective fictions for New Englanders and Americans anxious to justify their possessions of Indigenous spaces. Yet in their alacrity to contain Indigenous histories—and pin them to singular moments and spots of presumed destruction—such mythologies overlooked profound complexities radiating out from these very grounds and sources. Quartz, for example, has long been a more robust signifier in the Northeast than a colonial trophy of conquest. Translucent, lustrous, and eye-catching, it occurs in deposits throughout the famously stony regional terrain, often appearing in milky white coloration. In Algonquian contexts, including those arising well before any European encounters, its crystals bore a range of significances. Associated with toolmaking, it was also interred in some ancestral burial sites and linked to oral traditions about powerful happenings.5 “Those rocks are the bones of the earth,” Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, medicine woman and tribal historian for the Mohegans, has commented about the Mohegan Hill area. “Streaked with quartz crystal veins, they contain hidden messages that guide generation after generation of those who listen well.”6 The types of memoryscapes that she described still persist at Mohegan and across myriad other parts of the Native Northeast. They are geographies bearing layers upon thick layers of meanings, accessible to and transmitted by Indigenous past-keepers who learned to navigate particular terrain and routes as well as relations stretching across time and into other-than-human domains. In these contexts, place itself has remained a crucial conduit of memory.

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While the onset of Euro-American settler colonialism inflected these memoryscapes, it did not comprehensively overwrite or destroy them. Instead the inherent dynamism of Indigenous placemaking reckoned with these arrivals. Consider the quartz at Magunkaquog, one of the “praying towns” established across Massachusett-Nipmuc country in the mid-seventeenth century. Puritan missionaries engaging with would-be Algonquian converts encouraged the development of these communities, hoping they would hasten the Christianization and acculturation of those Natives who inhabited them. Members of these communities played key roles during King Philip’s War, though not in the ways missionaries had anticipated. In recent times, archaeologists probing the grounds at Magunkaquog identified a series of quartz remnants— some smoky, some clear—alongside distinctly English material signatures like a structural foundation. Some of the stones had been deliberately shaped by hand, brought to this place from more distant locales. Altogether this assemblage suggests Algonquians navigating a pivotal historical moment constructed their habitations in ways that blended older and newer worldviews, practices, and spiritual beliefs.7 Few of these strikingly expansive, even hybrid, connotations of quartz were evident when Alden handed over the decontextualized chunk to the Antiquarian Society cabinet. In rethinking approaches to war and memory, one of the leading challenges involves scale: of time and of space. In relating King Philip’s War, Puritan participants and antiquarian descendants tended to zero in on the immediate years of conflict, perhaps broadening out to the mid-1600s to give brief context; they also tended to fixate on discrete battlegrounds or sites of damage. Many academic historians have followed these narrowly delimited approaches. But wartime happenings make little sense without deeper understandings of the places where they occurred and the longue durée evolutions of Indigenous geographies. Over thousands of years and successive generations, Algonquians developed fine-grained understandings of where to catch fish in springtime and which wetlands would provide reeds for constructing homes. They ascertained where boundaries and crossing-places needed to be negotiated, how to locate suitable mineral resources like quartz for crafting tools, in which seasons certain medicinal and ceremonial plants would be available for harvesting. And they remembered where corn and other cultigens would grow most strongly. Mount Hope belongs within that kind of context. It was not an isolated elevation, but a critical node within the fertile Cawsumsett peninsula and Wampanoag homelands crisscrossed by a spiderweb of streams, marshes, estuaries, and freshwater springs. When encounters with ever-closer colonial

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neighbors grew tense and ultimately broke out into violence in the 1670s, these events unfolded across this highly articulated geography. So did the multitude of commemorative monuments, rituals, pageants, and processions that ensued. Yet too often these vital contexts have remained undervisible. As I descended down the rabbit holes of memory-research—every story, place, and object links to another, it seems—I noticed that Timothy Alden, Jr., had made a corn-gift more than once in his life. In 1799 he donated “A Specimen of Burnt Corn, 1676” to the Massachusetts Historical Society.8 Though the book that logged acquisitions there furnished no further details, it seems this too was intended as a souvenir of historical violence. It is difficult to shake a vision of Alden venturing to regional repositories with a stash of charred kernels, planting in their collections deadened seeds that would never germinate, to convey mythologies of Indigenous conquest and finality. “Memory houses,” New England essayist Howard Mansfield called sites like these: spaces that exclude as much as they include in deciding which versions of the past shall be perpetuated in a community. “What is saved and what is discarded, who is remembered and why—all that is significant. Who may enter the memory house is determined by decree and chance and the shared illusions of any society.”9 Some of these venues, including the American Antiquarian Society, have evolved in signal ways and now accommodate new forms of critical inquiry. Others await reawakening. So do the stories being told across lands and waters far beyond their walls. In reassessing the nature and meanings of a transformative conflict, especially from Indigenous vantages, the concept of survivance can be a useful provocation. “Native survivance,” the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor has remarked, “is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion.” Its stories are “renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.”10 Accounting for Algonquians’ survivance requires a multifold project. On one hand, it means reckoning seriously with the nuances and shifting mentalities of colonial bids to ascribe stories of disappearance to Indigenous people, through a dizzying array of media. On the other, it means tracking Algonquians’ ongoing creative efforts to remember, speak, mark, and live other realities. In a number of compelling instances, it grapples with the contested crossovers and frictions among these. The chapters that follow take up not “merely” cultural phenomena of memorialization and placemaking, but worldviews that lie at the foundations of continuing legal debates, racial politics, contested sovereignties, environmental struggles, and socioeconomic inequities. The place-stories I relate are not exhaustive nor easily contained.

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They underscore the inherently dynamic quality of memories and places, as well as the myriad threads that connect past, present, future, often in nonlinear ways. In following these threads, my most pressing concern has been to open up alternative pathways—even ones that appear minor at first glance— that stand to illuminate not only the havoc and fragmentation wrought by conflict, but also the regrowth that emerges from it. As they sometimes say near the planting-lands, if you listen attentively enough, you may hear the corn growing.

Acknowledgments

One of the first words I learned in an Algonquian language was wliwni, Western Abenaki for “thank you.” Wliwni to the many people, communities, and institutions who have shaped this book, especially those who have helped me navigate across cultures, worldviews, sovereign nations, and academic disciplines. No single person can tell the story of this conflict and its legacies. I am humbled by the depth of expertise across the Northeast, and I hope this region’s multitude of past-keepers will continue their vital work, which has so strongly informed my own thinking. Over the last decade my understandings of the places, events, and legacies discussed here have changed dramatically. Going forward I expect they will continue to transform. For now, these chapters reflect my fullest effort to comprehend exceedingly fraught histories and to illuminate for wider audiences some of the still-powerful grounds and waters across which they unfolded. Lisa Brooks first set me on the path of Native American and Indigenous Studies. She has been a sharp-eyed, sensitive guide to the Northeast and its communities through the years, with a long-range sensibility about using scholarship and awikhigan—writing, broadly conceived—as tools to build alternative, better futures. I trust our narratives will intertwine in compelling ways, and I look forward to continuing connections across the river valley. At Harvard College, Lawrence Buell advised my early inquiries in history and literature and set the bar high as a steadfast mentor, teacher, and thinker on Americanist and environmental topics. Lizabeth Cohen, a tireless historian and social critic, showed me what the built environment can reveal and supported my first foray into Boston’s past and present. Elisa New, Joyce Chaplin, David Hall, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Brian DeLay, and John Tessitore introduced me to

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new dimensions of early American and Indigenous experiences. Jill Lepore commented on this project as a thesis. While I have not followed all of her leads—and indeed I depart from her work in signal ways—I have thought deeply in the ensuing years about the fundamental premises of historical inquiry that she raised. An internship in ancestral Puebloan lands in Colorado was transformative, and I wish Suzan Greefkens were still with us to converse about place, movement, and storytelling. John Zech amiably facilitated my earliest research road trip, including a ferry crossing. I was fortunate to work on environmental, transnational, and spatial topics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland with John Clark and Riccardo Bavaj, and to enjoy the company of history postgraduates as well as Nicola Searle and Allison Sherman. At Yale University, the American Studies graduate program was an inviting and publicly minded community. Victorine Shepard, Kathryn Dudley, Joanne Meyerowitz, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and Jean Cherniavsky kept the interdisciplinary ship afloat. John Mack Faragher was a supportive advisor and anchor for a robust circle of frontiers-and-borders scholars. Ned Blackhawk brought capacious views of American Indian history and insistence on scholarly interventions, and I appreciate his kind encouragement at every stage. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, a resourceful, courageous mentor from day one, continues to brighten and sharpen my thinking as we crisscross paths in many locales. Jay Winter, David Blight, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Dolores Hayden, Michael Warner, and Wai Chee Dimock influenced my approaches to early American literacies, landscapes, and memory. Ned Cooke’s seminar on material culture and decorative arts has exercised perhaps the farthest-reaching effect on my outlook and research inclinations. I have enjoyed every conversation about the art and science of archiving with George Miles and owe many insights on “collecting” to him. The Writing History Colloquium, Yale Early American Historians, Environmental History Colloquium, Yale Group for the Study of Native America, and Lamar Center were intellectual sounding boards, enlivened at various moments by Theodore Van Alst, Jay Gitlin, William Deverell, Virginia Scharff, Boyd Cothran, Jenny Davis, Rachel Smith Purvis, and Edith Rotkopf. Khalil Johnson, Anya Montiel, Melanie Yazzie, Ryan Shaw, Ryan Hall, Andrew Offenburger, Barry Muchnick, Ryan Brasseaux, Todd Holmes, Isaiah Wilner, Joseph Yannielli, Adam Arenson, and Paul Shin were indispensable fellow travelers, along with Helen Curry and Catherine McNeur, who are both smart and kind. I especially recognize Tyler Jackson Rogers, whose own promising work has made for thought-provoking conversations about methods, ethics, power, colonialism, and, of course, the ins and outs of Rhode Island.

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Patricia Rubertone has been a gracious commentator, sharing her deeply layered expertise on the historical and human landscapes around and beyond Narragansett Bay. Materiality and its ethical obligations occupy more of this project than I originally anticipated—in a positive sense—and I am indebted to her for frank perspectives on navigating these fields. Karl Jacoby and Linford Fisher welcomed me to the historical scene in Providence and took a memorable trip to Rehoboth. Karl’s eloquence on violence and memory has had an enduring effect on my own engagements with borderlands. William Simmons, Colin Porter, Elizabeth Hoover, Adrienne Keene, Emily Button Kambic, Robert Preucel, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology staff, and Holly Ewald have also been valuable interlocutors during my passing-through at Brown University and in Providence. At the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, access and helpful comments came from former State Archaeologist Paul Robinson, Charlotte Taylor, and Timothy Ives. I am especially grateful to Charlotte for thinking through maps, sites, and the dynamics of “place” with me. Beyond Narragansett, several other archaeologists have taken the time to show me around the land: Neill De Paoli at Pemaquid, Emerson (Tad) Baker in South Berwick, Kevin McBride at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, and Stephen Silliman on Eastern Pequot tribal lands. I researched in many archives, museums, and libraries, of all shapes and sizes. I have been impressed by staff members’ indefatigable efforts to keep these repositories accessible, despite pressing budgetary and other constraints. It would take me another volume to adequately recognize each one, so collectively: thank you. Particular gratitude is due to staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale; Abraham Parrish at the Yale Map Collection; Kimberly Nusco, Ken Ward, Margot Nishimura, Ted Widmer, and Neil Safier at the John Carter Brown Library, the latter of whose enthusiastic and serious support for an Indigenous Studies initiative has been most welcome; Jason Mancini at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, and also David Freeburg, now with the Mohegan Tribal Nation Library / Archives; Scott Stevens at the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies; staffs of the Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire Historical Societies; Kate Viens, Conrad Wright, and staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Michael Leclerc and Judy Lucey at the New England Historic Genealogical Society; Norma Keim at the Counting House Museum and Old Berwick Historical Society; Betty Moore at the Tuck Museum; David Bosse at the libraries of Historic Deerfield and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association; and Ned Lazaro at the material culture

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collections of the Flynt Center of Early New England Life at Historic Deerfield. Michael Kelly at Archives and Special Collections of Amherst College has been a tremendous colleague as the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection develops, and I look forward to all of our conversations with genuine, radical pleasure. At the American Antiquarian Society, the most congenial venue in Quinsigamond/Worcester, Paul Erickson, the late Jack Larkin, Carolyn Eastman, Yvette Piggush, Joseph Adelman, Adam Gordon, and John Demos formed excellent lunch company during my first fellowship stint, while Whitney Martinko, Colleen Boggs, Dwight McBride, and Amy Hughes were stellar companions as I wrapped this book up while starting a second research adventure. Thomas Knoles assisted with manuscripts, Kim Pelkey developed an innovative digital project about Algonquian and English texts, and the reading room staff routinely unearthed gems. At the Yale Indian Papers Project, the perpetually generous Paul Grant-Costa and Tobias Glaza have been collaboratively regathering archival pieces of the Native Northeast. I can’t even remember when our conversations began. I’m so delighted they keep moving and expanding, in the face of sometimes daunting challenges. Mount Holyoke College and its historians helped me think in fresh ways about the very nature and purpose of “doing history.” Daniel Czitrom, Kavita Datla, Desmond Fitz-Gibbon, Lowell Gudmunson, Jeremy King, Jonathan Lipman, Frederick McGinness, Lynda Morgan, Mary Renda, Robert Schwartz, Lan Wu, and especially Holly Hanson all have supported me on campus and in the valley. Holly Sharac helps this department run smoothly in ways obvious and subtle. Equally important, she knows where the good hiking trails are and keeps maps ready at hand. Lauret Savoy and Environmental Studies colleagues foster important conversations on people and places. At the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, I owe special debts to Aaron Miller for fruitful ongoing dialogues about challenges and responsibilities around Indigenous materials, as well as to Ellen Alvord, Kendra Weisbin, John Stomberg, and Tricia Paik for easing my entry into object-spaces. Leslie Fields, in Archives and Special Collections, has likewise prompted me to different perspectives on collecting and access. My students illuminate new pathways of thought and action, especially Allyson LaForge, who produced an eye-opening thesis on decolonizing museums, and those I have had in my classes. Hannah Kyer helped greatly with mapping. Within the Five College Consortium, the Native American and Indigenous Studies working group has been a joyful gathering place. I look forward to the warm company and decolonizing sensibilities of Lisa Brooks,

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Kathleen Brown-Pérez, Kiara Vigil, Sonya Atalay, Alice Nash, Ronald Welburn, Neal Salisbury, Robert Paynter, Paul Barten, Paulette Steeves, Christen Mucher, Sarah Lince, Nate Therien, and many others. The Crossroads in the Study of the Americas group also provided thoughtful feedback. Along the way, scholars who have shared comments and sources include Jean O’Brien, whose own studies on Native New England have laid such critical groundwork, David Silverman, Siobhan Senier, Marge Bruchac, Annette Kolodny, Nancy Shoemaker, Ari Kelman, James Brooks, Mark Peterson, Julie Fisher, Christian Crouch, Drew Lopenzina, Thomas Wickman, and Christopher Pastore. Ashley Smith has the mind of a scholar and heart of a canoeist. Coll Thrush encouraged me to think anew about place, layers, entanglements, and the sacred. Joshua Reid has been a pathbreaking and also supportive conversation partner as I navigate the waters of decolonizing historical methodologies. Peter Mancall, Karen Halttunen, and the “Grounded Histories” Early Modern Studies Institute / William and Mary Quarterly workshop were incisive commentators, as were Martin Jay, Sumathi Ramaswamy, the Social Science Research Council “Empires of Vision” group, and Jace Weaver’s “Red Atlantic” participants. Every presenter at the “Indigenous Enslavement and Incarceration” conference at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center gave remarks that continue to resonate. Aaron Sachs, Daegan Miller, and Cornell’s “Historians Are Writers!” have been committed proponents of good writing. Financial support has come from the Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship; the Council on Library and Information Resources / Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources; Phillips Fund for Native American Research at American Philosophical Society; the John Carter Brown Library, and American Antiquarian Society (both twice over); the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium; the Newberry Library Consortium in American Indian Studies graduate research fellowship; a W. B. H. Dowse Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society; a Michael Kraus Research Grant from the American Historical Society. At Yale, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; John F. Enders Grant; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders; Frederick Hilles Memorial Scholarship; and at Harvard, the Frank Knox Fellowship, and NationBuilding Fellowship from the Harvard University Native American Program. Mount Holyoke College provided faculty research grants and leave time, for which I thank my department and the dean of faculty’s office.

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Yale University Press has been a supportive, efficient publisher with concrete commitments to Native Studies. It is an honor to join the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. I thank Laura Davulis, Christopher Rogers, Adina Berk, Erica Hanson, Eva Skewes, and staff who seamlessly moved this project forward. My manuscript readers shared astute suggestions for revisions, while Bill Nelson created maps, June Sawyers indexed, and Kate Davis did attentive copyediting. Selections of this work have previously appeared as “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast after King Philip’s War,” in The Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (March 2012): 975–997; and “Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands,” in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 467–502. I thank these publishers for permission to republish. I am indebted to the 2010 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award Committee at the Organization of American Historians and anonymous readers, as well as to Edward Linenthal and Kevin Marsh. I am similarly grateful to Christopher Parsons, Cameron Strang, reviewers, and the editorial staff at Early American Studies. Of all those mentioned, tribal community members—historians, pastkeepers, and placemakers in their own right—deserve significant credit for keeping these stories and places animate. They have lived these histories and maintained deep accountability to ancestors and traditions as they move forward, even through formidable challenges. I do not purport to speak on anyone’s behalf, and as a matter of decolonizing practice I urge students, scholars, and members of the public to seek out tribal peoples’ own representations of their communities, important places, and heritages. I am grateful to tribal community members who have spoken with me about these topics and posed difficult questions: among them, John Brown III and Doug Harris of the Narragansett Tribal Historic Preservation Office; Lóren Spears at the Tomaquag Memorial Museum; Charles Norman Shay and James Francis, Sr., of the Penobscot Nation; Pam Ellis, Mary Anne Hendricks, and Rae Gould of the Nipmucs; Joseph and Jesse Bruchac (Abenaki); Rick Pouliot (Abenaki) and Gedakina; Marge Bruchac (Abenaki); Troy Phillips (Nipmuc) and LeeLee; Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke); Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel and Rachel Sayet of the Mohegan Tribe, and also linguist Stephanie Fielding; Patrick Coté and Réjean Obomsawin at Odanak; Elizabeth James Perry and Jonathan Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag). St. Clair “Brinky” Tucker of the St. David’s Island Indian Committee in Bermuda generously gave an unforgettable tour of the islands, while Tall Oak Weeden added to my conceptions of these places and

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connections. The Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation shared historical knowledge and material-culture insights in summer 2015. Since this study relies on immersion in highly specific terrain and waterways, it owes much to “locals,” whose understandings of the past arise from ongoing immersion in everyday landscapes and their human networks. Without their assistance I would have stood little chance of locating monuments, rocks, roads, and signs mentioned in these chapters. I have benefited from their information in gas stations and laundromats, at Dunkin’ Donuts and clam shacks, on construction details and police beats. The associated stories they have conveyed have rarely been neutral. These conversations have prompted me toward new questions and critiques. This began where the river plummets over the falls at Amoskeag: Manchester, New Hampshire. Kathleen Mirabile taught me that history matters; Patricia Hicks helped me learn to write and revise, as did Selma Naccach-Hoff; Sharon Wilson knew that listening to people’s stories is all-important. Manchester Central High School instilled in me enormous regard for public education. The never-ending research road trip has taken me through hundreds of corners of the Northeast, with hospitality at every turn. Notable thanks to Jenny Marshall and Fred Loucks, residents of Fiering House in 2010 and 2015, and dwellers of 9 Regent Street. In the final stretch, Matthew Gibson opened my eyes with memorable hikes and new vistas (plus a northern beaver sighting). Maurice and Forester have been there every mile, uncomplaining— mostly—through numberless unexpected detours. My family kept this endeavor going. Laura and Steve gave moral and technical support, Frank introduced me to back-roads beauty in western Massachusetts, and Marguerite and Spencer helped me navigate Rhode Island time and again. Meredith Lee DeLucia is wise, Justin Hall has a gift for realizing narratives, and Elizabeth Kerman and Margaret DeLucia showed me what strong women look like. More than anyone, Alice and Michael DeLucia sustained this. They know that the past shapes the present and the stories we tell, and they understand that sometimes it’s best to take the long road (as long as you have AAA). During my wanderings, they were always there. Thanks for keeping the porch light on. Finally, this is a project as much about the present and future as the past. As many people have taught me, and as I now say to new generations of students, much work remains to be done.

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Introduction Placemaking and Memorializing After the Great Watershed

“[I]t is difficult to escape the shadow it casts,” Colin Calloway has written of King Philip’s War, the “great watershed” in New England Native and colonial history. “[W]e cannot study Indian New England prior to 1675 without the knowledge of the destruction to come; after the war, things are never the same again.”1 King Philip’s War reshaped the Northeast in three years, destroying English settlements and decimating or dispersing diverse Native inhabitants from ancestral homelands, areas already affected by decades of colonial presence and epidemic disease. The conflict has lingered in collective remembrances because it forces confrontations with fundamental aspects of identity, heritage, and purpose. How do individuals and communities reckon with a past of almost unspeakable cruelties and dispossessions, the effects of which have persisted through centuries of racialized thinking and policy-making? How do they—we—conceive of ourselves as complicit in these violences, or as witnesses, victims, survivors of them? “Bitter memories of King Philip’s War lingered for many years along the New England frontier,” John Demos has written.2 Yet scholarship has only begun to investigate the ways in which this crisis and Indigenous resistance movement entered into private and collective memories, permeating the emotional lives and shaping the political persuasions of peoples in the Northeast and beyond.3 This book is a study of the “shadow,” an examination of the protracted cultural, material, socioeconomic, and political legacies of this era of struggle. It makes two principal arguments. First, it challenges the idea that the colonial period and its violences are matters of the distant past, tracking instead their enduring influence in modernity, and the contemporary persistence of settler colonialism—structures of dominance and subjugation premised on continuing

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territorial dispossession of Indigenous populations. Second, it contends that remembrance of historical violence takes place: understandings of contested pasts take shape in relation to particular landscapes, material features of the world, and politically defined territories. Over the centuries, certain places have been deemed significant and transformed into “sites of memory,” while others (like zones of Native refuge and survivance) have been treated as marginal, eventually pushed to the sides of historical and geographical consciousness by the majority of New Englanders and scholars, though tribal descendants have frequently maintained alternative accounts. Places are intrinsically dynamic, however. They are perpetually being modified by human communities and by the earth itself, and may be reanimated after long periods of apparent dormancy. By getting back into place, into specific terrain, rivers, swamps, islands, and cities of the Northeast, we can begin to better comprehend those secret, semihidden, or willfully forgotten contours of early America that still weigh so heavily on the present. This war and its legacies attained academic prominence in the late 1990s with publication of Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity.4 The book won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished scholarship in American history and has remained a standout reference on the topic. The study aimed high in its assessment of the war’s consequences, discerning roots of a peculiarly “American” opposition of “Indian” and “English” identities and their supposedly concomitant practices of savagery and literacy. But in its aspirations to diagnose national mentalité and mythos, The Name of War slighted the subtler shifts occasioned by this convulsion: its effects at the levels of colony, state, town, tribe, reservation, family. Its intense focus on the rhetoric of war also overlooked the manifold ways that nonlinguistic dimensions of human experience, like material culture, bodily performance, and the physical environment, have contoured grassroots senses of the past. An array of “minor” yet critical sites spread between Long Island Sound and the St. Lawrence River figured nowhere in its calculus of memory. Yet The Name of War’s premises have not been fundamentally challenged in the nineteen years since its publication—despite the fact that remembrance has been contested throughout the Northeast and transnationally in ways its paradigm can scarcely accommodate, and despite resounding historiographical rejections of “Indian” generalizing in Native and New England assessments of identity and place.5 For more than three centuries, tribal members, avocational historians, custodians of public memory-sites, and even academics have engaged in practices of recall that have little to do with elite print culture or concerns of the U.S. nation-state yet hold paramount importance for community articulations of belonging and collective purpose.

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This book revisits the Northeast to track how practices of placemaking have helped conserve or erase diverse local understandings of King Philip’s War.6 It approaches these chorographic links between time and space through the concept of memoryscapes: constellations of spots on the land that have accrued stories over time, transforming them from seemingly blank or neutral spaces into emotionally infused, politically potent places.7 Moving from “time out of mind” to the early twenty-first century (with emphasis on the seventeenth), and drawing upon methodologies from Indigenous studies, ethnohistory, geography, environmental history, literary studies, and material culture studies, this book demonstrates that getting back into place—acknowledging that people produce history and memory in specific sites—is critical to understanding the divergences that distinguish community memories and identities. It is also paramount for recognizing the concrete repercussions for territorial control that are the bedfellows of topophilia, attachment to place. Lands and waters lay at the heart of early American encounters as Indigenous residents and European arrivals negotiated rights and struggled openly for influence over terrain. In the centuries since, these grounds have remained contested: adjudicated, managed, commodified, “improved,” moralized, aestheticized, sacralized. The fallout has been monumental. Dislocated peoples have longed and labored to recapture ancestral geographies or install spatial orders that appear more just, using tactics conciliatory and radical. A place-based approach also restores the multidimensional quality of remembrance overlooked in histories reliant primarily on written records. Ordinary people across the region have persistently formed meaningful relationships with the past using voice, body, land, and objects, in addition to texts. To recover this unstable milieu where land is a potent vector of memory production is to restore a dimension of cultural practice oftentimes unseen and unheard. It is to access meanings negotiated not solely through words and icons but produced out on the earth itself through activities like walking, paddling, meeting, and speaking at salient points. “[W]e must return memory to the world,” philosopher Edward Casey has urged, arguing that remembrance is an irreducibly emplaced phenomenon. For historians of memory, this return can begin by working longitudinally: digging deep in small places over long time spans and engaging a more expansive source base of artifacts, dwellings, rituals, and other gestures of human expression that gather in unique contexts.8 By journeying through a selection of “minor” sites in the Northeast, this book probes underrecognized locales that illuminate vernacular geographies of remembrance, mourning, protest, and regeneration, all in a region still invested in a strong

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self-image of historical innocence. Memory, the means by which individuals and groups conserve the past and mobilize it for present and future uses, is not treated here as an ersatz or faulty version of history. Memory has its own logic and faculties for recalling, forgetting, or silencing the past. It merits serious consideration as a form of knowledge, particularly among communities that have valued nonwritten strategies for transmitting the past to posterity. The insistent refrain of this project is that localization is crucial to understanding historical and memorial developments. I do recognize that a few generalizations can be useful tools for orientation, given that the Native Northeast may be terra incognita to those outside the tribal communities who call this place home and to a circle of ethnohistorical scholars. Over the centuries, Native and non-Native approaches to reckoning with the effects of colonialism have demonstrated signal differences. During King Philip’s War itself—a slippery thing to define at every turn, from its very name, to its causes, to its starting and ending points—an initial string of Native victories in 1675 and early 1676 gave way to English military successes that resulted in the death of the Pokanoket Wampanoag leader King Philip, or Metacom (sometimes spelled Metacomet), in August 1676, followed by English military dominance in southern New England. Fighting in the “eastward” parts of Wabanaki country (New Hampshire and Maine) continued through 1677 with more Native successes, before formally ceasing with a 1678 treaty.9 Though the war devastated dozens of English settlements and saddled survivors with staggering debts that constrained the colonies for years, Anglo-Americans profited from the war. Veterans received monetary payments and land grants for their service. Colonial settlers pushed much deeper into the interior after Native military power had been constrained, and certain tribal communities directed to remain within reservationlike enclaves. Colonial households benefited from the labor of Native prisoners-of-war put to work as slaves and servants. Puritans and their secularized Yankee heirs mobilized their print culture resources to produce a series of published narratives about the war’s meanings, notably Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), and dueling accounts by the Massachusetts ministers Increase Mather (1676) and William Hubbard (1677). Editors published and republished their narratives well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, adding new prefaces, illustrations, and emendations that reflected the changing values “Indian War” held for successive generations. The war retained a hold on colonial imaginaries despite the passing years, and writers developed

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intense mythologies about it and the figure of Philip, using poetry, romance, novels, and printed histories to circulate often fanciful interpretations. Literary luminaries took up the war as a formative subject, along with thousands of less recognized writers. As antiquarians founded historical societies, built museums, “played Indian” in historical pageants, and installed a profusion of monuments all over the regional terrain in boulders and bronze, they also obsessively “mapped virtually every action in King Philip’s War on the landscape,” and “mounted a virtual cult of King Philip” (fig. 3).10 Place-sense was

Figure 3. Euro-American antiquarians frequently gathered at sites believed to be associated with King Philip’s War, as they fashioned colonial versions of local and regional memory. On these occasions they delivered orations, read poetry, sometimes collected material culture traces, and overwhelmingly attempted to inscribe these locales as sites bespeaking Indigenous downfall. In this photograph from the late nineteenth century, members of the Worcester Society of Antiquity posed with “Redemption Rock” in a commemoration of Mary Rowlandson’s wartime captivity and eventual return. Whether the sizable geological formation was the actual site of this exchange in 1676, or if it attained that designation later, the place was a critical point in Nipmuc geographies near the important refuge area of Mount Wachusett. The photograph appeared in Samuel Hathaway’s History of Redemption Rock (1898). (Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

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vital to them. They sought to create cultural myths and symbolic roots for the young American republic and especially for New England, and defining the signature characteristics of regional landscapes was an expedient method. Commentators occasionally confronted the moral quandaries posed by their founding myths. But the result was generally filiopietistic histories, colonial ancestor-worship that valorized conquest of Natives during King Philip’s War, even as it dutifully lamented the scale of destruction.11 Yankee communities profited materially from continuous territorial expansion into Algonquian homelands, creating atop and amid them a patchwork of towns, farms, and ports. When new waves of foreign migrants began to alter regional demography, efforts to assert Anglo-American heritage and hegemony only intensified, with xenophobic undercurrents poorly disguised. Mills, mansions, summer resorts, and other features of modernizing, industrializing New England took shape on the very grounds of historical violence, with the ironic bourgeois twist of naming exclusive privatized property after Native peoples who had been forcibly dispossessed or relocated: the Metacomet Country Club in East Providence, Rhode Island, the Wampanoag Golf Course in Swansea, Massachusetts. Owing to this casual yet endemic colonialism—which simultaneously took pride in Philip and Algonquians as cultural touchstones of the “noble savage” variety and trivialized them—today one can find room to live at the Metacom Condominiums or King Phillip [sic] Apartments, buy a car at King Philip Motors or Metacom Auto Sales, buy sporting goods at King Philip’s Crossing (fig. 4), catch a game played by the King Philip Little League, go antique hunting at the King Philip Trading Post, or, in an especially unnerving twist, eat lunch at the King Philip (“KP”) Grill, where the menu has featured a cheese-steak sandwich called the King Philly.12 This appropriative landscape rests on the premise that icons of brutal colonial conflict and Algonquian resistance are suitable fodder for marketing and consumption, and that there are not really Native people still around to be put out by it. For Algonquian communities, the trajectory has often been different. King Philip’s War wrought extraordinary damage, causing among certain groups dispersion from traditional homelands and resources, forced diaspora into domestic and Atlantic World slavery, indenture into colonial households as servants, and marginalization from the region’s dominant politics and economies. A few tribal communities, like Mohegans and Pequots, briefly benefited from their wartime service as allies of and skilled scouts among English troops. But even they, and Algonquian communities who attempted to maintain wartime neutrality, were enmeshed in larger struggles with settler colo-

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Figure 4. A Seekonk, Massachusetts, shopping plaza has been named “King Philip’s Crossing” (shown here in 2010). This site forms one part of a multifaceted regional landscape premised on commercial invocations of Indigenous pasts, particularly the wellknown figure of Philip/Metacom himself. Most signage and branding makes little reference to the realities of historical Algonquian geographies or the detrimental consequences of the conflict they promote. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

nialism that pressured the entire Native Northeast, regardless of status as “friend Indians.” Postwar diminishment of tribal territories through colonial purchases, de facto encroachment, and outright fraud impelled many members to relocate to farms, cities, and ports, taking jobs as basket makers, traveling herbalists, whalers, industrial workers, domestic laborers, and an assortment of other pursuits.13 Considerable numbers intermarried with neighbors of different backgrounds, including other so-called people of color. Such miscegenation tended to affect succeeding generations’ physical appearances in ways that confounded non-Natives accustomed to constrained

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genetic notions of “blood” and physiognomy as markers of authentic indigeneity. These movements and minglings exacerbated Indigenous language loss, while social stigmas against indigeneity sometimes led to public denials of tribal heritage. Yet through the centuries, Algonquians did not vanish. Nor did they irremediably lose or discard cultural traditions and knowledge about the past. The endurance of robust oral traditions and place-knowledge is clear in myriad places, as are newer practices that maintain cultural links to sensitive sites and stories—not dismissed here as mere “invented traditions,” but understood as evidence of the inherent malleability of culture.14 Algonquians sometimes dressed and acted in ways that directly engaged with non-Native preconceptions of indigeneity, drawing upon pan-Indian regalia and rituals to make themselves legible to Yankee neighbors.15 They also selectively used English-language literacy and Westernized institutions like archives and museums to give semipublic faces to their versions of the past.16 While certain of their accountings have been circulated and sustained within tribal communities, they have not always percolated out to the “mainstream,” and at times have been strategically concealed from those larger publics. While overarching narratives provide a general picture, they are only marginally useful for assessing finer-grained transformations. Tribal communities have each followed distinctive trajectories. Among the diverse Algonquian groups and nations of the Northeast—Massachusetts, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Niantics, Quinnipiacs, Mohegans, Pequots, Schagticokes, Pocumtucks, Pennacooks, Nipmucs, Penobscots, Abenakis, and others—some constructed monuments and museums of their own. Others did not. Some developed intricate ties with Euro-American neighbors; others kept more distance. Some have been scrutinized and written about at length by anthropologists and ethnohistorians, while others have been spared those attentions. Some had their inherent sovereignty affirmed through a tortuous process of U.S. federal recognition. Others have been denied that status or hold state-level recognition, with variable consequences for economic support, political standing, and ability to hold land. Some developed high-stakes casino gaming in the late twentieth century that rapidly reshaped tribal economies and capacities to broadcast culture to wider audiences; others have rejected gaming or been legally precluded from it. Differences cleave minutely, being distinct not only from tribe to tribe but also between families, kin-groups, neighborhoods, and individuals. Similarly localized differentiations hold for non-Indigenous communities as well. This book is ultimately interested in the intersections among these groups: the sites where they encounter and challenge each other, responding dialecti-

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cally to each other’s heritage practices. Frequently Natives have protested nonNative ideologies and behaviors, invoking rhetoric that accentuates political, cultural, ethnic, and/or racial divides, where articulations of difference matter acutely. In other cases, surprising coalitions have taken shape to develop partially consensual interpretations of the past. “Collaboration” can seem an apt description for these latter situations. But the term is loaded. As Narragansett Tribe and Rhode Island State historic preservation officers pointed out in a coauthored essay, Webster’s Dictionary gives multiple meanings for “collaborate,” the first two of which are: “1. to work jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor; 2. to cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy of one’s country and especially an occupying force.”17 In a region still strongly shaped by settler colonialism, “collaborative” arrangements ought to be viewed as pragmatic, time- and site-specific connections that proceed imperfectly, rather than as long-term, finalized agreements to dissolve differences— or as bids for reconciliation, a perhaps premature endeavor in places where cultural conflict still seethes and where foundational political dilemmas about the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty remain profoundly unresolved. Whether co-construction of past, place, and memory has been openly acknowledged is a thorny matter. The actors involved have not always perceived a cross-cultural dialectic at work, or have not considered previous iterations of a memoryscape as the impetus for their revisions, preferring to view their efforts as arising sui generis, in an original way. Some revisions or challenges to inherited forms of remembrance have taken years, even centuries, to coalesce, meaning that a sense of back-and-forth negotiation acquired a protracted quality that is hard to perceive. Or there has been a political imperative to presenting memory and tradition as unbroken lineages rather than as relatively new or revived creations. To acknowledge interruption or forgetting can appear to undermine claims of authenticity or legitimacy. Place is a useful lens for dialectical analysis because a place never belongs to one group: there are always multiple claimants, passers-through, and understandings of the same physical setting. By structuring this study along the lines of distinctive places, I delve into these ongoing interactions and the co-construction of meaning at the most granular level: the evolving materiality and significance of this island, that swamp, those fishing places. This granular level of analysis has not always been popular in academic history writing. While antiquarians of the nineteenth century probed corners they knew intimately, the professionalization of history as a discipline bred disdain for such postage stamp–sized perspectives. Historians pushed away

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from the local in favor of larger frameworks of the nation-state, empire, hemisphere, and globe. Even the influential community studies that drove 1970s social history ultimately were interested in how small places exemplified larger processes and trends. But in the transit from the small to the large, something fell by the wayside. For early Americanists, the rise of Atlantic World frameworks audaciously spanning an ocean and several continents has been fruitful for certain inquiries, but also strikingly devoid of grounded accounts of the actual locales involved. “It is time to consider what is lost by continuing to privilege bigger histories of early America over smaller histories attentive to local and regional place,” Karen Halttunen has argued, calling for early Americanists to pay better attention to the minute qualities of the placeworlds of those who inhabited them.18 Her call for (re-)localization of historical scholarship resonates with the spatial turn’s insistence that we cannot think of space as a neutral or inert backdrop to the drama of history. Space has been reenvisioned as an active force in the shaping of history, and as continuously produced by history. As we now see time as having relative qualities, so too has space become reunderstood as fluid, changing over time, appearing distinctive to individuals and communities. There is not a single essential space, but multiple, proliferating, competing spaces, each brought into being through specific cultural behaviors and representational technologies. Spatially attuned historical studies realize that events happen differentially over geography—activities cluster in certain areas but not others—and, without being environmentally determinist, seek to explain the unevenness of historical action: why things happen here and not there.19 They also recognize that social power constitutes itself spatially, through the definition and policing of national and state borders, neighborhoods, reservations, and private property.20 “Space” can be distinct from “place,” and while scholars from multiple disciplines tangle over the terms’ respective meanings, the former might denote a more abstract, geometric display, detached from the experiences of any individual or group; the latter, a complex of emotional, affective, memorial investments.21 Place matters for remembrance of any violence, as studies about the Shoah, the U.S. Civil War, the western “Indian Wars,” and other sites of struggle attest.22 What makes place an especially powerful lens in the case of King Philip’s War is that the conflict itself involved major questions of territorial authority. The massive Indigenous dispossessions and diasporas that took place in its lead-up and aftermath meant that the war’s violences were bound up with fundamental questions of where: where certain people could legitimately live,

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where they could safely access lands and waters, where they could conduct ceremonies and pursue sustenance. Since the Northeast is not yet a postcolonial region—the colonizers came, stayed, and put down roots—remembrance has unfolded within a framework of ongoing dispossession and continuance of a dominant spatial order of privatized property and state control that runs counter to many tribal communities’ own sensibilities about homelands.23 In reckoning with human connections to place, I emphasize deep-seated ties that Algonquians have maintained with their homelands, despite colonial intrusions and appropriations. While Euro-American settlers also formed profound ties, Native place-connections have added intensity because they involve conceptions of arising from particular landscapes at creation, or having migrated there in “time out of mind,” as relayed in origin stories—sacred, transhistorical, cosmological dimensions. Yet it is important to avoid characterizing Indigenous people as inextricable from place, effectively locked into single locales or diminished and inauthentic if they exercise mobility. The equation of Natives with stasis and Westerners with mobility is a pernicious commonplace, Arjun Appadurai has argued: “Natives are in one place, a place to which explorers, administrators, missionaries, and eventually anthropologists, come. These outsiders, these observers, are regarded as quintessentially mobile; they are the movers, the seers, the knowers. The natives are immobilized by their belonging to a place. Of course, when observers arrive, natives are capable of moving to another place. But this is not really motion; it is usually flight, escape, to another equally confining place.”24 Appadurai’s contention, which criticizes the unwavering theoretical alliance of indigeneity and place as “incarceration,” complements the emphasis on real, ingrained relations with earth and its beings. As this study demonstrates, many Northeastern Natives moved away from traditional homelands and reservations in an underrecognized “Algonquian diaspora,” set in motion to a large degree by King Philip’s War and related conflicts, but also propelled by their own volition and strategic adaptations to shifting circumstances. Far-flung sites like Wisconsin, Québec, Bermuda, the West Indies, and North Africa thereby came to figure into Algonquian postwar geographies, along with smaller intraregional migrations that brought them to new ports, cities, suburbs, rural areas, and tribal homelands. At the same time, Algonquians have cultivated ties to older homelands through commemorations, rituals, periodic visitations, and imaginative journeys, demonstrating that movement itself, and the paths and routes that underpin it, can constructively contribute to culture instead of undercutting or degrading it.25

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If “space” and “place” are volatile terms, so are “memory” and “history” commonplace yet contentious words. Since the rise of “memory studies” as a discrete field in the late twentieth century, they have frequently been characterized as oppositional. Memory can be the antihistory: local, vernacular, lived, animate, unfootnoted, quasi-religious, a presentist lens that refracts the past to suit contemporary needs. History can be academic, objective, dispassionate, footnoted, resolutely secular, unbeholden to contemporary concerns in its treatment of the past.26 Some academic historians delight in dismantling popular memory, using document-based research to poke holes in easy truisms and bring to light historical actualities that challenge sanguine folk views of the past. Or they critique memory as an ally of profiteering, disparaging the socalled “memory boom” and its tendencies to commodify the past through entrepreneurial pursuits like pricey museums and “tragedy tourism.”27 This book proceeds partly in that vein, showing, for instance, how Yankee antiquarians conveniently ignored empirical information about enduring Natives in favor of simplistic “memory” of their vanishing, and profited from the display and interpretation of Native artifacts and knowledge. But that deconstructive— even destructive—approach to popular memory is not the whole story. And in almost every case, stark binaries pitting memory against history rapidly break down.28 I view memory and history in the Northeast as mutually constitutive, operating in complex feedback loops. Memory can prod history into confrontations with uncomfortable chapters of the past. There are instances in which community memory kept alive the brutalities of colonialism, for example, while academic history sidestepped reckoning with them in favor of more palatable narratives. Memory can conserve real information that no documentary record has registered. Archaeologists frequently have consulted oral traditions about the locations of certain events when determining where to conduct their field surveys. In some communities history is trusted, verifiable, authoritative, while memory is untrustworthy, overly emotional, merely anecdotal. In others, memory holds more cultural currency and authoritative clout than written history, which is distrusted as out of touch with lived experiences, based on a woefully small subset of information that captures only a sliver of reality. While memory frequently is ascribed to Indigenous peoples (or “Others” aligned with oral modes of knowledge transmission), and history to EuroAmericans, those boundaries routinely collapse as well. This book demonstrates how memory has shaped the writing of history, and vice versa, in such intricate ways that by the early twenty-first century they

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are thoroughly intertwined. While it treats memories seriously, as legitimate ways of apprehending the past, it does not take them at face value, but instead explores their origins, transformations, and cultural functions within and beyond their home communities. This is thus a book about epistemology as well: how we know what we know about early American pasts. Unexpectedly, it developed into an investigation of the sources and sites that inform scholars and everyday people about that past. I realized en route that locating the materials of memory—the stories, anecdotes, heirlooms, monuments, maps, and other vernacular items that recall King Philip’s War in one way or another— ought to involve a truly widespread mode of research. Early Americanists tend to gravitate to a handful of archives in southern New England to conduct their research. I too have worked profitably at these venues. Yet much more lies in the “minor” archives of the Northeast, the hundreds or thousands of tiny public libraries, tribal museums, and local historical societies, which range from well-endowed institutions to trailers scarcely able to pay their electric bills. More than 140 of these sites have informed my analyses. These modest “memory houses” hold the manuscripts and ephemera hauled down from family attics that exist nowhere else. Their collecting practices are distinctive, and their cataloging systems even more so. As the label on one cabinet in the history room of the Conway, New Hampshire, public library candidly classifies its holdings: “Wicked Nifty Stuff.” More common are the “Indians” files, folders into which every manner of material on Native topics has been stuffed over the years—surely an instructive lens into mainstream mentalities about historicity and its actors. Drawing on the multitudinous holdings of these heterogeneous archives, libraries, and museums, this study is also about those sites: how repositories originated, how collections developed, who has arbitrated what belongs inside, and what is not a rightful part of the official story. “There is no political power without control of the archive,” Jacques Derrida contended in Archive Fever about these acts of gatekeeping.29 Archiving has been a cornerstone of New Englanders’ claims to territorial and political authority. From land deeds they semicarefully preserved, to sheaves of manuscripts that affirmed AngloAmerican versions of Native-settler relations, to census records that selectively tabulated or erased tribal populations, Puritan and Yankee archivists used control of paper trails to bolster real-world hegemony. By developing a critical genealogy of archiving, this study demonstrates that the very sources upon which scholars rely to reconstruct Northeastern pasts have been inflected by historical contingencies and settler colonialism: papers and artifacts destroyed

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intentionally and accidentally; curators who decided to not collect, or to deaccession, certain materials; the alienation of tribal communities from their own heritage objects, claimed and controlled by outsider repositories. Scholars recognize repositories in other parts of the world as politically fraught “imperial archives,” and that lens can also be productively turned on Northeastern sites.30 At the same time, a smaller but notable group of Native repositories have also developed alternative practices of collection, management, interpretation, and access, implementing Indigenous preservationist and pedagogic sensibilities.31 All of these inform this book. In The Name of War, Jill Lepore highlighted the transformative role language played in the war’s waging and remembrance, investigating how “acts of war generate acts of narration.”32 Written at a high point of the twentieth century’s “linguistic turn,” it made detailed contributions to understandings of the narrativization of violence. Indeed, it homed in on King Philip’s War as a convenient case study for observing the mechanisms of language’s relations to violence and race. “I’m interested in our capacity to justify acts of tremendous, unspeakable cruelty,” Lepore later remarked. “It’s not obvious, at least not to me. And the way I have always tried to puzzle it out is by thinking mainly about language. What, literally, is the vocabulary of justification?”33 There was a casualness in the approach, at times more invested in the compelling narrative qualities and tropes of King Philip’s War than the particular conditions of colonialism and resistance in the Northeast: “In the end, of course, it is just another story about just another war. Happily, along the way it’s also a murder mystery, an adventure story, and a tale of peril on the high seas. King Philip’s War, like most bulky chunks of the past, is filled with fascinating characters, bizarre happenings, and strange tales.”34 Yet language, especially as expressed in Western alphabetic form, is only a part of human experience. Alphabetic literacy was one among many modes of communication in early America, as a provocative wave of recent scholarship has amply demonstrated. Wampum belts, knotted string quipus, birch-bark scrolls, deerskin maps, brush heaps, petroglyphs, megaliths, and an immense array of other media also constituted crucial modes of signification and recollection—objects touched, held, recited from, visited, carefully maintained from one generation of knowledge-keepers to the next.35 As a result of focusing tightly on narrative language, Lepore’s constrained methodology foreclosed important avenues of inquiry. “How those Algonquians who survived King Philip’s War commemorated and remembered the war is, sadly,

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mere speculation,” The Name of War lamented.36 This is misleading. Rich strands of evidence shed light on how diverse communities responded to and remembered the war, from its immediate aftermath onward. This evidence is readily available in documentary collections as well as more arcane unpublished materials, and in a plethora of sources that require different methodologies to unfold than textual close reading. Consider: remembrance of King Philip’s War has taken place through oral accounts relayed through face-to-face encounters; performances, embodied and enacted; tangible and visible creations including public artwork, monuments small and large; layers of so-called graffiti; the material record explored by archaeologists; and especially human entanglements with physical surroundings—paths walked over and over, burial and sacred sites regularly visited, familiar rivers, ponds, and coastlines waded and paddled. Rituals of mourning, protest, solidarity, and conquest have been crucial aspects of negotiating this past, involving bodies in motion that sometimes leave behind few lasting imprints.37 Artifacts and human remains circulated domestically and transatlantically—both real and specious ones, including King Philip’s alleged “war club” and “battle ax,” his samp (corn) bowl, his silver cup, his sash and mantle, the sword used to behead him, and parts of his bodily remnants. Though the war itself did not attain immediate visualization, the prolonged postwar period brought an efflorescence of illustrations, paintings, engravings, murals, public sculpture, even graphic novels and films. Visuality and materiality create unique fields of engagement that are distinct from the relationship of a solitary reader with a written text, and these relations cannot be simplistically distilled to discourse or narrative.38 My particular interest is in the materiality of remembrance and the transformation of landscapes, which draws on the aforementioned objects and behaviors by considering how they function in situ. The production of landscape and memory has been dialectical, an ongoing reverberation between communities and places that builds, accretes, responds, generates new formations.39 This dialectic has taken shape over a very long time span, though certain eras have seen frenzies of land clearing and monument erecting that briskly altered the morphology, or form and spatial structure, of landscape. Such things have been happening since “time out of mind,” as some tribal traditions describe their ancient pasts. When colonists and tribal members marked and recalled violences, they did not interact with a tabula rasa, vacuum domicilium, or pristine “wilderness.” The Northeast was already memorial terrain and had been for millennia. Origin stories about earth-shapers who created giant

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landforms, navigational markings, stone and brush cairns, petroglyphs, megaliths, and ceremonial sites all contoured and animated the earth, and the memoryscapes of 1675–1678 took shape within those matrices. Consider the Wampanoag memorial practices described by English colonist Edward Winslow in 1624: Instead of Records and Chronicles, they take this course, where any remarkable act is done, in memorie of it, either in the place, or by some path-way neere adjoyning, they make a round hole in the ground about a foote deep, and as much over, which when others passing by behold, they enquire the cause and occasion of the same, which being once knowne, they are carefull to acquaint all men, as occasion serveth therewith. And lest such holes should be filled, or growne vp [with vegetation] by any accident, as men passe by they will oft renew the same. By which means many things of great Antiquitie are fresh in memory. So that as a man travelleth, if he can vnderstand his guide, his journey will be less tedious, by reason of the many historicall Discourses [that] will be related to him.40 Envision that. A vast memorial terrain dotted with holes in the earth, continuously being cleared, refreshed, and narrated by those who walked by, powerfully linking together ancestors and their descendants. While Natives were fluent in these mnemonic practices, Winslow was one of the rare colonial observers of Native landmarking to attribute to these constructions a legitimate status within systems of recording and knowledge-keeping.41 But overall these long-standing memoryscapes have remained undervisible to outsiders. Given that academic historians tend to work in diminutive increments of years or decades, reperiodizations are needed to accommodate these longue durée dialectics of place development.42 Turning toward materiality brings challenges, certainly. In speaking of historical trauma, particularly of war and its extravagant brutalities, the notion of the “trace” can be consolatory, even seductive. It implies constraint upon remembrance, appearing to possess an irrefutable factuality that sets limits upon what can be said, or denied, about the past. When conventional written archives are absent or compromised, the material (especially landscape) trace may seem the lone remaining testament to what transpired at a site, an ineradicable witness exempt from coercion or faulty recollection. Landscape, as opposed to edited texts or airbrushed photographs, can “feel immutable,” Claudia Koontz has argued, giving an “impression of fixity.” Channeling

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Maurice Halbwachs’s work on collective memory, she valued landscapes as historical artifacts for their apparent stability: “space is a reality that endures.”43 Kent Ryden’s assessment of New England folkloric terrain echoed this conviction. The destruction of environmental traces is distressing, he wrote, because “stories cling to place, with such tenacity that the destruction of place threatens the entire structure—the fear is that stories will fly away unanchored, memory will dim, emotion will fade, identity will become tenuous if the geographical root is cut.”44 This desire for the solid, witnessing trace may be a phenomenon of late modernity, or an inclination intensified by the twentieth century’s especial violences and subsequent injunctions against forgetting and denial; or by the specter of unchecked renarrations of the past. There has been a surge of interest in what establishes the contours of historical writing: wariness of notions that “the past somehow speaks for itself,” but endorsement of the “conviction that the room for maneuver allowed to practicing research historians is not open or unbounded and it is the past’s traces that supply the confinement.”45 “Artefacts matter,” Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan have argued: in “their absence . . ., memory work is much more arduous. Artefacts related to place enable the retrieval of dense memory traces, because they create ‘extrinsic context dependency.’ ”46 In The Archive of Place, William Turkel tracked “the ways people retrieve the past from a place” and found that peculiar weight has been accorded to material traces to buttress claims to social memory.47 Traces can carry outsize authority to bear witness to a supposed past. This book takes seriously the distinctive nature of the material trace as compared to language. But it also contends that traces of violence are not selfevident or self-explanatory. The presumed stability of the material trace may be more illusory than actual, as traces do not emerge from the earth so much as they are produced through historically, culturally specific actions of individuals and communities. This can seem counterintuitive. How could anyone argue with the foundation stones of a house, with charred kernels of corn at the bottom of archaeological test pits, with a line of metal bullets embedded in the ground? Surely these remnants must confirm that here it was, here it happened. Yet the very visibility and legibility of such traces depends on culturally inflected ways of seeing; on the tools used and questions asked by archaeologists, preservationists, community members; and on the meanings these groups seek to ascribe to physical remains and earthly features. It is possible to work toward greater inclusion of materialities in accountings of violence while steering away from mystification of how they “hold” memory or truth. Across the Northeast, harsh winters, humidity, and acidic soils all hasten

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decay in distinctive ways. And the past four centuries have brought intensive remodeling of natural and built environments, accelerated in the twenty-first century, as construction of residential developments, highways and roads, shopping plazas, and industrial areas have all but bulldozed numberless soil layers. Yet archaeologist James Deetz has urged more creative searching for even the subtlest signs of past peoples: “in theory almost every person who lived in America left behind some trace of their passing. Perhaps a personal possession, now broken and buried, or a slave cabin in the forest covered with Virginia creeper, or a gravestone tilted by time but still speaking to us across the centuries, or something as humble as the remains of a meal consumed and forgotten—it is all there and we must not disregard it.”48 Finally—crucially—materiality is not everything. Countless practices of placemaking hinge on invisible qualities, aspects of human connection to place that are not readily apparent to investigative eyes and leave no marks or only transient ones: walking, moving, enacting ritual. By overfocusing on the durable, visible, and tangible, Lisa Prosper has argued about Indigenous landscapes in First Nations / Canadian contexts, preservationists and critics “run the risk of paving over difference by overlooking the experience of those social actors whose relationship to the landscape is not materially evident,” when measured against conventional Western modes of assessing heritage value, like a fixation on ruins.49 “Any thing—anything in the world, even the frailest footprint—can become memorial: can become a bearer of memories with as much right as a monument built to stand forever,” Edward Casey has written.50 Extending the purview of memory studies to encompass this fuller range of memory-sparks, from the durable to the utterly ephemeral, invites reconsideration of the means through which Northeasterners pursued (or were pursued by) the past and its things.51 In 1786, historian Jeremy Belknap proclaimed that scholars of New England needed to immerse themselves in the grounds about which they wrote: “To be a true Geographer it is necessary . . . to be a Traveller & a Surveyor. To depend on distant & accidental Information is not safe & there is a material difference between describing a Place that We have seen & one that We have not seen.”52 His call for eyewitnessing is worth heeding. Becoming deeply immersed in land and water is an incomparable way of seeing sites’ nuances, webs of relations, and terms of human engagement. Places are always in flux, as this book emphasizes, so naively projecting present conditions upon the past can distort views of earlier environments. But the current state of affairs

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in situ can be illustrative nonetheless. Based on a conviction that fieldwork ought to be an integral part of researching place and memory, I undertook an extensive journey. In the past dozen years, especially regular travels between 2007 and 2016 and a concentrated fifteen-month stretch of 2010 and 2011, I have sought out memoryscapes of the Northeast across tens of thousands of miles. I have generally submerged discussion of these itineraries to avoid the confessional excesses of travel memoirs, which tend to reveal more about authors’ neuroses (and automobile woes) than their subject matter. Yet personal attunement to the phenomenology of place unavoidably shapes the nature of research, thinking, and writing.53 The following pages probe a dense map of sites, and I have attempted to visit as many as has been feasible. This meant climbing mountains, mucking through swamps, sliding across frozen streams, venturing down dirt roads and wooded paths, enduring island ferries with seasick tourists. Paddling canoes, getting mired in mud looking for garrison houses, bushwhacking through overgrown colonial cemeteries, gingerly stepping across abandoned beaver dams. I have skirted the margins of golf courses, been chased by dogs and trailed by security officers, slid down snow-covered hillsides, scrambled over seaside cliffs, navigated hairpin turns, swatted mosquitoes in archaeological sites—with a camera in hand when appropriate, which I used to visually document these sites in upward of thirteen thousand photographs. Some places were fresh to me. Others I knew previously but learned radically anew through the research process. Sometimes I walked and drove alone. Other times I traveled and listened in the company of townspeople, archaeologists, interpreters, landowners, tribal historians, and community members. When possible, I dwelled long enough in a given area to sense how the salt-marsh grass appears in the midday sun and in the failing dusk-light when the tide starts to change and the wind picks up. Many of the places featured here cannot be “seen” from the archives or the comfort of a computer chair. These environs have not all been photographed or imaged by satellites, despite the digital age’s pretensions to universal availability of information. Seeing them requires bodily exertion, dislocation from familiar habits of movement, and time-intensive immersion in the lived qualities of diverse worlds. Hearing Indigenous perspectives on their own terms, on their own grounds, is an especially critical movement toward the kinds of “decolonizing methodologies” that early Americanist studies and American history urgently need.54 The term “research” itself “is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary,” Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith has

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argued. “When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful.”55 In Western contexts, research about Indigenous people, across a spectrum of academic disciplines, has long been intertwined with imperial and colonial projects, and has been complicit in damages, dislocations, and losses that still bear effects on communities today. Tuhiwai Smith urges a foundational rethinking of what constitutes research, along with the ethical considerations involved in choosing to examine Indigenous people, past and present. While there is no single decolonizing methodology—instead, a range of approaches that vary across disciplines, and from project to project—there are several common commitments that have shaped my own outlook and process. Decolonizing methodologies do not seek to unilaterally extract information from communities or construct narratives and analyses about them without input and accountability. Instead, they strive to recognize that knowledge is multisited, existing in many locales, including the oral traditions and lived experiences of past-keepers. (A tactic of “braiding knowledge,” which “brings distinct forms of knowledge together” in order to “present a multifaceted view of the past” is how Sonya Atalay, an Anishinaabe community member and professional archaeologist, has conceptualized this.)56 They aim to understand phenomena through communities’ own cosmologies and intellectual frameworks, to cultivate meaningful relationships between scholars and descendant communities, to share works in progress and final products in reciprocal ways, and to pursue inquiries that are both intellectually rigorous and careful about not inflicting new harms on communities that have already endured tremendous stresses. They acknowledge that access to archives, museums, and other repositories containing historical sources can be uneven, meaning that academically based scholars with formal credentials and research budgets (however modest in an age of austerity) sometimes make headway in manners tribal members cannot. And they realize that the very act of telling stories about the past carries consequences for the present and future. For the discipline of history, the need for decolonizing methodologies proceeds partly from Indigenous communities’ own insistence that the versions of the American past most often taught in schools and other public venues tend to be enormously misaligned with complex historical realities. “The population at large has been lied to or misinformed about the history of this nation,” Dawn Dove, a Narragansett tribal elder and educator, has commented about the teaching of history in New England classrooms, including King Philip’s War specifically. “We have raised a society that does not even know that we, the

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Indigenous people of this land, still exist.”57 Dove’s critique could also apply to a wave of scholarly articles and monographs produced in recent decades about Natives and colonists in early America. While I am indebted to much of this work for opening up compelling windows onto formative interactions among these groups, it is still rare that a scholarly study in these fields encompasses substantive acknowledgment of—never mind engagement with— present-day tribal descendant communities. Perhaps there is a nod to them in the preface or epilogue. This strikes me as a major missed opportunity to develop more sensitive, capacious, and culturally informed analyses. To put it another way, in order to write (and teach) histories that are more fully consonant with the complicated, violent, dynamic past of the Northeast, it is essential to encompass other voices, other sources, other places, and other modes of inquiry than those that have conventionally undergirded this region’s and nation’s dominant stories. My own methods have evolved significantly since I commenced this project many years ago, and they remain imperfect works in progress. They continue to change as my comprehension of Native-colonial relations in this region deepens—what may well be a lifelong endeavor. Perhaps more than anything, I aspire in these alternative methods to be in responsive conversation with both the real people and real places of the Northeast. The many place-visits I have undertaken for this book gave me insights that no archive could in isolation. They convinced me of the durability of antiquarians’ monuments, remarkably resistant to collapse even when grievously neglected—yet recurrently challenged in important ways. They drove home how access to place hinges upon social and environmental factors, denoted by those two ubiquitous New England signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY: NO TRESPASSING and CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. (Maybe FROST HEAVES as well.) Most sobering, they underscored the socioecological brink on which much of the Northeast stands. Signs in four languages warn against consuming fish from the Sudbury River. Boston Harbor churns with motor oil and sewage outflow. Beer cans and discarded tires litter parts of Great Swamp, while industrial corridors remain soaked in carcinogens. I grew up by Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire, near the bank where sizable gatherings of Algonquians camped, fished, and socialized for thousands of years. Only recently has the Merrimack been resuscitated after industrialization exhausted it (fig. 5). Jeremiads about degradation are age-old, from Wampanoags’ protesting destruction of their cornfields by roving English swine, to present-day “Save the Bay” activists’ rallying around the Narragansett watershed. They can easily slip into stagnating nostalgia, as antiquarians demonstrated in their bids to recapture a fictive age where

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Figure 5. The waterfalls at Amoskeag, which are located just below this point in the Merrimack River, exist within Pennacook lands that were critical refuges for Algonquians relocating from war-torn southern New England. The falls supported a major Indigenous fishing and gathering area for thousands of years, as archaeology and oral traditions have attested. In intervening centuries the riverscape has been substantially transformed by industrialization and curtailing of certain activities, including fishing. Construction of a bridge access route in the mid-twentieth century leveled part of a bluff known to contain rich material traces of Indigenous presence. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

people and land lived more harmoniously, or as “ecological Indian” stereotyping simplistically posited about Indigenous earth-stewardship.58 There nevertheless is urgency to confronting settler colonialism’s dominant modes of land use and water use, and contemporary disintegrations of local attachments, vernacular knowledge, and place-respect—qualities that can seem ever more fragile in globalizing, commercializing, homogenizing, amnesiac America.59 The most crucial dimension of this study may be its assessment of how memories of devastation exist relationally alongside those of regeneration. A participant remarked to me one year at a commemoration at Deer Island, site of a Native wartime internment camp in the harbor waters by Boston, that historians seemed to be compelled by accounts of the conflict—but less interested in what came before and after, and how Indigenous people survived ex-

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treme pressures.60 I have long ruminated on these comments because they encapsulate the conundrum of choosing to focus on conflict. Historians are partly beholden to conflict for creating sources, admittedly. When people bring each other to court, they generate legal records. When they gather at barricades or in town meetings, newspaper records emerge. Contestation tends to generate archival trails, though unevenly for the parties involved. Violence can silence certain voices, as Karl Jacoby notes in his study of memory in the aftermath of an Apache massacre.61 But in focusing on conflict, we run the risk of overstating conflict’s significance in the long lives of Northeastern communities. By opening up a scale of inquiry that encompasses the longue durée, we may be able to better contextualize these heightened moments of overt struggle within stretches of relative stability and continuity. Memory itself has a weedlike quality, a resilient way of branching out from trauma into other realms of experience. Memories of a 1675 massacre at Great Swamp intertwine with memories of other swamps, hunting, sovereign resurgence, while a 1676 massacre at a waterfall rolls into recollections of fishing, ethnogenesis, regathering, and ceremony. The study of memory, then, can do more than reinscribe trauma onto the historical geographies of the Northeast. It can accommodate other pasts—and futures—even while acknowledging Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd’s trenchant remark in The Transit of Empire about Indigenous dispossessions: “there is a difference between recovered and having never lost in the first place.”62 In turning my attention to King Philip’s War, I set out to write about upheaval, destruction, the centuries-long fallout of extraordinary violence, and ongoing colonialism that haunts everyday habits. These exist in staggering quantities, and I have been distressed by colonial mentalities and practices still present in subtle and egregious forms throughout a region that prides itself on supposed progressiveness. But along the way, through many cycles of the seasons, the historic and contemporary people of the Northeast have also shown me the converse: spots of critical reflection, ethical reckoning, political resistance, regathering, recovery, regeneration. Disturbed soil, as those who work the earth well know, can be fertile ground for new growth.

Note on Organization, Terminology, and Imagery This book is arranged around place, a structure that intentionally challenges many academic historians’ preferences for straightforward chronology as an organizing scheme. Each section examines a place in the Northeast and

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Atlantic World that has been significant in the waging and remembering of King Philip’s War, tracking its material and conceptual evolution from deep time to the present, and its complex links to other places. In many standard historical texts, “colonial New England” refers to the era of European, primarily English, presence on the northeastern Atlantic seaboard and near interior prior to the American Revolution (ca. 1608–1776). As used here, this also refers to historical and contemporary New England, which is still a region of settler colonialism. “Northeast” encompasses Native as well as colonial spaces. It is used here to cover the area between Long Island Sound and the St. Lawrence River, including parts of Canada that have historically been linked to areas presently claimed by the New England states, New York, and United States. There is not a single, universally used Algonquian-language word for this region, though occasionally commentators use “Dawnland.” Indigenous toponyms are used when possible for local geographies, and the very process of name-changing is discussed as a feature of both colonization and decolonization. Both “Indian” and “Native” or “Native American” are commonly used in the United States, as well as “Indigenous,” while “First Nations” occurs in Canada. In some situations “Indian” refers more to Euro-American representations of Indigenous people, while “Native” indicates actual Indigenous people. Tribally specific names are used when possible, or “Native” when individuals or groups of multiple, or indeterminate, tribal heritages are involved. Several Northeastern tribal communities are in the midst of language revitalization projects, which involve important considerations around access and use of Indigenous-language words and translations.63 In selected places I have incorporated such words, since language is a major conduit for cultural knowledge, though overall I have exercised caution in respecting those boundaries since I am not a tribal community member. When including direct quotations from historical sources, I have generally maintained the original spelling and punctuation. I hope readers will grapple with the complexities of historical language, including the strategic use of English by Native people who were often multilingual. The communities discussed in this book have reckoned with the passage of time in diverse ways. In English and American colonial contexts, dating systems have changed over time, shifting the start of the new year to January 1 instead of March 25 and transitioning from a Julian to Gregorian calendar. To avoid confusion between “Old Style” and “New Style” systems, in some instances dates are denoted in a split form (for example, January 10, 1675/76).

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Because a monograph has finite limits, I have chosen a discrete number of “places” to examine, and thereby set aside a formidable volume of research and site notes. The entirety of King Philip’s War and the seventeenth century deserves thorough revisiting, from multiple scholarly and community-based perspectives. I hope future studies will take up other dimensions, geographies, narratives, documents, objects, and analytic frameworks. A number of illustrations and maps have been included to allow the reader more direct access to specific areas, events, and objects under discussion. I am keenly aware of sensitivities around visualization, particularly pertaining to locales that could be put at risk for looting or vandalism; to Indigenous human remains and ceremonial/sacred objects, including those in museums; and to living persons who may wish to maintain privacy or anonymity. I have endeavored to maintain intellectually robust as well as respectful practices around all of these. Any misjudgments are my responsibility.

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1 • Contested Passages Coastal and Inland Homelands, Bastoniak, and Internment by the “City Upon a Hill”

The runners set out before dawn. Traveling east from the rushing falls at South Natick, Massachusetts, they swept over cold earth and under midautumn stars, silhouetted by headlights cutting the dark. By the time they reached the river, the sun had risen just high enough to illuminate a striking sight. Just upstream from the Boston skyline, alongside crew teams stroking in dawn practice, three mishoonash floated on the calm waters of the Charles River. These were wooden dugouts fashioned by Wampanoags from burnt, hewn tree trunks, and perhaps not since the violent days of King Philip’s War had such vessels made the trip downriver to the harbor.1 The “Sacred Run and Paddle” undertaken by tribal members and supporters on October 30, 2010, commemorated one of the most wrenching chapters in that conflict: the forced removal of Native people from their homes to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where they were confined during the winter of 1675–1676. Many of them suffered and died on that windswept spot. Deer Island’s present-day built environment gives scant testimony to the island’s calamitous past. Yet memories of this violence were unquestionably alive that frigid October day, animating a reclamation of Indigenous geographies transformed—but not erased—by centuries of cross-cultural struggle. As the wooden vessels pushed through the waves, they were more than maritime curiosities. They were politically charged agents of decolonization, making a provocative statement to Boston and reaffirming the city’s urban heart as Native space. When you travel to Deer Island today, you may notice first its most visually prominent feature: a sewage treatment complex. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority constructed this plant to more effectively process wastewater from Greater Boston after decades of harbor-polluting practices. But the

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plant’s very existence has been strongly contested, standing as it does on grounds considered intensely sensitive by certain Native descendant communities. They have sought physical commemoration of their ancestors’ presence there during wartime—and also long before and after—and lobbied for more just historical interpretations of the site and its environs. The harbor overall has been embroiled in long-running dialogues about appropriate uses of water and land. Recreationalists and environmentalists vocally assert interests in these areas, such as the more than sixty acres of “open space” on Deer Island. The island’s meandering trails and ocean-hugging perimeter walkway attract Bostonians and tourists as unique escapes from the city’s confines. These and other priorities tentatively became reconciled when the National Park Service consolidated a preliminary blueprint in 2002 for the harbor islands’ future. But the plan’s apparent cohesiveness, especially its attempt to support a multiple-use model, belied major unresolved disagreements over place-meanings.2 In a city where space for development is at a premium, where private enterprises can trump public- or community-oriented ones, and where growing urban populations create ever-greater pressures for infrastructure, cultural memory and heritage can find themselves marginalized in decision-making. The challenges have been especially acute in matters involving tribal communities and foundationally different conceptions of ancestral spaces and political authority. Yet as the ongoing evolution of Deer Island makes apparent, connections to centuries-old conflicts remain potent signifiers that exert tangible influence on the present and future. Deer Island is the harbor’s second-largest island, said to be named for the “Deare which often [swam] thither from the Maine, when they [were] chased by the Woolves.” Present-day Deer Island is actually a peninsula, connected to nearby Winthrop by a narrow strip of land since soil erosion filled in Shirley Gut. In the late seventeenth century the site was still a true island, a quality that precipitated its mobilization in King Philip’s War and complicated status in the ensuing years (fig. 6). In the course of the conflict, colonial authorities ordered hundreds of Christian-affiliated Natives from southern New England’s “praying towns” to be rounded up and hastened to the island with scant notice. Ostensibly for their own protection, this internment dislocated Natives from traditional homelands and kinship networks, as well as from newer links to English communities and influential Puritan figures. Though the island lacked adequate means of sustenance and shelter, internees were forbidden to leave even as weather turned colder. Massachusetts Bay Colony authorities eventually ordered minimal provisions to be sent to the island, but unknown

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Figure 6. Human activities on the harbor islands by Shawmut extend over thousands of years. This map depicts extensive maritime activity in the surrounding waters and structures on several islands. The emerging town of Boston is at left, while Deer Island lies to its east. The map is an 1883 facsimile of the 1711 An exact draught of Bostone harbour with a survey of most of the islands about it. (Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library)

numbers died from starvation and exposure. When colonial captors released survivors in spring 1676, these Natives returned to physical and social milieus strongly altered by seasons of unrest and made overtly resistant toward Indigenous continuance.3 While Deer Island is a conspicuous spot in fraught processes of redevelopment and commemoration, it does not exist in a vacuum. For generations the island has been intricately connected through ecology and human networks to wider land-, river-, and seascapes spanning the immediate coastal and interior parts of Massachusetts as well as the Greater Northeast. Freshwater and saltwater, along with firm ground and many intermediate forms of wetlands, constituted the place-worlds of Massachusetts, Wampanoags, Nipmucs, and other

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Algonquian relations. When the runners set out before first light at the falls along the Charles River in 2010, they animated another node in this extensive geography. That river (perhaps originally called Quinnebequin, or the Massachusetts River) arises at headwaters in the hilly, forested interior, then snakes to the northeast before emptying into the harbor, all the way gathering water from a tangle of brooks, streams, and aquifers. Twenty dams regulate the river today, but for most of its existence the current flowed freely along an eightymile course, allowing alewife, blueback herring, and other anadromous fish to swim upstream to spawn. These fishways supported Indigenous communities throughout the watershed, who also hunted, planted, and settled in fertile surrounding terrain.4 The comparatively newer settlement at the river’s mouth known as Boston has been a regional center of colonial policy-making and historical interpretation since the 1630s. Some Algonquians called all colonists in New England Bastoniak, using the town’s name as a metonym for regional settler colonialism more broadly.5 As an exceedingly colonial place by design, Boston can seem detached from Native homelands. This was the city, after all, that only in 2005 formally lifted a ban on Native presence dating from the 1670s.6 Yet this “urban homeland” has remained a passageway and dwelling place for Native peoples over the centuries, proving fertile ground for multitribal coalition building, strategic interactions with colonial power brokers, and social resistance.7 As the mishoonash powerfully demonstrated, it has also been a visible locus for ritual or performative reclamations of iconic cityscapes within one of the United States’ oldest Euro-American settlements. Some of these place-dynamics attain visibility in documentary records. Others require alternative methods to access. “The pursuit of performance does not require historians to abandon the archive, but it does encourage them to spend more time in the streets,” Joseph Roach contends.8 By attending to the long-standing uses of city streets—and water highways—by Natives and non-Natives alike, we can discern more clearly the stakes of reassessing Deer Island as a space of intentional isolation and antimobility, and also of expansive connections to the Native Northeast.

Islands by Shawmut, “Praying Towns,” and Pressures in Nipmuc Country Algonquians standing on Deer Island millennia ago looked over a place of rhythmic tidal and freshwater motions, where three rivers flowed into a harbor and then the open ocean. The origins of these land- and waterscapes lay in

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the beginning times, they knew, when larger-than-life figures shaped the contours of the Dawnland. Islands, presumably including Deer Island, arose through specific actions that were orally related across generations through closely maintained traditions. Some accounts say that the giant Maushop, a foundational figure among the Wampanoags, dragged his toes while walking across the earth, creating island chains in his footsteps’ path. Others attest that at the place where Maushop “smoked his pipe and . . . dumped the ashes out of it,” the island of Nantucket formed. The colorfully striated cliffs on the island of Noepe (later called Martha’s Vineyard) attained their hues from Maushop’s energetic whale hunting, as he struck his catch against the rocks. Still other stories relate that Maushop constructed certain islands in the wake of familial tragedy. He and his wife Squant bore five sons, who died during conflict with the Little People; in the aftermath Maushop “heaped sand over their corpses, building it into huge mounds which became small islands. He planted trees and grasses to grow on the graves of his sons.”9 These islands could be intensely memorial places, connecting Algonquians to ancestral cycles of loss and renewal that gave form and significance to the known world. Just to the northeast in Wabanaki country, the giant-transformer Gluskap similarly influenced the coastline, tides, and other-than-human beings that dwelled there. Remnants of his canoe could be seen above the waterline, appearing as islands.10 Numberless islands dot the Dawnland’s coast, and specific oral-mythological traditions have descended for some. These wide-ranging story-cycles conveyed the changeability of Indigenous coastal worlds and the purposeful quality of their distinctive features. This island, that cove, that whirlpool, those currents existed because of meaningful events in the emergence of the world and the process of making it habitable for the People. The “coastal zone is . . . fundamentally liminal, a threshold between the very different domains of land and sea,” archaeologist Barbara Luedtke has written about the harbor. Thinking about these spaces as transitional and dynamic helps illuminate their importance. They were dependably fertile zones replete with fish, shellfish, birds, and plants, but also potentially dangerous stretches of fast-changing wind and water conditions.11 Given the plentitude and power of freshwater and saltwater for Natives of this region, it is all the more curious that regional historical scholarship has conventionally granted lesser attention to offshore lifeways and encounters, concentrating instead on terrestrial areas. But recent attunement to “wet homelands,” “saltwater frontiers,” the “Indigenous Atlantic,” and similar geographies has opened up broader conceptions of Indigenous places and the thorough interlinking

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between water and land.12 And these were ancient ties. On the harbor islands and onshore, material signs indicate extensive use by humans across millennia, evidence of the area’s long-standing value on a seasonal or periodic basis if not for full-time habitation.13 As this basin transformed geologically and environmentally following the last glacial retreat, the People adapted their travels and uses in response to incrementally rising water levels. Coastal Algonquians knew the harbor and surroundings as places of mobility, encounter, sustenance, and responsibility. They routinely traveled by water to visit extended kin networks and conduct diplomacy with neighbors. Skilled paddlers of mishoonash, they traversed freshwater streams, rivers, and lakes that connected them to the interior as well as open sea, where young people learned to navigate shifting tides and underwater shoals.14 The ocean gave them whales—hunted near shore or washed up on beaches—whose meat, blubber, and other parts were allocated within particular sachemships, the territories over which sachems (leaders) held responsibility.15 Seals, eels, turtles, and shellfish added protein to diets, along with multiple species of fish—caught in weirs, lines, nets—that could also be used to enrich cropland cultivated by women.16 Native women performed the challenging labor of lobster hunting: “they must dive sometimes over head and eares for a Lobster, which often shakes them by their hands with a churlish nippe, and bids them adiew.”17 For the spring fish runs, when migrants left the saltwater and pushed upstream, Native people gathered at specific areas like Nemasket, Amoskeag, and Peskeomskut in reliable cycles. During the long Northeast winters, when water assumed its snow and ice forms, hunters tracked animals in the uplands; come springtime, snowmelt replenished fields for corn, beans, and squash. Within these seasonal rounds, it appears the harbor islands were most intensively accessed and used in warmer weather. Rather than hurriedly extracting resources, Algonquians tried to navigate their environs with an ethos of reciprocity and sustainability, accompanied by necessary protocols, ceremonies, and planning, to ensure that all beings in the web of relations would endure into the future. Such “traditional ecological knowledge” evolved by trial and error over the longue durée, adjusting to environmental shifts like rising sea levels. For Natives the very concept of “wilderness”—nature apart from humans—would have been nonsensical, as the entirety of these homelands were known, used, valued, and reflected in place-names that described qualities in terms of use by inhabitants.18 So, too, would have been an aggressively commodity-driven approach. Rather than exhaust one landscape, then uproot and move elsewhere to start anew, Native

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people typically intended to remain in the same locales where generations of ancestors preceded them. Such intergenerational connections are suggested by burial areas situated near rivers and coasts, including close to Deer Island. Ancestors and living relations would have remained in proximity and visibility alongside these vital channels.19 Floating islands held prominent places in Algonquian story-cycles across the Dawnland, which acknowledged a world replete with comings, goings, and transformations. Sometimes these islands harbingered the arrival of a different sort of being. When the first European floating island—or masted wooden ship—appeared in Massachusetts waters is uncertain. A few theories suggest the expansionist Norse, conducting their own transoceanic variety of island-hopping to Iceland, Greenland, and North America, ranged this far south in their Vinland pursuits and encountered Indigenous people they called Skrælings.20 Early contacts and possibly trading between Algonquians and transatlantic fishermen likely predated known written records, given how keen European entrepreneurs were to protect productive fishing grounds for their own access.21 Contacts increased in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, creating opportunities for new trade and interaction. Europeans also brought unfamiliar diseases that swept fiercely through Native communities near the coast. Rampant epidemic disease caused the premature passing-on of sachems and sunksquaws (female leaders), medicine men and women, hunters, fishermen, mishoon builders, story-keepers, parents, and others who played key roles in ensuring a community’s health and stability of future generations. These biological stresses, plus unauthorized English captive-taking in coastal areas in the early 1600s, set groundwork for wary relations toward English settler colonialism. As cold weather set in at Patuxet, south of the bay, a small contingent of English migrants arrived on the floating island they called Mayflower. After ranging up and down the Cape—where they opened corn caches and gravesites—they began to construct a village that they named Plymouth.22 The Pilgrims’ straggling, starving colonizing project coincided with the aftermath of a recent epidemic, which had left local Indigenous populations in diminished circumstances. This contingency shaped their interactions, including the relative receptivity demonstrated by the sachem Massasoit, himself actively cultivating alliances to build stability against other Native groups, particularly Narragansetts to the west.23 Massasoit and his relations strategically made way within Wampanoag homelands for the colonists, and news of the tenuous Plymouth enterprise rapidly spread northward and inward through

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Native networks. Plymouth colonists attempted to replicate customary English regional lifeways in a new setting: they fashioned timber-and-thatch houses, pens for domesticated animals, and fenced-in agricultural fields atop long-standing Indigenous homelands and travel routes. They also surrounded their settlement’s nucleus with a guarded palisade, a vernacular architecture of militarization and defensiveness designed to demarcate colonial from Indigenous spaces.24 So intensely did they perceive a threat from nearby and slightly distant Algonquians that they rapidly erected an enclosure of high, sharpened wooden pales, gates to control entry and departure, and defensive bastions, all monitored by rotating squadrons of male colonists (diverting their labor from badly needed subsistence activities). The colonists also constructed a platform equipped with ordnance at the top of their “Mount” to protect houses and gardens arrayed below, as well as afford them commanding sight lines over the surrounding lands and waters, and before long they replaced it with a more substantial fort. “It was a great work for them in this weakness and time of wants, but the danger of the time required it,” William Bradford asserted in his retrospective account of the colony’s formative years.25 None of these modifications or mentalities arose in a vacuum. English colonists and overseas investors drew upon nearly a half century of Atlantic colonization experiences, from the brutal Tudor conquest of Ireland (training grounds for subduing “savages”), to Martin Frobisher’s fraught interactions with Inuits in the 1570s, to the short-lived Roanoke experiment in Carolina Algonquian territories in the 1580s, to the incorporation of the nearly disastrous Jamestown Colony within Powhatan tributary systems in 1607. All of these involved commercial desires for New World commodities, as well as violent interactions between Native inhabitants and English arrivals. Most notably, Powhatans raised a major resistance against Virginia planters in 1622, news of which eventually reverberated to Englishmen all around the Atlantic and directly spurred the fort construction at Plymouth. Natives just north of Patuxet soon experienced pressures from leaders at Plymouth, who attempted to extend their influence up to Massachusetts Bay. The sachems Obbatinewat and Obtakiest/Chickataubut, who exercised responsibility for lands and waters around the bay, endeavored to maintain Native spaces and sovereignties without overtly antagonizing colonial emissaries.26 Just northeast of the bay, a settlement under John Endecott took shape at Naumkeag (deemed Salem by the migrants). To the southeast, an independent colonial venture arose at Wessagussett (Weymouth), while at Passonagessit Thomas Morton installed a minor but dynamic post. At “Ma-re

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Mount” Morton cultivated a fluid trading-space with Native partners, where furs, alcohol, and firearms circulated. He also ardently opposed neighboring Puritans with his Anglican, royalist sensibilities, underscoring the heterogeneity of English presences and motivations in the region.27 Plymouth leaders and troops repeatedly tried to exercise influence in these areas and came to suspect an insurgent Massachusett resistance. To quell it (rumored or real), in 1623 they pursued and killed a number of Massachusett people, spiritual leaders among them. Plymouth authorities posted Wituwamet’s head outside their palisade as part of a nascent colonial memoryscape, using this dismembered Indigenous body to graphically warn others against noncompliance.28 By precluding traditional tribal forms of interment and mourning for deceased relations, Plymouth also disrupted Wituwamet’s passage onward. Within a few years, Massachusetts, Wampanoags, and nearby Algonquians negotiated rapidly changing material and social landscapes that overtly pressured their homelands and mobility—with the potential for reprisal underlying possibilities for mutually beneficial interactions. Natives and English also increasingly familiarized themselves with each other’s practices and protocols for engaging in violence and with the symbolic dimensions of doing so. Given these exposures, Natives around the harbor by Deer Island would have had complex conceptual frameworks at hand when yet another floating island moved into their space. Algonquians must have sighted the approaching Arbella in 1630, though Native impressions have not been recorded in written documents. As John Winthrop’s company entered the harborscape— an active waterway already crisscrossed by numberless mishoon routes—they did not perceive an ancestral homeland that attested to Maushop’s placeshaping.29 Though partly conversant with an emerging corpus of travelers’ reports and maps, the complement of Puritans knew few subtleties of Algonquian geographies or significant travel passages. (“JW is still confused concerning his location,” modern editors of Winthrop’s journals succinctly noted about his writings upon arrival by the Wabanaki coast.30) To many Puritans’ minds the entire region was an uncertain wilderness, replete with biblical connotations of that term. The Northeast served as bodily and spiritual testing grounds for a dissident experiment that aimed to purify a corrupted Christianity. “[W]e shall be as a City upon a Hill,” Winthrop said of the venture, metaphorically referencing the moral aspirations the Massachusetts Bay Colony held to redeem a fallen Christian world, and its self-consciousness as a social experiment subject to scrutiny at every turn.31 Yet members of this collective project already had face-to-face evidence they were entering space that was

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more than a theological abstraction. Masconomet, sachem at Agawam, boarded and spent a full day upon Winthrop’s vessel in a stop prior to the harbor. Winthrop related few details, but Masconomet was likely formally receiving the vessel into Native space as well as gathering intelligence about the newcomers.32 Upon reaching the harbor, the ocean-weary company gazed toward many actual hills circling deep water, a suitable locale for accommodating largedrafted ships and thus a permanent colony. They came during the warm croptending and -harvesting moons, when trees and grasses grew thickly green, but they had to hasten before winter set in. Winthrop’s company was not the first set of Englishmen to scope out the vicinity. William Blackstone, previously at Wessagussett, had already set up a homestead on the Shawmut peninsula, while Samuel Maverick established himself on one of the islands.33 But those men’s influence was minimal, whereas the hundreds of offspring of Arbella and the rest of the well-financed Winthrop fleet set about transforming this undulating, somewhat marshy terrain and surrounding riverscapes into Anglicized landscapes that more closely resembled the European countrysides and urban centers they had recently departed. Natives had used and modified this terrain since time out of mind, building communities like Mishawum along the Mystic River. Anglo-Americans in so-called Boston added a new level of “constant tinkering,” over time leveling certain elevations and filling in formerly inundated spots in an audacious project of landmaking to expand the grounds for citification.34 They were articulating memoryscapes of their own as well—sometimes predicated on loss, as when Winthrop’s son Henry drowned in a Massachusetts river crossing only weeks after arrival.35 Sizable square-rigged ships like the Arbella could sail no farther west than the harbor, and even the colonists’ smaller pinnaces and sloops fared poorly in the sinuous, shallower inland waterways. But Natives’ dugout mishoonash and bark canoes maneuvered readily in the web of freshwater streams that spread far into the interior, so much that colonists soon adapted these Indigenous vessels for their own uses. Algonquians’ water prowess and portaging abilities fascinated Daniel Gookin, a migrant Englishman with military background. Bark canoes “are much more ticklish and apt to overset” than mishoonash, he noted. “But the Indians are so used to them, and sit so steady, that they seldom overturn . . . and if they should, they can all swim well and save their lives.”36 He had reason to focus on Indigenous mobility, since it appeared to him and other Puritans a potential obstacle to a major goal of the Bay Colony and religious supporters: saving not Native lives but souls through conversions to

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Protestant Christianity. Natives already possessed complex spiritual practices and cosmologies: ties with an array of powerful beings and entities and ways to access manit (power) through specialized figures in the community. The fecundity of cornfields, the steady flow of rivers, the plentitude of migratory fish and browsing deer, the health of mothers and newborns in childbirth, and so many other happenings depended on proper relations with manit, as did ongoing connections with ancestors and passage to the afterlife. Natives had been praying and holding ceremonies for generations before any Europeans on floating islands made incursions. But Gookin and his colleagues viewed these systems derogatorily, deeming Algonquian powwows “partly wizards and witches, holding familiarity with Satan, that evil one.” Algonquians’ medicinal knowledge, based on curative properties of environmentally specific ethnobotanical resources, Gookin acknowledged in the same breath as he condemned their “diabolical spells, mutterings, exorcisms.”37 Puritan missionaries composed volumes about the rationale and techniques for encouraging—or coercing—conversions to Christianity, and modern scholars have followed that intense focus (sometimes to the exclusion of other social processes). The significance of these cross-cultural spiritual encounters as they pertain to placemaking involves contrasting conceptions of “settlement.” To the minds of Gookin, appointed superintendent of the praying Indians in 1656, and especially John Eliot, who spearheaded early New England missionizing projects, conversion necessitated altered forms of place-connection among Natives. Effectively teaching the Word meant binding Native listeners more fixedly to Land. Missionaries supported the establishment of so-called “praying towns”: plantations or settlements that endeavored to dislocate Natives from their traditional lifeways and immerse them in Anglicized modes of dress, Christian worship, and labor, with emphasis on sedentary, nucleated, agriculturally oriented settlements.38 The first of these arose at Natick in 1651, its dwellings arranged in home-lots along linear streets on both sides of the river called Charles by colonists, connected by a stone bridge. In addition to “oldfashioned” (traditional) Indigenous dwellings, Natick also contained a palisaded fort and English-style house for worship meetings and school.39 Punkapoag (a place by a spring arising from red earth), and Wamesit followed, then Hassanamesit (a place of small stones), Okommakamesit, Nashobah, and Magunkoquog (a place of great trees). These were the “old praying towns,” later augmented by others farther west and south: Quantisset, Packachoog, Chabanakongkomun, Wabquisset, Manchaug, Maanexit, and Waeuntug.

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Their acreage was substantial. Hassanamesit, for example, originally encompassed eight thousand acres. While the towns did transform the geographic ranges of those who inhabited them, their theoretical logic of containment did not in actuality undo long-standing patterns of mobility and social engagement across much more extensive homelands. Eliot originally intended Natick to be the principal praying town but acquiesced to Native desires for other such settlements closer to communities’ customary core locations, enabling the continuance of decentralized, interconnected Native landscapes. Considering the praying towns’ geographic contexts, it is also apparent that many were deliberately sited on or close by springs and rivers to enable ongoing ties to these vital freshwater resources. Natives formed Wamesit by the fertile intersection of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, and as Gookin observed, a “great confluence of Indians . . . usually resort to this place in the fishing seasons.”40 Material evidences bear out the complexities of these places. Quartz pieces found at Magunkaquog, for instance, suggest enduring Algonquian relations with earth and manit, alongside more Anglicized matter. These traces, partially accessible through archaeology, are important counterparts to Puritan-authored textual sources that frequently expressed aspirations about comprehensive missionizing successes rather than more hybridized or syncretic realities.41 The fact that these new settlements did not fundamentally undermine Native connections to coastal and interior places might explain some of their attraction. So might their capacity to provide certain foods and trade resources, plus access to alternative forms of literacy and spiritual power, often mediated through Native teachers like Anthony and John Speen at Natick, William Ahawton at Punkapoag, and Tackuppawillin at Hassanamesit42—all potentially compelling offerings, especially for communities regathering themselves in the wake of grievous demographic losses from epidemics and related stresses of colonization.43 Moreover, the constellation of praying towns never encompassed the entirety, or even majority, of Natives in southern New England. Roughly seventy Natives lived in each of the old towns, ninety in the new ones, by the 1670s, while large numbers maintained their livelihoods, kinship ties, and sovereignties apart from this system. They did so substantially beyond the sight lines of English observers who documented Native presences and whose writings have formed the foundations of colonial archives. Native people who launched a mishoon at Natick and headed downriver would soon find themselves paddling through Cambridge. There, inside a small brick building just a ten-minute walk north from the river, skilled work-

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ers labored over a clanking, groaning printing press. They painstakingly assembled a dense thicket of inky signs, then bound leaf upon leaf of scarce paper into a new object. It was the first Bible printed in the English colonies, and it appeared in an Indigenous language. Frequently deemed the “Eliot Bible” by bibliophiles, it was in reality a thoroughly multiauthored project, strongly dependent on Native translation to ensure accuracy and typesetting. Wowaus—James of Hassanamesitt—for instance, worked as a “press man.” As the costly Up-Biblum God and other translated religious texts came off the press at recently established Harvard College, they supported a missionizing strategy designed to give would-be Native converts direct access to Christian Scripture in their own language, in printed alphabetic form. (The emphasis on sola scriptura—Christian Scriptures as the authoritative bedrock of faith and practice—also made room for Native readers to directly interpret biblical text on their own terms, frequently rooted in concepts from traditional contexts.) Harvard housed an Indian College at mid-century, founded for the education of both Algonquian and English youth in a cross-cultural learning experiment (fig. 7).44 In hemispheric context the Indian College was not unique; Indigenous students in Meso- and Latin America attended earlier and more robust institutions.45 But for the English colonies in North America it was a novel undertaking. Like the islands in the harbor, this structure, “strong and substantial, though not very capacious,” was not an isolated site but part of a wider connective landscape of relations that stretched into Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett homelands, including those on Maushop’s Noepe, then an active site for Natives considering Christian affiliations.46 The tribal communities that agreed to send promising young men away to the college and nearby preparatory schools did so not out of naive beliefs about beneficial Christian and classical education. They expected these selected children to cultivate fluency in the practices and mentalities of colonial neighbors, who were increasingly proximate to Native homelands as missionaries, magistrates, traders, employers—and perhaps most pressingly, as land-desirers. “Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New-England,” Bostonian Increase Mather bemoaned about his fellow colonizers. Mather issued his condemnation in the midst of King Philip’s War, possibly projecting backward what he had come to view as a root of conflict and cause of fragmentation among the collective body of Christians. But myriad developments of the mid1600s bear out his assessment of the escalating territorial acquisitiveness of Massachusetts Bay colonists and other English arrivals. As colonial families, entrepreneurs, and land corporations sought “elbow-room enough in the

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Figure 7. A stone marker on the exterior of Matthews Hall, a first-year dormitory at Harvard College, acknowledges the history of the seventeenth-century Indian College, which stood approximately at this site. Young Native men from area tribal communities, notably the Wampanoag, came to Cambridge to attend preparatory schools and the college, where they were educated alongside English youth in a bid to teach them English and classical languages, as well as Puritan theology. Their tribal relations hoped these skills would assist them in serving as intercultural brokers, helping their communities to strategically navigate interactions with New England colonizers. The Indian College’s hybrid space was a short-lived but significant venture. Recent archaeological work has examined the material footprints of the college and environs. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

World” (to invoke Mather’s phrase), they did so by moving farther into Native homelands and waters, especially those of Massachusetts, Nipmucs, Wampanoags, and Pennacooks. Their widespread pursuit of land was a fundamental feature of settler colonialism, which required continuous acquisition of new territory to support growing settler populations, and by consequence continuous attempts to displace Indigenous populations already living in those locales. Or as Patrick Wolfe has characterized the process, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.”47 Bostonians built densely within the water-hemmed peninsula of Shawmut, but many migrants and offspring, including waves of

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newcomers that crested in the 1630s–1640s, sought more dispersed inland and riverine tracts on which to farm and pasture livestock. Others looked eastward to the harbor islands. Early Bay Colony affiliates sometimes spent time on the islands when stormy weather blew their boats there. Subsequent ones intentionally accessed the islands to harvest timber, cultivate acreage, graze animals, and construct buildings and fortifications. They also may have hunted the plentiful four-legged ungulates that gave Deer Island its moniker.48 The legality, or lack thereof, by which Bay colonists accrued and speculated on land provoked heated debate (and still does). The entire Northeast, it is vital to recall, constituted active Native homelands prior to and following contacts with Europeans: homelands used, accessed, traveled, remembered, storied, and valued, even if a village site was not immediately located on a plot at any given moment. Sachems and sunksquaws traditionally held responsibility for maintaining use rights and articulating boundaries and also could make way for other groups in strategic fashion, such as Bastoniak. They did so via a large series of land negotiations beginning in the 1630s and continuing for decades, specifying areas that colonists could inhabit and use and sometimes explicitly reserving certain tracts, resources, or rights for tribal communities: “liberty for to fish foull and hunt,” for Native signatories and their heirs in perpetuity, as a 1662 document expressed these relations in Nipmuc country.49 Written “deeds,” which many scholars have treated transparently as clear cessions of Native land to colonists, bundled together layers of difficulties and expectations. Paper trails tried to distill multifaceted interpersonal exchanges— encompassing beaver pelts, wampum, trade cloth, iron, food, currency, animate landscapes—into singular, static archival traces. Moreover, not everyone considered this emerging land market to be a market, or viewed the terms of exchange in protocapitalistic terms, culminating in privatized “title” to sharply bounded tracts.50 As Native populations suffered owing to disease by mid-century; and as some constituencies amalgamated more closely around praying towns, where paternalistic colonial policies prevented Natives from selling land without permission, these dynamics acquired new complexities.51 But neither factor effected a wholesale abandonment or contraction of traditional homelands. Understandings of water rights were even less well defined. Who had legitimacy to harvest fish, shellfish, or whales, or traverse certain fresh or salty expanses? When Watertown colonists waded into the Charles River in springtime 1631, constructed a weir, and “tooke greate store of Shaddes,” it is debatable whether they consulted with the series of communities up- and downstream who depended on reliable fish runs for sustenance.52

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Terrestrial surfaces attracted the predominance of colonial designs since English settlers could hoe, plant, build, and graze their animals atop them, fulfilling biblical exhortations for fruitful “husbandry” and “dominion” over the earth. Occasionally hidden depths did as well. A case that well illustrates the increasingly entangled relations at mid-century was a mining operation that took form at Tantiusques. Lying near the Quinebaug River, the place was amply known and used by Natives who valued the soft, black form of carbon found there. In English eyes, this same deposit of graphite promised to be useful for writing implements, the quotidian tools of their intensively literate culture, and for the silver that could be separated out. English colonizers had long desired subterranean resources: silver, for example, to rival Spanish extractive operations at Potosí, which grievously exploited Indigenous labor to generate European imperial wealth. Scant silver or gold was to be had in the Dawnland, but perhaps the lead at Tantiusques could turn a profit. John Winthrop, Jr., son of the Arbella’s leader and Bay Colony governor, a governor in his own right of Connecticut Colony, and a committed proponent of natural philosophy and alchemy, tried to launch a colonial mining enterprise there.53 Unfortunately for Winthrop, the site’s remoteness from centers of English settlement and road systems stymied efforts to bring workers in and out, and to transport the ore overland to the Kwinitekw (Connecticut) River for water passage to Boston. Additionally, colonial attempts to acquire the site became embroiled in questionable negotiations, subjected to multiple “purchase” agreements with a shifting array of signatories. Daniel Gookin consistently presented himself as a committed supporter of Native interests and the well-being of the praying settlements. But from his own public-facing writings it can be challenging to discern other, more private dimensions of his interests—notably his steadily expanding land investments. From the outset of his active career in New England, Gookin amassed a sizable checkerboard of claims to Native places, in or nearby traditional homelands of Massachusetts, Pennacooks, Nipmucs, Pequots, and Narragansetts. Sometimes the Massachusetts General Court granted him hundreds of acres as recompense for service; sometimes he tapped into his Algonquian networks to purchase other hundreds of acres. He could not reside simultaneously in all of these places, so he rented, sold, or remained an absentee investor for various acreages over his lifetime.54 In the 1660s–1670s he fervently supported establishment of a colonial settlement at Quinsigamond, about thirty miles northeast of Tantiusques, in intimate proximity to the inland Nipmuc settlement at Pakachoag. Quinsigamond’s attractions included a long fresh-

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water pond and rough equidistance from Massachusetts Bay and the powerful Kwinitekw River. At multiple steps in the settlement-planning process— petitioning the court, surveying, laying out lots—Gookin actively shaped outcomes for personal benefit. Several partners (Thomas Prentice, Daniel Henchman, Richard Beers) became deeply involved in colonial military affairs, including campaigns targeting area Natives. It was more than coincidental, in other words, that Gookin’s landed interests meshed with his missionary visions for praying towns. Encouraging more conscribed boundaries for Native people bolstered the “opening-up” of other terrain for profitable colonization.55 The heart of Bay Colony settlement, commerce, theology, and policymaking was Boston, which thrived as a seaport by mid-century. It also functioned as a major site for diplomacy with tribal leaders from communities both immediately proximate and at a distance. They came to the town on their own volition, in response to invitations and, more than once, following coercions and provocations. Frequently they carried material goods like animal pelts, food, and wampum beads that served critical roles in relationship building. Chickataubut, who probably still called the place Shawmut, came in 1631 with a company of Native men and women, presented English leaders with a hogshead of corn—perhaps demonstrating Native strength through their ability to provide—ate meals together, and accepted trade goods to bring home, beginning to bind these communities into a new web of relations. Soon after this initial visit he returned several times, bringing beavers and expressing interest in hybrid self-fashioning by placing an order for English-style garments. As colonists moved farther into Native homelands, he also agreed to pay a beaver skin as recompense for damage done to colonial livestock, and he experienced the reverse adjudication when a colonist compensated him for stealing Native corn. Chickataubut’s growing familiarity with this milieu and its power brokers ended abruptly when he and numerous Massachusetts died in a 1633 smallpox epidemic. English colonists “kept” many of their surviving children (likely traumatized and disoriented by rapid collapse of their homes), though under what terms, in which specific households, and for perpetuity or more limited durations is unclear.56 As the Pequot War gained destructive momentum three years later, Miantonomo and nearly twenty members of a Narragansett delegation traveled into Boston to affirm strategic terms of solidarity with the English;57 while in the hot months of 1642 Ousamequin/Massasoit, already intimately conversant with his immediate Plymouth neighbors, visited Boston with a sizable company of associated leaders. All of them

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carried intelligence about these encounters back to their home communities across Massachusett, Narragansett, and Wampanoag countries.58 These interactions became more tense and asymmetric in the decades after 1630. Colonial envoys repeatedly traveled from Boston to Native centers of power, but the Bay Colony increasingly bade sachems and their counselors to come to them. English political and military leadership endeavored to exercise dominion over Native entities, whom they began to consider more as colonial subjects, tributaries, or semisubordinate allies than as wholly autonomous sovereigns.59 When another Narragansett delegation came to Boston in 1645 in the wake of widespread controversies over a supposedly incipient pantribal uprising, commissioners of the United Colonies attempted to dictate onerous “peace” terms, including enormous fines of wampum that would require burdensome community labor to produce, and cessions of captives already being integrated into Narragansett kinship structures.60 Having witnessed firsthand and heard reports of deadly colonial military force against Native groups, such delegations found themselves needing to maneuver carefully in response to these demands. And there was ample room for divergent interpretations of diplomatic intentions, in contexts that still required extensive translations across linguistic and cultural domains. When an array of other Native leaders came into Boston and “submitted to our government,” in Winthrop’s words, they likely intended more complex and reciprocal affirmation of rights and responsibilities than what colonial interlocutors perceived. At various times Passaconaway traveled down from the Merrimack watershed and Pennacook interior, Pomham traveled up from Narragansett Bay (where he convinced colonial laborers to build him a fort), Masconomet traveled coastwise from Agawam, and sachems came east from the Wachusett mountain area of Nipmuc country, all seeking ways to advocate for their home communities’ interests while attempting to fashion workable relations with the increasingly populous colonizers.61 These tensions, accommodations, and bids to maintain a tenuous balance between colonial and Native interests mounted at mid-century. While the Pequot War of the 1630s devastated that tribal community and set important precedents for intercultural warfare, the region as a whole averted widespread outright conflict until 1675. In Natick, murmurings of unrest among the Pokanoket Wampanoags had been heard and conveyed to colonial leadership during planting and fish-harvesting time, though nothing immediately transpired.62 Perhaps these murmurings were no cause for worry, given a series of false reports and “panics” over previous decades about impending uprisings

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involving diverse Natives, English, Dutch, and even French.63 But as corn grew higher in mid-June, small-scale violence broke out south of Boston, near Pokanoket homelands by Plymouth Colony. A long series of provocations in previous months and years had stressed Native communities in that area.64 Wampanoag captives seized in the early 1600s remained unrestored to their homes. Following Massasoit’s passing in 1660, leadership transitioned with difficulty to his son Wamsutta/Alexander, who died suddenly under ambiguous circumstances, then to the younger son Metacom/Philip. Questionably legitimate land negotiations extensively undercut tribal land and water bases, making the possibility of shared space with English neighbors ever more elusive. Colonial negotiators disrespected and tried to circumvent the female authority of sunksquaws such as Weetamoo and Awashonks. Burgeoning praying towns and Puritan missionizing in certain stretches of Wampanoag country, including the Cape and Noepe, created friction, especially as Philip largely repulsed these projects. Plymouth and other colonies undermined Native sovereignty and jurisdiction, a matter that came to a head in 1674–1675 as Native men were tried for murdering the Harvard-educated and perhaps untrustworthy Native translator John Sassamon. Intrusive English livestock continued to trample Native fields; courts dealt unevenly with Indigenous and colonial claimants; Plymouth attempted to forcibly remove critical firearms from Philip’s people; precarious intertribal alliances and tributary relationships shifted contentiously all around Narragansett Bay. And perhaps least visible to English eyes, evolving kinship ties linked Wampanoags to new sets of responsibilities toward other Algonquian communities with their own arrays of grievances. No single cause sparked war, certainly. A series of placespecific contingencies spanning economics, politics, culture, religion, and land all contributed to seemingly untenable circumstances by mid-summer 1675. Some area oral traditions maintained that when Philip received news of the spiraling violence, he wept at Kickemuit Spring, a vital freshwater source and boundary-place by Cawsumsett–Mount Hope, presaging the potential destruction.65 Around Massachusetts Bay and the Nipmuc country, colonial authorities initially maintained confidence in their own security and ability to stay aloof from the emerging conflict. Gookin surmised that if violence moved in their direction, the older praying towns might serve as a “wall of defence” for Massachusetts.66 But in speaking of heterogeneous, still-mobile Native people as a spatially bounded monolith, he overestimated their support for the colony and also underestimated the enduring power of kinship and diplomatic ties

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that drew those members in other directions. In July selected Nipmuc settlements received young Ephraim Curtis, who owned a trucking house in the Quinsigamond area. Curtis had been dispatched by Massachusetts governor John Leverett to travel farther into Nipmuc country and sound out communities’ intentions, hoping they would not join Philip’s forces against the English. What Curtis heard was a range of responses that suggested Nipmucs’ receptivity to joining the Wampanoag uprising was growing, though not uniformly.67 In late July 1675 fifty Mohegans entered Boston, among them Owaneco, son of the sachem Uncas. They had lodged the previous night at Natick, and some of those Natives accompanied them into town, possibly as protection against trigger-sensitive Bastoniak. Their purpose was to affirm alliance with the English and agree to military service against Philip’s groups.68 Mohegans had largely declined the overtures of Puritan missionaries, but long-standing obligations between Uncas and the colonies encompassed military support at signal moments. Heading southeast from Boston, these Mohegans, along with a number of praying-town members, joined colonial troops en route to Wampanoag country, especially by Pocasset and Mount Hope, where early military actions took place across swamps, pease fields, and waterways—deep stories in themselves. This form of Indigenous mobility remained crucial to the colonies for the entirety of the war. As skilled navigators and woodsmen, Mohegans, Pequots, and selected praying-town Natives enabled colonial troops on foot and horseback (dragoons) to move faster, farther, and through more diverse terrain than they would have been able to do unassisted.69 They participated in these campaigns not as subordinates, but as substantially autonomous agents from sovereign nations, who received material recompense—or promise thereof—for their long weeks away from kin and homegrounds. As violence escalated in late summer and early autumn, Massachusetts Bay authorities attempted to curtail other forms of Indigenous mobility. Heading into harvest time, colonial officials decreed in late August that all prayingtown affiliates be confined to five settlements—Natick, Punkapoag, Nashobah, Wamesit, Hassanamesit—and not be permitted to travel outside a one-mile radius of each, except under strict guard. If Natives at these places needed to harvest corn, they were required to do so under the monitoring of an Englishman. They were to establish their wetuash (sapling-framed and matcovered dwellings) compactly to facilitate these conscribed ranges. If any moved beyond the circles and suffered injury or death “their blood . . . will be upon their own heads,” the colonial council declared in self-absolution. The

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act also forbade the harboring of “strange Indians,” disrupting long-standing practices of hospitality toward extended kin and allies.70 This detrimental geometry and its unambiguous threat of violent reprisal stood to strongly compromise requisite hunting, fishing, planting, and medicine gathering across diffuse taskscapes. All of this was ostensibly for members’ own “security.” Within Boston itself a similar decree undercut Native passages. In October the Massachusetts Bay General Court issued a series of stringent prohibitions. Only under armed guard could any Native pass through town. Private colonial individuals could freely apprehend any unguarded Native they encountered. The ferry from Charlestown was not to transport any Native. The only Natives permitted to lodge in town were those in prison. The act specifically singled out river and ocean travel: “That care be taken by the military watch to prevent any [Indians] from coming by water to the said toune . . . in cannooes or otherwise.”71 In a place crisscrossed by generations of mishoonash, declaration of war suddenly made such movements dangerous, even fatal. There was often a difference between the rhetoric of policy-making and the reality of lived practice, of course, particularly in hilly and marshy stretches where colonial footholds and surveillance abilities were more tenuous. But the fact remained that leading Bastoniak engaged in an exclusionary version of placemaking, attempting to redetermine who could be mobile within an important node for diplomacy, cross-cultural communication, and trade. Authorities coupled this decree with an even more devastating bid for containment that October. Citing a spate of colonial threats against praying settlements, as well as mounting suspicions among Bay Colony residents toward Native neighbors, they decided to round up Christian-affiliated Natives and remove them to Deer Island. Ostensibly the removal was for these Natives’ own protection. But it had the clear consequence of also permitting closer colonial surveillance of groups whose loyalty they did not wholly trust.72 Deer Island had not been the original destination. The colony considered a range of proposals that would relocate multiple praying settlements, shifting Natick people to Cambridge, for example, Wamesits to Noddle’s Island, Punkapoags to Dorchester, Nashobahs to Concord, and other reconfigurations of Indigenous geographies. Authorities also heard debate on the very legality and Christian morality of effecting such removals.73 But following a partial bid to remove the Wamesits (some of whom they temporarily confined in Charlestown), the Deer Island proposal gained momentum. At the time, colonist Samuel Shrimpton claimed lease rights to the island, which Bastoniak understood to be owned by the town. He agreed to permit Native internment there

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on the conditions that no one would cut timber or disturb his pastured sheep.74 Thomas Prentice, with whom the Natick Natives previously had familiarity, followed orders to escort about two hundred Natives by foot and cart from Natick to a place called the Pines, on the Charles River above Cambridge. There John Eliot met and conversed with them. Around midnight on October 30, as tides came into favor, the Natives were placed upon three boats that brought them to the island. While Gookin’s own testimony about the removal suggested degrees of consensual participation by the Natick group (albeit distressed and resigned), it is difficult to judge from archival traces just how forcible or violently effected these actions were. Moreover, Gookin relied on other English “eye and ear witnesses” to characterize the scene at the Pines.75 Once upon the island, confined Natives were forbidden from unauthorized trade and contact with mainland colonists or Indigenous relations, and were expected to spend their time spinning and planting.76 Subsistence presented an acute problem, however, especially as winter approached and weather worsened. In peacetime, late fall and winter traditionally were hunting seasons. Communities relied on parties returning from the uplands with adequate meat, while living off cultigens and other provisions they had carefully set aside, along with any livestock. But stranded on the island, cut off from their customary hunting ranges and supplies—having been forced to leave behind their cattle and most possessions77—internees faced great pressure to improvise food and shelter. The deer that inspired the island’s name may have been utterly gone by this time, and since colonists had been harvesting timber from the harbor islands for decades, little of that wooded landscape may have remained (never mind Shrimpton’s prohibition). Planting was a reasonable goal, but whether the land was any good for crops, or whether the internees had the necessary tools at hand, was unclear (never mind how late in the year it was). As a buffer island between the inner harbor and open ocean, Deer Island stood tremendously exposed and windswept, conditions inauspicious for cultivation.78 Daniel Henchman received orders to provide the internees with sufficient land for planting.79 But the supply shortages remained painful. They suffered “great distress for want of food,” Henchman reported. Realizing that fishing and clamming in the vicinity might provide relief, officials authorized commandeering of a boat in early spring 1676 to be used by the Natives for those purposes.80 (In their capacities as overseers, Henchman and his associates found themselves in danger from English neighbors outraged by even “friendly” Natives, and Gookin received death threats for trying to advocate on their behalf.)81

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Deer Island was not the only island mobilized for Native prisoners during wartime. The council authorized a number of transfers to Long, Potuck, and Brewster Islands (“one hundred of sd Indians—consisting proportionally of men, women & children to abide & plant”), and appointed Samuel Hunting to arrange a boat to transport them.82 The elder Ahawton requested permission to leave Deer Island and go to Long Island, saying they were being shot at and provisions were running low, but the court took no action.83 Colonist Henry Mayer, who held acreage on Long Island, had been asked by the council to receive some Natives to “come and plant a parcell of Land” there. Initially he refused, citing the “feare and dread (of the Indians)” harbored by his aging mother and wife. But “upon more mature consideration” Mayer rethought his revulsion—even groveled for the council’s pardon—then expressed his willingness to have Natives plant one hundred acres, while also pleading for aid to his indigent family.84 In November 1675 the court permitted some Native women to join their husbands in prison or in exile. If they declined those dire options, they could elect to be sent to Brewster Island, a sliver of land east of Deer Island that also stood exposed to the elements.85 In other words, the wider harborscape was critical to Native prisoners’ suffering and survival in this period, though Deer Island received the lion’s share of attention in 1675– 1676 and later, becoming a singular geographic icon for Native wartime internment. Given the critical situation unfolding in the harbor, Natives repeatedly sought ways to gain release for the captives. In very late December 1675 James Quanopohit, also known as James Rumney Marsh, was permitted to travel off-island by colonial authorities, along with Job Kattenanit. Their temporary release came with conditions. The colony wished these two men, previously affiliated with Natick and Magunkaquog, respectively, to conduct themselves as spies among other Natives, gathering intelligence about the locations, numbers, and conditions of those in the interior. Both previously served alongside colonial troops, so authorities assumed their fidelity. Both men agreed to this “hazardous undertakeing” because it might serve familial and collective ends: locating Job’s three children among the Hassanamiscos, tendering a potential peace, and advocating for the relief of relations on Deer Island. Equipped only with hatchets and some parched corn, the pair left Cambridge on December 30, then moved westward. The speed of their itinerary demonstrated their geographical familiarity with the archipelago of praying towns as well as non-Christian-affiliated Nipmuc areas. (This route, verbally reported to and transcribed by colonial authorities following James’s

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return, potentially contained strategic redactions or misrepresentations of actual locales and people for their own protection, rather than being a fully transparent account.) They passed through Natick, Hassanamesit, Manchaug, Maanexit, Quaboag. At Menemesit, critical planting grounds just north of Quaboag, they encountered a large gathering of Natives including those from Hassanamesit and Magunkaquog. They had retreated there rather than face deportation to Deer Island, or worse: “others feard they should bee sent away to Barbados,” dispersed across vast saltwater to another island for even more difficult confinement and enslavement. A number of Native leaders and prominent intercultural go-betweens met them: Matoonas, John of Packachoog, Tuckuppawillan, “James Printer” (the press man at Harvard), and others. Altogether their situation was stressed but not calamitous. They had appropriated beef and pork from Quaboag and turned deep snows to their advantage since the snow cover facilitated deer hunting. When corn stores dwindled they planned to restore food security by striking colonial enclaves at Lancaster, Marlborough, and Groton and redistributing their resources.86 (And they did: weeks later Native parties conducted Mary Rowlandson, their captive from Lancaster, to Menemesit. The “Indian town” became an indelible node in her memoryscape of “removes,” as the locale where her “sweet Babe” of six years, five months died.)87 Thoroughly entangled with and skilled in colonial material culture, Natives at Menemesit possessed firearms and a gunsmith to repair them, as well as a kettleful plus two horns of powder, reportedly acquired from a semivisible supply chain through Albany and the Mohawks. Rumors of impending support from New France down the Kwinitekw River Valley bolstered spirits. Or perhaps James embellished that point to distract the Bastoniak?88 As the crow flies, Menemesit stood about seventy-five miles west of Deer Island. But those miles, replete with hills, swamps, and streams intimately known to Nipmucs and relations, meant the difference between colonial confinement and comparative autonomy.89 Even farther west, along the Kwinitekw and beyond, other Algonquians likewise regathered momentum, Philip among them. Ultimately James and Job returned east separately. As James passed back through Natick he visited with several “aged & sick folkes” too weak to have been removed to Deer Island, who must have been cause for worry in addition to their kin in the harbor. Colonial authorities began to allow additional Native men to come off the islands in spring 1676 provided they make the difficult decisions to serve as mainland scouts against groups remaining at-large.90 The total number involved in the removal and island internments is uncer-

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tain, with estimates ranging from five hundred to eleven hundred, possibly considerably higher.91 Those who died on-island (again, exact count unknown) presumably received burials in situ or in the encircling waves, though no contemporaneous colonial documentation of those events or sites seems to exist. As exceedingly complicated campaigns and strategic removals unfolded across interior Native and colonial geographies in 1675–1676—far more than can be related in detail here—Boston itself occupied a distinctive position. The nerve center of the Bay Colony never came under attack or imminent threat. Colonial business as usual continued in mundane activities like appointments of constables, maintenance to roads, management of hogs, laying out of boundary lines, licensing of beer and wine sellers. Yet signs of strain and of colonists’ shared sense of suffering alongside other English people who had been assaulted lay close to the surface. Townspeople held days of humiliation and fasting, while fear of Native incursions into Cambridge, just across the Charles River, drove locals to stockpile materials “for the purpose of fortifying the town against them.”92 Rumors and half-truths along with substantiated intelligence flooded into town from the frontiers. The magistrate, merchant, and Boston resident Samuel Sewall was in his mid-twenties when King Philip’s War broke out, and he avidly followed news of its unfolding. “We hear,” “we heard of,” “we heard the amazing newes”: the entries in his obsessively detailed diary registered this uneven tide of information and the oral communication networks buzzing across a Boston population approaching six thousand.93 Sewall’s diary also imparted a colonial Bostonian’s perspective on the war’s geography within the townscape, as observed from his residence in his father-in-law John Hull’s house and from his busy perambulations about the streets. “The after part of the day was very rainy,” he recorded on September 13, 1676. “Note, there were eight Indians shot to death on the Common, upon Wind-mill hill.”94 What Sewall’s laconic entry described was devastating reprisals against individual Natives, which continued well after Philip’s own death came at Mount Hope in August 1676. Boston Common, then grazing land for cows, served as a prominent spot for executions of allegedly hostile Natives brought into Boston as prisoners. About forty-five were hanged or shot there in August and September 1676. Sewall recorded details of their final urban pathways, like forced public walks to the gallows, but made few attempts to connect these discrete fatalities to wider networks of surviving Algonquians.95 Sewall was more than an impassive bystander. He participated in semiscientific spectacles predicated on the violation of Indigenous bodies, which began long before antiquarian “relic hunters” disinterred Native burials. On

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September 22, 1676, he recorded that he “Spent the day from 9 in the M. with Mr. [Dr.] Brakenbury, Mr. Thomson, Butler, Hooper, Cragg, Pemberton, dissecting the middlemost of the Indians executed the day before”—Hooper, “taking the ♥ in his hand, affirmed it to be the stomack.”96 Sewall also periodically traveled out to the harbor islands but made no remembrance of the Native internment camps there either during the war or afterward.97 While Boston overwhelmingly incarcerated, contained, adjudicated, and executed Native people during wartime and in the immediate aftermath, the town functioned as a safe haven for colonial refugees fleeing English frontier settlements under siege along the Wabanaki coast and to the south and west. Bostonians may have felt moral and kinship obligations to accommodate these arrivals. But they also had to contend with material pressures placed on the town. The General Court considered a petition in November 1675 for relief to an influx of these displaced persons, who arrived only with the possessions loaded on their backs. It aimed “to settle some generall way where by those persons or Families who by ye Outrage of ye Enimie were bereaued of all meanes of theire subsistance or forced from theire habitations, many whereof are come into this towne, may finde such reliefe & redresse yt noe particular Towne may be burdened thereby.”98 Provisions “for the releife of ye distressed yt had suffered by the warr with the Indians” arrived transatlantically in January 1676/77 when town selectmen received some of the “Irish prouision,” a charitable donation collected by sympathetic Irish who had belatedly received news of the area’s struggles. The donation amounted to thirty-eight barrels of oatmeal, twenty-five barrels of wheat meal, and other goods, “which were distributed to seuerall poore Families, of this towne, & such as came hither from the Easterne ptes & other places, now resident here.”99 A second donation arrived in July 1677, “to be distributed amonge those poore now residinge in Bostone, come from other pts impouerished by the warr.” Wheat, malt, flour, oatmeal, butter, and cheese went to the hungry mouths of these refugees, English colonists who were not “native” Bostonians but nevertheless intensely reliant on urban social support during these crises.100 Not all of the people coming into Boston were alive. Consider Thomas Lake, who assisted in the transfer of harbor island leases to Samuel Shrimpton just before the war.101 A prominent Boston merchant who also operated a trading house on Arrowsic Island in Wabanaki country, Lake died in an attack on that coastal zone in August 1676, as Wabanakis endeavored to rebalance their own relations with regional colonization. Lake’s body languished for seven months before it could be retrieved and brought back to Boston for

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burial.102 The colonial reconnaissance party that found his corpse bundled it aboard a ship, and it arrived in the city remarkably well preserved thanks to the deep freeze of a northern winter. Mourners laid Lake to rest in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, a commanding height boasting a panoramic view of the Charles River where it twisted south to join the harbor. AN EMINENTLY FAITHFULL SERVANT OF GOD & ONE OF A PUBLICK SPIRIT WAS PERFIDIOUSLY SLAIN BY YE INDIANS AT KENNIBECK AUGUST YE

14 1676 & 13

HERE INTERRED THE

OF MARCH FOLLOWING

This epitaph on Lake’s unadorned gravestone recalled not only his death but also the vexing interim of delayed interment. Its characterization of Lake as “perfidiously slain by ye Indians” cast the colonist as a tragic martyr to an Indigenous menace, giving scant sense of why those Natives were resisting his and his associates’ presence. The lettered stone made this wartime casualty a visible node on the colonial memoryscape. Tradition held that “the deep slit cut into the stone was filled with melted bullets taken from his body,” though physical investigations have not confirmed this macabre detail.103 Lake’s death in the “eastward” reaches reminded Bostonians that the Wabanaki-Maine coast, though geographically at a distance, was an integral part of the conflict. Nathaniel Wallis, for instance, worried about providing for his family in Boston during the war because he would be stationed in Casco (Falmouth, Maine) to defend his property, so the council let him bring corn and provisions to his relations.104 Boston held fast days as late as 1678 to ensure colonial conquests in those eastward regions.105 The wartime human influx into Boston brought Indigenous individuals as well. Thirty-two Algonquian children came into Boston with John of Pakachoag in mid-1676 and found themselves “put to service,” assigned to masters or mistresses in Boston and neighboring towns like Charlestown, Billerica, Dedham, Concord, and more-distant areas like Ipswich and Salem on the North Shore.106 Daniel Gookin, Thomas Prentice, and Edward Oakes sat on the committee charged with settling the indentures. Gookin himself benefited, receiving two children: “a Boy named Joshua aged about eight yeares, son to William Wunuko late of Magunkoog; his father dead,” and “a girle aged

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about six yeares daughter to the widdow Quinshiske late of Shookanet beyond Mendon.”107 The children came from many communities, such as Narragansett as well as Massachusetts-area tribes. Many of their parents were listed as dead, making them orphans in colonial eyes, though still part of wider Algonquian social formations. A few had one or both parents still living and present to agree to the indentures. Some took up residence in their assigned households with siblings, preserving intact certain kinship groups. Others were forcibly separated. A few fled after being assigned, like Jabez (age ten) and Joseph (age six), sons of Woompsleow of Pakachoag, one or both of whom were reported to have “run away wth his father” as of October 1676.108 Gookin and the committee advised the General Court to “lay som penalty vpon them if they runne away before yr time expire and on their parents or kindred yt shall entice or harborr and conceale ym”—clear evidence that kinship networks endured into the postwar period and that opposition toward Indigenous agency and mobility did as well.109 Eleven-year-old Josoph (son of Annawekin), assigned to Thomas Prentice,110 was later taken from Prentice and sent to England with administrator William Stoughton on a mission before the Crown, making the youth one of exceedingly few New England Algonquians believed to have traveled transatlantically to the metropole in the immediate postwar period. This removal concerned Prentice, “for he has taken much care and paynes about those indians.”111 It likely concerned Josoph’s Indigenous relations even more, but colonial archives did not register those views. The Englishmen and -women who took in these children acquired inexpensive labor to assist in cooking, cleaning, tending to hogs and kitchen gardens. The arrangements also presumed efforts to Anglicize and acculturate Indigenous youth. Terms of the indentures specified “yt the children bee religiously educated and taught to read the english tounge [sic],”until they reached age twenty-four and were allowed to depart, giving a gloss of English benevolence and uplift to a highly coercive and paternalistic setup. Assignment of these children to colonial households spelled a significant demographic shift, as it resettled war refugees under the watchful eyes of colonial monitoring. Yet it also ensured that Native presence in these rapidly developing colonial settlements continued. Old enough to be placed independently as workers, these children were also mature enough to remember the war’s recent violences, displacements, and familial losses. Along with the few items they carried, they also brought Indigenous memories and perspectives on the war into the domestic interiors of greater Boston. The General Court issued further orders clarifying the indenture terms in June 1677,112 and the disposition of Native

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servants (or slaves, by some accountings) continued well after the war officially terminated in southern New England. Especially in 1676–1677, authorities entertained a flood of requests from Bostonians and nearby colonists regarding Native servants they wished to acquire or keep, constituting a postwar marketplace for valuable Indigenous bodies and energies. War took its toll on Prentice, Gookin, Henchman, and their ambitions for settler colonialism in Nipmuc country. Gookin reaffirmed English claims to Quinsigamond in February 1677 and paid again for the eight-square-mile tract, this time to relations of Pannasunnet, a Nipmuc leader.113 The trio tried in 1678 to persuade other English to establish themselves on the site, but no families were willing to make the move—dangerous country it still appeared to English eyes, despite the recent ostensible peace—and they risked forfeiting the land in the 1680s if no plantation got underway. Henchman took the initiative, bundled up his belongings in 1683, and left Boston for Quinsigamond, where he claimed twenty-five acres of land at the so-called Henchman Farm.114 Surveying the land and divvying it up into lots encouraged others to join him, and in 1684 the General Court approved a name change from Quinsigamond to Worcester. For his exertions, Henchman would be hailed by Euro-Americans many years later as Worcester’s founder. He tilled his farm until his death on October 15, 1685. But a land dispute had left Henchman ostracized by a faction of colonists, so “Very few at his Funeral,” Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary.115 No marker distinguished the burial spot. Gookin soon followed him to the grave. Gookin had continued to write during and after the war, and though he completed in 1677 “An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677,” this missionary-centric recounting of the recent conflict remained unpublished in his lifetime.116 His “History of New England” endured in fragments. Gookin died on March 19, 1686/87. Interred in the Old Cambridge Burying Ground, just across from the former Harvard Indian College venue, Gookin was given a gravestone incised with a simple, giant heart, which spoke not a word about his life’s fraught entanglements with Algonquian communities. Gookin’s final resting place, when considered alongside those of other key participants in King Philip’s War, like Lake, Henchman, and the unnumbered casualties of Deer Island, demonstrated the strikingly variable forms assumed by greater Boston’s memorial terrain in the close aftermath of the conflict. Some parts were visibly, formally commemorated with lettered stones, while others were left less visible, at least to colonial eyes—though they stayed powerfully resonant in the minds and geographical imaginaries of Indigenous survivors.

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In the 1680s colonial Boston largely moved on from King Philip’s War. Its built environment suffered no lasting traces of the violence that seared other swaths of the Northeast. Townspeople’s attentions had plenty to occupy them as they grappled with political tumult like annulment of the colony’s charter and Edmund Andros’s controversial ascension to a regional governorship, raising anxieties about demise of local autonomy. Yet in other ways the war’s effects lingered. In September 1685 selectmen approved Jeremiah Bumsteed’s petition to “keepe a publique house” in which he could “sell beere & Cyder by retayle, in consideration of the wounds & lamnesse he receaued in ye time of the Indian warr.”117 The tavern would provide income to a wounded veteran presumably unable to undertake other labor. Bumsteed had ample company in his struggles to subsist. As a petition from February 1686 bemoaned, “there haueinge of these late yeares, beene considerable visible decayes in the Estates thereof, through the Adversitie of ye Indian Warr, desolations by fire, & the failinge of trade, which haue greatly impoverished the towne, soe that the number of poore is much increased.”118 Throughout the town’s winding streets and compactly situated houses, impoverished colonial refugees from outlying regions circulated, along with Puritan elites who had directed wartime campaigns and policy-making, former soldiers (some incapacitated for life), women and children left widowed or orphaned and thereby vulnerable, and diverse Natives variously classed by overseers as prisoners, servants, or wards. They carried with them highly divergent memories and stories of the recent turmoil, only a fraction of which ever attained written form and, by extension, archival presence. The war’s economic impact dragged on. Consider the ripple effects on Harvard, an institution that counted a host of its graduates among the war’s most antitribal prosecutors and casualties. College officials and students eagerly anticipated construction of a new building, “the old wooden one being small and decayed,” but the war delayed completion until 1677 of this “fair and stately edifice of brick.”119 Urian Oakes, Harvard’s fourth president, watched in impotent frustration in the late 1670s and early 1680s as student enrollments dwindled due to wartime financial ruination, which left much of New England unable to fund education.120 The Indian College itself had largely foundered in the absence of sufficient support, as well as wariness among tribal communities, now perhaps disinclined to let their most promising youth live directly among Bastoniak. From 1701 to 1707 refugee Samuel Willard presided over Harvard. He came to Boston after his previous residence, the town of Groton, fell in March 1676 to Native forces and his congregation scattered. Rather

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than remain in inland Nipmuc country and attempt to recolonize with his stricken flock, Willard decamped to the safety of Boston and stayed. Willard was so esteemed by his new colleagues that one, with not a small dose of arrogance, expressed gratitude to the war for having driven the minister to their midst—“the translation of this bright star to a more conspicuous orb”— rescuing Willard from provincial obscurity.121 In a less celebrated series of events, as the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth, the printing press at Harvard that so prolifically churned out Algonquian-language imprints fell apart after printer Samuel Green died in 1702, and the press’s components were removed from Cambridge.122 Twenty years earlier the press secured a place for itself in the annals of printing history by producing the first edition of the war’s colonial best seller, Mary Rowlandson’s The Soveraignty and Goodness of GOD, Together With the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed, an account of her captivity at key locales like Menemesit. Most notably in terms of postwar placemaking, Harvard directly involved itself in land acquisitions and rental arrangements that made the college an instrumental force in settler encroachments on tribal territories. Before and after the war, Harvard received parcels of land from English donors and amassed a patchwork of property throughout the Northeast for enrichment of its coffers, including a five-hundred-acre farm from Samuel Sewall (class of 1671) in “the Narraganset country,” its proceeds to be used for indigent students from that area, “English or Indians, if any such there be.”123 Harvard acquired lands at the place of great trees (Magunkaquog) from Natick affiliates in 1715 using funds from the estate of Edward Hopkins. Native interlocutors, including Thomas Waban, a Deer Island survivor, collectively expressed unwillingness to sell in September 1715, reflecting ongoing community opposition to land loss. But they traveled to Cambridge to confer with colonial representatives, Sewall among them, and by October signed an agreement. The new proprietors renamed the place Hopkinton.124

The Bostonian Ebenezer: Colonial Remembrances in Text and Monuments “[I]t came into my thoughts, that it would be a service and benefit for posterity, if all other general troubles which have happened by the Heathen in this land, were recorded and made known.” Increase Mather wrote these lines for the opening sections of his A Relation Of the Troubles which have hapned in New-England, By reason of the Indians there.125 Published at the Boston press in

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1677, the work was a history of the war from the perspective of a colonial observer situated in that town. It was also a memory device. The capacity of text to serve as a memorial, which would ensure precise recollection of sufferings and deliverances, was a powerful theme in early colonial printed narratives. Though the major period accounts diverged on interpretation of events—King Philip’s War was a watershed for Puritan historiography, galvanizing clerichistorians like William Hubbard and Mather to critique the corporate, political, and spiritual state of New England in the unsettled 1670s126—they shared pervasive fear of forgetting. Remembering was a religious obligation, a means of testifying to providential powers. Thus writing down the history of conflict was imperative, since such texts would instruct future generations on the lessons they ought to retain from the divine chastising of errant New Englanders through “Indian War.” Increase Mather completed an earlier, briefer account only days after Philip’s death in mid-August 1676 and rushed it into publication.127 The influential Mather family survived the war without injury: Increase’s son Cotton headed to Harvard before fighting broke out, and the distresses Increase noted were primarily hearsay of violence at a distance.128 But whatever relief the Mathers felt at having been spared direct suffering proved short-lived. On November 27, 1676, a tailor’s assistant near the Red Lion Tavern fell asleep, and his light ignited a fire shortly before daybreak. The fire spread rapidly and destroyed a large swath of Boston, seventy or eighty buildings in a town of about one thousand households.129 Increase’s house and the North Church figured among the structures turned to rubble. “This was ye Fatal e dismall day, wn ye Meeting Houes e Houses yrabouts, e mine amongst ye Rest, were burnt wh fire,” he lamented in his diary.130 Cotton helped salvage some of his father’s library books from the ashes, but others went up in smoke, undoing in a few hours’ time the supposed permanence of the written record. (Ironically, in the summer of 1676 Increase issued thanks that God “hath prserved my habitation & Bookes, wn several ministers . . . in ys Land have bin deprived of such mercyes.”)131 The family found themselves put out of home along with hundreds of neighbors. The morning after the fire, Increase reflected on his suddenly reduced situation: “Is Judgt begun at ye House of God! Must it begin wth me? And is this all? . . . Hee is pleased to afflict me Correct me wth so much gentleness.”132 He immediately began to mitigate his textual woes: “A.M. Time spent in drying my Bookes,” followed by “setting vp shelves e Bookes.”133 The fire distressed town officials who realized the entire settlement stood in danger of ruination from similar accidents. They deputized a

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committee to inspect house chimneys, and in the following months Bostonians set about reconstructing. On the upside, the destruction gave them an opportunity to improve the layout of previously cramped streets.134 Increase Mather built a new house in 1677 near the north corner of what would become Hanover and North Bennet Streets.135 “When you go into your Comfortable Houses, reckon them no more than Stages, whereat you can only stay to Bait [rest] a while in your Journey, to your Eternal State,” Cotton Mather implored a Boston audience in 1695. He was lecturing on ruination caused by fires, and his own family’s losses years before must have emblazoned themselves in his memory. “As we walk about our Houses, let this Consideration come into our Hearts; How easily can all these Riches take themselves Wings and flee away! One or Two Hours, may lay this House Level with the Ground.” When Mather published this lecture in 1698, using the authorial handle “a Native of Boston,” it appeared in tandem with another lecture under the collective title of The Bostonian Ebenezer.136 The volume was a notable public statement for reasons beyond its cautions about open flames. It reflected on how Puritans ought to perform acts of remembrance, and succinctly expressed pervasive though generally unarticulated convictions about collective recall and material commemorations of the past. As Mather made clear, Puritans were cautious about creating monuments— wary of “graven images” and the prospect of individual lives’ and worldly sites’ being venerated over the transcendent divinity that underlay them. Only a few decades earlier, puritanical iconoclasm confronted Anglican iconophilia during the Civil War in England, resulting in the razing and defacing of monuments.137 Yet biblical precedents existed that sanctioned erecting of stone monuments and marking specific places of revelation or providential happening.138 The concept of the “ebenezer,” from the Hebrew for “stone of remembrance,” formed a key element in Puritan thinking on commemorative placemaking. Ebenezers could fix permanently on the land witnesses to Providence, serving as valuable reminders to posterity and passersby about a community’s past trials and future obligations. In The Bostonian Ebenezer Mather encapsulated the risky stakes of monumentalizing: “Then Samuel took a Stone, and set it up . . . called the Name of it, Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto the Lord hath Helped us,” Mather quoted from 1 Samuel 7:12, before outlining in his own words the pitfalls of such “Stones of Help”: “The Thankful Servants of God, have used sometimes, to Erect Monuments of Stone, as dureable Tokens of their Thankfulness to God, for Mercies Received in the places thus distinguished. Jacob did

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so; Joshua did so; and Samuel did so; but they so did it, as to keep clear of the Transgression forbidden, in Lev. 26 I. Ye shall not set up an Image of Stone in your Land for to Bow down unto it.”139 To steer clear of idolatry while marking the “Places thus distinguished” by notable events: this was the dilemma of attempting to pin collective memory to worldly space. Reminding Bostonians of their historical favor by Providence, Mather acknowledged that they needed a means of commemoration: “That a People whom the God of Heaven hath Remarkably Helped, in their Distresses, ought Greatly and Gratefully to acknowledge, what Help of Heaven they have Received.” But rather than urging installation of a monument in town (easily enough fashioned from the Northeast’s famously stony ground), Mather concluded a literary memorial might better accomplish these ends: “my Sermon shall be this Day, your Ebenezer.”140 Indeed, text initially served as the stand-in for physical monuments in Puritan New England, as in exemplary biographies and histories of the virtuous. Texts and monuments were connected from the earliest days, though strictures remained on acceptable forms for each. Cotton Mather put these prescriptions about memorialization into action by following in his father’s historiographical footsteps and publishing his own historical studies of the regional past. Foremost among them stood his 1702 opus Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of our Lord, 1698.141 The Magnalia dealt at length with King Philip’s War and expressed consternation that New Englanders’ experiences of war appeared paltry in global context: ’Tis true, the European Campaigns for the Numbers of Men appearing in them, compared with the little Numbers that appear in these American Actions, may tempt the Reader to make a very Diminutive Business of our whole Indian-War; but we who felt our selves Assaulted by unknown Numbers of Devils in Flesh on every side of us, and knew that our Minute Numbers employ’d in the Service against them, were proportionably more to us than mighty Legions are to Nations, that have existed as many Centuries as our Colonies have Years in the World, can scarce forbear taking the Colours in the Sixth Book of Milton to describe our Story. . . . At least we think our Story as considerable as that silly Business of the Invading and Conquering Florida by the Spaniards, under Fernando de Soto; and yet that Story the World has thought worthy to be read in divers Languages.142

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If “a War between Us and a Handful of Indians do appear no more than a Batrachomyomachie to the World abroad”—a comedic “Battle of Frogs and Mice” parodying Homer’s Iliad—“yet unto us at home it hath been considerable enough to make an History.”143 The younger Mather evinced little respect for Native people (“Exterminating the Rabid Animals,” as he phrased it),144 and his Boston-centric vantage undergirded a certain laziness in recounting farther-flung campaigns in the war. He wrote dismissively of the eastward violences, despite the death of his “Dear Friend” Thomas Lake there.145 He would not be the first historian to eliminate those important Wabanaki lands from studies of the conflict. A work of “Incontestable Veracity,” Mather billed the Magnalia: “it Aims at the doing of Good, as well as the telling of Truth; and if its Aim shall be attained, that will be a sufficient Reward for all the Trouble of Writing it.”146 Consistent with the preference for textual rather than stone monuments, few Bastoniak or their New England counterparts more generally of this period demonstrated interest in erecting tangible “ebenezers” to commemorate the war. Among those who did, monumentalizing happened after the most severe Calvinist iconoclasm waned. In the 1730s, for instance, Benjamin Wadsworth, then the eighth president of Harvard College and a religious moderate, traveled west from Cambridge to Sudbury, Massachusetts, to dedicate a monument to the memory of his father, Samuel Wadsworth, killed there along with his troops by Native parties in spring 1676.147 The younger Wadsworth was six years old when his father died, and he waited more than half a century to formally commemorate this loss. The stone wedged into the ground bore the then-common motif of a winged death’s head,148 and beneath that: Capt. SAMUEL WADSWORTH of MILTON, His Lieut. Sharp of BROOKLIN, Capt. BROCLEBANK of ROWLEY With about Twenty Six Other Souldrs Fighting for y Defence of their COUNTRY, Were slain by y Indian enemy April 18 1676 & lye buried in this Place The inscribed death date of April 18, 1676 may have been erroneous. Wadsworth possibly derived it from William Hubbard’s seemingly mistaken published recounting of the Sudbury “fight” rather than from his own family

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traditions, a case of print culture and textual errata wending into the built environment and becoming reified within its commemorative structures.149 Even this stone occupied an uneasy place between conventional gravestones and monuments by both memorializing specific individuals and their interment spots (hallmarks of the former), and pinpointing for posterity the location of a historical event notable in the collective consciousness of a community (the latter). None of the text acknowledged that “this Place” lay in a critical corridor of Native space, crisscrossed by fertile rivers, brooks, and ponds, extremely close to both Natick and Magunkaquog. The Wadsworth monument in Sudbury was an exceedingly rare construction, and no similar monuments seem to have gone up in greater Boston in this period.150 For colonists, the principal means of formally circulating knowledge about the war in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century eastern Massachusetts remained the written word. War and captivity narratives, sermons, and histories steadily proliferated thanks to a burgeoning print culture marketplace.151 Among the vendors carrying domestic imprints and imports was the prominent Boston bookseller Daniel Henchman, grandson of the Deer Island overseer and Quinsigamond colonizer.152 The elder Henchman directly shaped Native lives and trajectories of King Philip’s War, and benefited personally from its displacements. The younger made his livelihood by marketing narratives about that period to colonial publics hungry for stories.

Postwar Homelands: Changing Native Geographies Inside and Beyond Boston When Native prisoners confined on the harbor islands finally gained release in spring 1676, they faced the daunting prospect of returning to homelands turned upside down, once-familiar areas now wracked by demographic collapse and material destruction.153 Intertribal conflict in the form of Mohawk attacks worried Nipmuc returnees into the late 1670s, well after the war’s violences had supposedly ceased. The General Court severely restricted their options for resettlement, issuing orders about the management and oversight of four main communities that Natives had been permitted to inhabit in the postwar period: Natick, Punkapaog, Hassenamesit, and Wamesit—places “where they may be Continually inspected.” The court ordered “A lyst to bee taken of all the men, women and children of the severall companies, once a yeare and kept upon record, with a strickt chardge and prohibition upon the penalty of the displeasure of this court not to rec[ei]ve or entertayne any

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stranger or forraigne indian or indians into yr society without the knowledge or approbation of Authority.”154 Under heightened surveillance, Massachusetts Natives inhabited increasingly conscribed geographic ranges as colonists attempted to pare down the sites where they could legally dwell. The town of Mendon moved in 1685 to restrict Natives’ movements and ban firearms and liquor among them, claiming they were disorderly.155 Prohibitions on mobility proved more stringent in theory than in practice, however, as Natives continued to inhabit and travel across extensive geographies despite colonial legislation and grassroots pushback. Governance of the four remaining praying towns posed challenges as heterogeneous postwar populations—drawn from multiple antebellum communities—negotiated claims to leadership and authority. At the recreated Natick, Thomas Waban (Weegramomenit), son of the Nipmuc Waban who acted as an intermediary with John Eliot, and himself a former Deer Island internee, stepped into this unsettled milieu and acted as a principal leader from 1685 until his death in 1722. The harbor island survivors suffered tremendous losses due to their exile, but their subsequent experiences were not ones of straightforward marginalization.156 Perhaps most notable among the postwar transformations was the change in Massachusetts Natives’ territorial claims. A wave of English land sales (and grabs) alienated tens of thousands of acres from Native proprietors, who increasingly had to satisfy colonial creditors, while in other instances Natives actively leased out tracts, inaugurating incremental processes of dispossession. At Hassanamesit (later called Grafton), Moses Printer received a land allotment of 108 acres in 1727. Nipmucs lost many of their holdings in 1728 when 7,500 acres of praying-town land at Hassanamesit were transferred to English settlers, the remainder divided among Natives who had returned after the war.157 Even Printer’s holdings diminished after 1727 due to a series of land sales by the colonial “trustees” or “guardians” appointed to that community. But on what remained, an English-style homestead was built in 1801 for Lucy Gimbee, Moses Printer’s great-granddaughter.158 These processes unfolded across east-central Massachusetts, though local variables shaped the exact nature and pace of change. Natives’ inroads into colonial settings as laborers and their persistent mobility across postwar landscapes appeared to Euro-American observers as mere transience signaling the dissolution of their communities. A colonial discourse of “vanishing” began to develop: convictions that most or all of the Nipmuc-area Natives had died in King Philip’s War or subsequent military service, permanently dispersed to other parts, or intermarried their way into being “people of color,” thus

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removing tribal presences from the land and conveniently opening the way to unconstrained Euro-American expansion.159 Within greater Boston the situation proved little easier. King Philip’s War left Bastoniak unnerved about tribal neighbors and led them to curtail Indigenous access to and transit through the town. In March 1676, the militia and selectmen of Dorchester asked that Natives living with families be removed from the town—Boston previously made the same request—and the court approved.160 In May 1677, Boston officials considered a motion about “regulateinge buildings in ye respectiue townes, yt by scatteringe they expose not themselues to ye crueltie of ye natiues or by theire narrow streets ye dangr of fire.”161 At the October 1677 town meeting, a motion passed to give “spetiall charge to the watch to be carefull about fire, & whatsoeuer Indians shall be found goeinge or comeinge to commit to prison, or any other disorderly persons.”162 To many colonial minds, Natives and fire constituted perpetual specters of destruction and merited comparable precautions. Despite municipal attempts to eradicate or clamp down on Native presence, Boston had hardly become a permanently de-indigenized place. Descendants of the Algonquian children “put to service” in 1676 may have remained in town or periodically visited, though their names and voices are elusive. Natives traveled into Boston from outlying areas to give depositions defending their lands against settler claims, as in August 1683 when the elder Hahawton, William Hahawton, and Robert Momontague walked into the county court to dispute Richard Thayer’s claim to land at Clapp’s Farm in Dorchester.163 Deer Island and other corners of the harbor resurfaced into public debate less than a decade after the internments ended, this time in a property dispute. Selectmen weighed demands in June 1684 from Natives who “haue of late claymed a proprietie in some of ye Islands in this bay, yt haue not formerlie beene compounded for wth them, of wch Deare Island is supposed to be one.” The town delegated Simon Linde to investigate the situation and “procure a firm deed of conveyance for ye Inheritance of any of sd places,” and the town agreed to pay in order to secure title.164 Boston confirmed Samuel Shrimpton’s lease of Deer Island and Natives’ “quitclaim” of it in 1685, seemingly finalizing Algonquian relinquishment of that ground—but only in narrowly legalistic terms (and even then, earlier colonial title claims were dubious).165 The court received a flood of petitions written by or on behalf of Natives disputing other land transactions in Massachusetts. Its courtrooms became clearinghouses for property grievances—paper warfare—and respondents increasingly engaged with Boston as the physical setting for

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these important arbitrations, unsatisfactory though some of them turned out to be. Natives living in Boston strategically explored ways to get by and to adapt traditional subsistence practices to the conditions of an urbanizing environment (fig. 8). “[G]reat Damage arises to the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston by negro’s and Indians keeping Hogs,” the town reported in 1746, “not only by Occasioning very great Wast in the several Familys they respectively belong to, but as it Exposes them to great Temptations to Steal and purloin from their several Masters, provisions and other of their Substance.” What appeared to Euro-American masters as “theft” may have felt like deserved redistribution of

Figure 8. In the years following King Philip’s War, Algonquians and other Natives continued to inhabit the town of Boston and its surroundings, often in positions of bondage or servitude. Town regulations attempted to curtail Indigenous and African presence and mobility in the urban environment, based on fears of insurgence. John Bonner’s map of The Town of Boston in New England, ca. 1720s–1730s, depicted urban developments across the Shawmut peninsula, prior to extensive land-making projects that substantially altered the coastline. (Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library)

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resources to the people in bondage who reclaimed them. Perhaps more problematic, swine raising “Occasions great Loss of time, and gives them an opportunity of Meeting and conferring together, whereby great Injuries have been done to the Inhabitants of said town.” Officials responded to these colonial allegations of resource waste and African-Native plotting or insurrection by requiring masters’ permission for them to keep such animals, imposing another level of oversight on their informal economies. The act also forbade any person to “let to hire to any Indian Negro or Molatto, any Sty or Penn, or peice of Ground whereon to Erect the same,” attempting to limit the specific spaces within the townscape where Natives or other minorities could gather and socialize.166 Other so-called “weapons of the weak”167 likely contributed to these everyday practices of resistance against colonial spatial and capitalist regimes. Boston continued as an active Indigenous crossroads during the next succession of “Indian Wars” that shook the Northeast. Tribal delegations traveled there to negotiate treaties with colonial officials, including Wabanaki representatives from the eastward parts. New England troops took scalps during these wars as trophies of violent conquests (and for monetary bounties), sometimes carrying them back to Boston.168 Native prisoners also came through under guard. For Massachusetts Natives who served in these wars, often for income, they knew Boston as a place for embarkation or stopping off. In 1689 colonial officials, purportedly for the protection of “friendly Indians,” authorized heightened military presence in Boston and outlying towns, firearms searches, and, if necessary, seizure of “suspicious” Natives.169 Just as English refugees from the frontiers flooded into Boston for security during King Philip’s War, so did King William’s and Queen Anne’s Wars (1689–1697, 1702– 1713) bring in waves of recently displaced English, refreshing anti-Indian fears well into the 1700s. Boston also coped with anxieties about “the Growing Numbr. of Poor Amonge us & the great Number Come in amonge ous wch has been Occasioned by the Eastern warr wth the Indians, & other poor and vild persons yt has Come in amonge us from Other Towns, Our Town being so Populous and they shifting from place to place. . . . Now these things do presage great Poverty to be hastening upon this Town if some sutable methods be not timely Taken to prevent the same.”170 Far from being a stable, homogenous population, Boston in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries accommodated a shifting mixture of people struggling for footholds. It was also a passageway and home for a range of tribal members who had diplomacy, grievances, or livelihoods to pursue in its streets and institutions.

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Then there were Mohawks, real and imagined. Bostonians took sharp notice of them, widely regarded across the English colonies as assertive diplomats and warriors and frequently considered by colonists to be “New York” Natives living in the political orbit of that colony to the west—not New England ones. In mid-October 1722 a Mohawk leader “dyed here in town,” reported Jeremiah Bumstead, son of the tavern-owning Bumstead who sustained career-threatening wounds in King Philip’s War. The younger Bumstead and fellow Bostonians may have witnessed the elaborate funeral that followed, a procession that included four Natives, two of them bearing young children on their backs.171 Colonists also performed indigeneity at critical political moments, drawing upon “Indian” signifiers and scripts in street theater that challenged dominant social orders and imperial structures. A mob of colonists dressed up as “Mohawks” in December 1773, disguising themselves with paint and costumes while dumping East India Company Tea into the harbor. This prominent instance of “playing Indian” on the eve of revolution drew upon complex “doubled identities,” Philip Deloria has contended, as the costumed colonists both invoked indigeneity as a desirable signifier—connoting independence, strength, aboriginal claims to the continent, for instance—and deliberately demarcated their own “Other” that was not racially “Other.” The Mohawk costumes were intended to be unbelievable, based on assumptions that a sizable rendezvous of Mohawks would be out of place in Boston, at a distance from homelands in Iroquoia/Haudenosaunee areas (though Mohawks who raided Massachusetts tribal enclaves in the late 1670s underscored their eastward mobility). Certain private correspondence characterized the costumed Sons of Liberty not as Mohawks but as “Indians from Narragansett,” considerably more local Algonquians.172 Yet that tribally specific detail never caught on in Euro-American public imaginaries. The Tea Party performers were most widely identified as Mohawk pretenders from the moment of their insurgence to modern times, perpetuating notions that Bostonian rebels impersonated other places’ Natives, not Algonquians. When it came to stylized Indians, none figured more conspicuously than the weathervane perched atop Boston’s Province House, the official residence for the provincial governors of Massachusetts. The “Indian Archer” brandished an enormous bow and arrow and sported only a fringed loincloth and feathered headdress. He was the hammered copper creation (ca. 1716) of Shem Drowne, a metalworker born in the Piscataqua River region of Pennacook/Wabanaki borderlands and later proprietor of a shop on Anne Street in Boston. Drowne’s most famous weathervane was the grasshopper adorning

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Faneuil Hall, but the Indian figurine, likely a reprisal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s seal, also became a prominent landmark in the early Boston skyline. Distinctively, the Indian’s arrow pointed with the wind rather than against it, and as it caught gusts blowing off the harbor, the arrow quietly informed townspeople of storms heading their way. Tradition held that the Indian might one day shoot his arrow. Crowds of children circled around the Province House to stare with anticipation—perhaps sublimated desire too, for revival of Indigenous militancy they had been assured no longer posed a challenge to Boston.173

“A Trophy from the Wigwam of King Philip”: Boston Antiquarianism The Indian Archer surveyed Boston with unnerving glass eyes throughout the eighteenth century before descending from public heights. Following temporary displays in Brookline, he moved inside to the private quarters of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston’s oldest Euro-American institution for collection, interpretation, and display about local and national pasts. Founded in 1791 by antiquarians looking to cultivate distinctive senses of heritage in the early days of the American republic, the society was the original organization of its kind in the fledgling United States. “We intend to be an active, not a passive, literary body,” Jeremy Belknap, one of its founders, affirmed: “not to lie waiting, like a bed of oysters, for the tide (of communication) to flow in upon us, but to seek and find, to preserve and communicate, literary intelligence, especially in the historical way.”174 Collecting and publishing historical manuscripts became one of the society’s main projects. Members devoted tremendous energy to issuing editions of significant texts, conceiving of them as memorial devices that would “diffuse” information about the past. “The surest way of preserving historical records and materials is, not to lock them up; but to multiply the copies,” they declared in 1795. “The art of printing affords a mode of preservation, more effectual than Corinthian brass or Egyptian marble. Statues and pyramids . . . are unable to tell the names of their sculptors, or the date of their foundation.”175 Equally important was amassing physical artifacts linked to Massachusetts and American pasts, which members acquired through donations and solicitations. Indigenous artifacts (and attendant stories) they specially valued. Within its growing objects cabinet, the society counted several mementos purportedly associated with King Philip’s War. A standout was the item character-

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ized as the “Bowl of Sachem Philip.”176 A sizable bowl or dish carved from a burl—a hard, knotty-grained tree growth—the vessel bore one geometrically shaped handle; two small holes, possibly for stringing cordage to make the bowl portable; and a number of marks across its interior indicating active use at an earlier time. Its form and craftsmanship bore many similarities to known Algonquian burl vessels, as well as to some burl items created by colonial craftsmen. In the society’s eyes, what gave it importance was its claimed link to Philip, and specifically the story about its chain of descent, which asserted the bowl had been taken from Philip’s dwelling shortly after his death in August 1676. While the society wished to ascertain the “authenticity of the relic,”177 the documentary evidence about its provenance remained admittedly thin. Society members glossed over some of these indeterminacies by affixing gilded letters to the interior: “A Trophy from the Wigwam of King Philip, when he was slain in 1676, by Richard. Present by Eleazer Richard, his Grandson.” This inscription used English-language alphabetic text to overwrite the original artifact and to brand upon it a violent history of acquisition, fixating on the moment of Philip’s extinguishment. Through such trophies of conquest the society’s antiquarians affirmed the significance of Indigenous histories—insofar as they signified Native peoples’ decisive defeat by ascendant colonists. Over time the bowl became a closely held heritage item of the society, into which members ritually cast ballots in the form of dried corn and beans (fig. 9). By treating it as a conquest trophy, the society pushed aside other potential meanings. Such bowls can convey deep associations with community feasting, land-based sustenance, craftsmanship, and tribal continuance, as Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) recently has expressed it.178 They can bespeak Algonquian women’s sustaining labors in the cornfields, the multigenerational transmission of woodworking skills, and traditional ecological knowledge about where in the Northeast to locate suitable raw materials. They can attest to Indigenous conceptions of “home,” intentional mobility, and survival even in times of conflict. Yet those more capacious meanings held little resonance for an organization increasingly invested in narratives of gradual Indigenous decline. Society members implicitly made that point when they implored correspondents to share information on “number and present state of any remaining Indians among you.”179 They wished to tabulate the rate and kind of Indigenous diminishment in the United States. The society gained ownership of other supposedly war-related curios: a piece of burnt corn from 1676 (via Timothy Alden, Jr.), the gun that allegedly killed Philip.180 It also held a chunk of the “Monumental Stone erected in Sud-

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Figure 9. In this group portrait from 1855, members of the Massachusetts Historical Society gather around a burl bowl that New England antiquarians characterized as the “samp” (corn) bowl belonging to King Philip, purportedly taken from his dwelling after his death in 1676. Fashioned from burl, a knotty-grained part of a tree growth, the bowl had its interior modified by antiquarians who affixed gilded lettering asserting its status as a “trophy.” Algonquians historically produced many items from burl and other woods, and they held deep associations with community feasting, sustenance, and a web of human and nonhuman relations. Society members considered the bowl a heritage item in its own right for their organization and used it during membership business, casting votes into it in the form of corn and beans. (Image courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College)

bury, where an Indian battle was fought, 1676, from a Friend.”181 This latter entry referenced the rare early war monument erected by Benjamin Wadsworth, demonstrating that the eighteenth-century colonial memoryscape was already falling to fragments and being scooped up by collectors (fig. 10). Among its extensive Indigenous holdings, the society claimed an “Indian Canoe” and an “Indian Mortar and Pestle” donated by Belknap; an “Indian Axe” from Amoskeag Falls along the Merrimack River; an “Indian Stone Image, found at Plymouth” (possibly funerary and/or ceremonial); “Several Weapons, Implements, and Ornaments of Stone, found in Indian graves at

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Figure 10. This wood engraving from John Warner Barber’s historical guidebook Massachusetts Historical Collections (1839) shows a visitor viewing a monument to colonial casualties of King Philip’s War, located in Massachusett-Nipmuc country (Sudbury, Massachusetts). The stone was erected in the 1730s by Benjamin Wadsworth, president of Harvard College, in honor of his father and military company. In the mid-nineteenth century antiquarians added a larger commemorative obelisk in the vicinity of this older memorial. Few such commemorative installations were erected in the early eighteenth century, though they became commonplace by the nineteenth and twentieth. Sudbury arose in close proximity to the Native “praying towns” at Natick and Magunkaquog. (Image courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College)

Plymouth” (clearly funerary); “Mohegan Spikes or Spears” found at the west end of Long Island; and others gotten through a growing network of avocational collectors. Artifacts from tribal groups beyond New England included bracelets, axes, caps, and cordage from the Northwest Coast and other corners of the Indigenous Pacific world. The society’s records did not always specify acquisition histories of these items, but at least some appeared to be items of spiritual and/or mortuary significance, unilaterally removed to a EuroAmerican exhibitionary venue and detached from the original contexts that gave them meaning.182 Society members envisioned themselves partaking in

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an admirable effort to amass textual and material fragments of the storied pasts of Massachusetts and the Americas, contributing to a powerful mythos about the founding of Euro-America that could rival Old World claims of antiquity. The Indigenous descendant communities who were collected from, largely without consent, likely would have perceived more disruptive processes. For them, such a nascent museum might have signaled loss and deracination, rather than enlightening accumulation.183 In order to curate these items in ways it deemed proper, the society needed space. It initially lodged at Faneuil Hall, then moved to Hamilton Place, Franklin Street, Tremont Street, and finally Back Bay. The society quickly ascended into a major venue within the town (and before long, city) for the appropriation of Native heritage items, though its semiprivate rooms, closed off to those outside its elite circle, remained inaccessible to the masses, not to mention Natives dwelling in the vicinity. Members envisioned their artifactfilled cabinets and paper-stuffed shelves to be permanent fixtures, but they proved precarious only a few decades after the society’s establishment. In the morning hours of November 10, 1825, a fire broke out in a hatter’s shop and spread to the offices of society librarian and banker James Savage. Savage was sweating over an edition of John Winthrop’s The History of New England, and he had taken the second volume of Winthrop’s manuscript back to his Court Street rooms to continue his painstaking editorial labors—the volume that detailed colonial involvement in King Philip’s War, among other events of the late seventeenth century. When the conflagration started, this irreplaceable colonial text went up in smoke, along with two thousand volumes of the society’s collections housed nearby.184 “For this loss, as well as that of some friends, who entrusted me with some books relative to the early history of our country, my regret is deep and sincere,” Savage morosely relayed in a letter after the disaster, likely haunted until the end of his days by the destruction of materials he held precious.185 The other two Winthrop manuscript volumes survived by being safely sequestered in the society’s unscathed rooms in the Tontine Crescent. This dramatic loss led members to look into “procuring a more safe and commodious room for the meetings of said society and for the preservation of its records.”186 The Court Street fire also drew municipal officials’ attention to the insufficiency of water flow into the city, a major hazard when firefighters needed it to quench flames, so the city soon appropriated funds for construction of thirteen reservoirs.187 In a circuitous way, the much-lamented loss of the society’s resources—seen by many Euro-Americans as the collective cultural heritage of

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Massachusetts and the new United States—helped modernize elements of Boston’s built environment. Burgeoning interest in the heritages of Massachusetts and the American republic reshaped perspectives on the symbolic meanings of nearby landscapes. The harbor islands served as crucial defenses for American forces during the Revolutionary War, and in the early nineteenth century, writers who mused on that coastal zone tended to focus on patriotic exploits of 1776—not the fraught events of 1676, precisely a century earlier. In an 1819 poem that imaginatively toured the islands, Frederick W. A. S. Brown described them as a shelter from the storm, And Boston’s best defence188 before recalling Revolutionary victories and sacrifices. At Deer Island, he remembered the site for a near wreck of a fishing party and for melodramatic superstitions about a treasure-guarding headless ghost moaning on the beach.189 Brown made no mention of the 1675–1676 internments. His memoryscape retrieved sites of celebratory American patriotism and inward-focused feeling, not Native-settler violences and displacements. Sensibilities shifted in the mid-nineteenth century, however, as a handful of Boston-area writers sympathetically yet still patronizingly reimagined the exile to Deer Island. Daughter of a Rhode Island minister, Sarah Sprague Jacobs devoted an entire chapter to Deer Island in Nonantum and Natick, a study of John Eliot and Indian communities designed for juvenile readers, published in Boston in 1853. Describing at length the removals, she dwelled on the moment of riverside embarkation at the Pines: I think, if I were a skilful painter, I would make a picture of this scene, and place it in the State House in Boston. In the foreground should be Mr. Eliot’s venerable figure, not yet much bent by age; around him the disciples who have been torn from their homes. He is bidding them be of good cheer; there are better homes on fairer hills than this earth affords, and a city where no fear, nor cruelty born of fear, can enter. Mr. Gookin stands near, with kind, grave countenance. Some of the younger Indians are busy with Captain Prentiss’ men in arranging the things they have brought. The women sit listless on the ground. Some of them have sleeping infants. A few boys look unconcerned and merry. On the right the horses are picketed among the deep-shadowing trees that give the spot its name. On the left we see the river, and the waiting boats; over all the autumn sky.190

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A melancholy tableau that imagined Eliot and Gookin as towering, heroic, sympathetic figures, this intensely sentimentalized vision of the Natick removal likely took inspiration from the infamous Southeastern Indian removals of the 1830s under Andrew Jackson and his presidential successors. The forced relocation of Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Chocktaws, and Seminoles to “Indian country” in Oklahoma caused public consternation among Northeastern and other critics who condemned the process as anti-Christian or anti-American. When Jacobs literarily revisited an earlier removal, and argued that such an image belonged in the architectural heart of Massachusetts civic identity, she urged public reckoning with the Northeast’s own complicities in anti-Indian activities. Yet for all its pathos her 1853 representation still conveyed a sense of Indigenous decline and marginalization, all the more striking for the Natick peoples’ apparently consensual participation in it. Nonantum and Natick’s concluding section cursorily surveyed the condition of Massachusetts tribes in the present and deemed those like the Nipmucs at Webster “poorer, more ignorant and degraded, than any of their brethren.”191 Jacobs’s racialized, declensionist conclusion did mention that a tribal community endured at “Marshpee” (Mashpee), where members confronted “encroachment of the whites on their fishing grounds”—and not long before petitioned the legislature about it.192 In this minute historical sliver she did perceive, albeit incompletely, a parallel series of antebellum events that demonstrated Massachusetts tribal peoples were hardly despondent or imminently vanishing. A delegation from the Mashpee Wampanoag community traveled north to Boston in 1833–1834 to petition the House of Representatives, airing grievances over settler encroachments onto their woodlots and over sovereignty. William Apess (née Apes), who publically self-identified as a Pequot and may have had more complex kinship ties, was the Indigenous Methodist minister living among the Mashpees who helped organize that nonviolent “Woodland Revolt.”193 While notable on its own terms, this intervention belongs within a multicentury context of Native individuals and groups actively engaging Bastoniak in a politically potent space, to reaffirm place- and sovereignty-based rights. Apess earned widespread notice in Boston again in 1836 when he returned to deliver a “Eulogy on King Philip” at the Odeon Theater. Fronted with sedate columns in a neoclassical design by celebrated architect Charles Bulfinch, the theater at the corner of Federal and Franklin Streets routinely hosted prominent orators and performers.194 When Apess took the stage, only blocks east of Boston Common where Natives had been hanged and shot during wartime, he issued an oral vindication of Philip. His extended

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oratorical comparison of the Wampanoag leader to U.S. patriots like George Washington earned immediate attention for its impassioned defense of a leader long denigrated by non-Natives. What many critics overlooked (then as well as now) was the tribally specific strangeness, or strategic inventiveness, of Apess’s interpretation. During the actual waging of King Philip’s War, Pequots—still reeling from their devastation in the Pequot War and seeking selfprotection against renewed violence—primarily aligned with the English, serving as skilled scouts in campaigns against Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Nipmucs. But Apess did not express antipathy toward Philip and his comrades. Instead, his recuperation of Philip as a collective Indigenous hero demonstrated how complex intertribal affiliations and loyalties had become by the mid-nineteenth century due to intermarriages, mobility across and beyond the Native Northeast, and emerging conceptions of pan-Indian solidarity and collectivized resistance to settler colonialism.195 Apess delivered the “Eulogy” at other Northeastern venues, bringing this alternative representation of Philip and the formative days of Native-settler interactions on tour to a substantial regional listenership—possibly including Indigenous audience members.196 Greater Boston’s active publishing circles supported production of counterhistories expressly concerned with certain Native perspectives. The Riverside Press in Cambridge published one such critique of conventionally filiopietistic colonial narratives. Frederick Freeman, a Euro-American, nervously sensed he was trampling upon hallowed historiographical turf when he composed the opening remarks to his history of the war: “If, in giving the history of an important era, or of a race, faithfulness requires exposure of historic facts unquestionable, as painful. . . .”197 Civilization and Barbarism, Illustrated by Especial Reference to Metacomet and the Extinction of His Race (1878) lodged a complaint against Puritan forefathers’ wartime conduct. Freeman’s contention in this revisionist history was that as early as King Philip’s War, Natives had been mistreated as a race, “despoiled of their hereditary possessions, nationality, and even existence, by the mercenary acts of their relentless oppressors.” He found even in this early chapter of the North American past concerted efforts to effect “complete humiliation and extinction of [Philip’s] race,” and incontrovertible evidence of a “course of oppression and extermination practiced towards Indians.”198 A Presbyterian resident of Sandwich on Cape Cod—only miles from Mashpee—Freeman moved beyond the local New England context of colonialism and dispossession to mount a case for remedying current and future wrongs toward tribes across the United States.199 It was incumbent upon contemporary writers to publicly remember

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and seek repentance for their predecessors’ wrongdoings, Freeman felt.200 This was presentist, politicized mobilization of the past, drawing upon the traumatic events of 1675–1676 and invoking Civil War–era transformations in racial equity, to demand better treatment of enduring tribal populations by the U.S. government. Freeman concluded with a call to arms for correcting violations against Western tribes like the Sioux, Navajo, Modoc, and Apache. His solution to the so-called “Indian problem” was paternalistic in its own way, advocating assimilation and fulfillment of dubious treaties. And his rhetoric of racial “extinction” replicated many problematic assumptions of the era regarding Indigenous demographics and identities. But the message was clear: progressive change in the present, he believed, could allow Americans to “atone for the past, by kindness and justice to the remnants of Indian nations.”201 Freeman’s critical rereading of King Philip’s War entered into long-running conversations among Boston liberals and literati about moral stances in Massachusetts on major issues of the day. The involvement of that state in abolitionist causes and the antislavery movement, its gestation of radical periodicals like The Liberator, and its self-positioning as an ethical compass for the United States in an era of social upheaval and race-based conflict all laid groundwork for such pro-Indian sentiments.202 Still, Freeman had his work cut out for him given the persistence of decisively pro-Puritan, anti-Indian narratives in standardized texts like schoolbooks. Published in Boston and other print-culture centers of the Northeast, these publications changed at glacial pace, recycling entire passages verbatim from one edition to the next. Authors drew heavily from the same tiny corpus of “primary” sources about King Philip’s War, including semifictional embellishments like Benjamin Church’s memoir, thereby keeping those problematic accounts in wide circulation. Marketconscious editors privileged clarity over interpretive nuance. Textbooks formed the historiographical rear guard, being conduits of conservative consensus for public consumption.203 In a sweeping sentence or two, mainstream publications like these erased Algonquians from New England as a consequence of King Philip’s War. “A bloody war of two years followed, which ended only when the sachem had been killed by a faithless follower, and the tribe of the Narragansetts has been exterminated as that of the Pequots had been [in 1637],” declared one Bostonpublished history.204 The “tribes which inhabited the regions bordering on the Atlantic, are utterly extinct,” confirmed a different text. “The Penobscots, Pautuckets, Pequods, Pokanokets, Narragansetts, Mohicans, Nipmucks, so trou-

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blesome to the New England settlers, are gone, and the places which once knew them, shall know them no more forever.”205 Schoolboys and -girls had to memorize and drill the correct answers to questions about these narratives.206 Children learned glib answers to queries like: What are some of the Indian tribes that have become extinct?207 How did the Indians suppose they could be saved from extinction?208 How did Philip lose strength and influence? What finally crushed the spirit of Philip? What was the fate of himself and family?209 Issued a limited selection of highly ideological “facts,” then expected to repeat the same, students rehearsed public scripts of Indigenous disappearance in their schoolrooms. (These narratives have outlasted the nineteenth century. “I remember reading in grade school, myself, that all of the Narragansett were killed during King Philip’s War,” Narragansett elder and educator Dawn Dove has remarked in the twenty-first century. “There I was, in that classroom, with my teacher negating my very existence. Our [tribal] students should not have to go through that humiliation.”)210 Frederick Freeman’s against-the-grain interpretation of King Philip’s War challenged the content of these boilerplate histories. But his idiosyncratic, limited-circulation book, available mostly to a local readership, could scarcely rival the reach of mass-market texts churned out in multiple editions with exponentially higher circulations. All told, Civilization and Barbarism may have exercised more influence as private catharsis for Freeman’s troubled conscience than as an instigator of altered popular understandings of King Philip’s War and ongoing Native-settler relations. In 1879 Boston’s Horticultural Hall hosted a Ponca representative named Standing Bear, who delivered a lecture detailing his tribe’s land losses in the aftermath of the establishment of the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868.211 The crowd swelled inside the imposing white granite hall on the corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets—Boston then claimed a population of 250,000— and it was noticeably female, reflecting the city’s skewed gender demographics following the Civil War’s catastrophic casualties. Helen Hunt Jackson sat among the audience. Standing Bear’s catalog of betrayals so moved her that she began researching the history of U.S. government misdealings with tribes. She published her findings in A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881).212 Whereas Freeman’s lament about ongoing U.S. mistreatment of tribes failed to gain much of a readership, Jackson’s account, published only three years after his,

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succeeded. It was a scathing best seller that rocked the American reading public and raised awareness of misconduct against tribes in the wake of the damaging Indian Appropriations Act of 1871. Most of the text focused on the American West beyond the Mississippi, but its appendix highlighted the dismembering of Philip as evidence of early injustices in the East, helping establish a protracted chronology of malfeasance in the context of settler colonialism.213 Standing Bear’s impassioned performance moved influential Bostonians and politicians to action, and the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee formed to pursue advocacy work.214 Publisher Henry Houghton joined the enthusiastic welcome for the Ponca delegation and gave Standing Bear a tour of the Riverside Press’s rooms in 1879, only a year after Freeman’s counterhistory had been typeset there.215 As Boston carved out a niche for itself as a seedbed of progressive activism on behalf of Indians, many supporters seemed untroubled by the apparent contradictions of ongoing Indigenous marginalization at home in Massachusetts. Standing Bear toured an urban environment in the throes of dramatic transformations. Over the nineteenth century extensive “land-making” projects rapidly filled in areas that had long been marshy or fully water, attempting to create more valuable city real estate for a burgeoning population. The original Shawmut peninsula grew significantly as earthen fill transformed an actual bay into the affluent Back Bay neighborhood. These built-environment changes sometimes made it challenging to identify historical locales, such as the specific spots where certain events from the seventeenth century had taken place (a fact that a number of Boston newspaper, guidebook, and popular writers remarked upon as they endeavored to retrace city geographies of King Philip’s War).216 Deer Island’s own landscape morphed under pressures of an expanding, diversifying urban populace. The centuries following the establishment and closure of the internment camps brought sweeping alterations to the island. Colonial agriculture and sheep occupied it for a spell, though storms periodically washed away land and bleating herds.217 A scattering of people inhabited it and nearby islands.218 Municipal buildings arrived in the mid-nineteenth century: a quarantine facility for immigrants, predominantly Irish arrivals, formed after an 1847 outbreak of smallpox. A House of Reformation, almshouse school, house for young female paupers, and the Suffolk County House of Correction followed, institutions that aimed to keep supposedly dangerous or contaminated human elements at arm’s length from center city.219 In the course of continuous rebuilding, the island’s contours changed. Originally consisting of two drumlins (elongated hills created by

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glacial drift), the island had one drumlin leveled to accommodate an early sewage treatment plant. The cumulative construction of these facilities entailed extensive excavation and grading that may have displaced Native burials from the seventeenth century and obliterated traces of the wartime encampments, as well as more ancient Indigenous traces, though disagreements persist about the nature and fate of those remains. Similar developments took root on other harbor islands, including Thompson’s, which housed the Boston Asylum for Indigent Boys and eventually the Farm and Trades School. There the resident boys staged an annual mock battle of King Philip’s War, pitting “settlers” against “Indians,” with the youthful combatants distinguished by different colored caps, worth a set number of points if captured. The cap of “Philip”? Ten points.220 While Boston and private interests increasingly regulated access to the islands and engineered them to serve municipal needs, Deer Island was not devoid of Indigenous presence. In a highly publicized episode in 1882, a group of Zunis traveled to the island (fig. 11). The Zunis were touring the Atlantic coast with anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. Six men accompanied Cushing: Nai-iu-tchi (Senior Priest of the Bow), Lai-iu-ah-tsai-lu, Ba:lawahdiwa, Lai-iu-ah-tsai-lun-k’ia (Priest of the Temple), Ki-a-si (Junior Priest of the Bow), and Nanahe (a Hopi adopted into the tribe). Their railway itinerary prior to the island visit brought them from their home pueblo in New Mexico to major eastern centers of political and commercial influence. They traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Chester A. Arthur and view exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution. They then toured the Northeast, making stops in Salem, at factories and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, and at Harvard’s recently established Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. On March 28, Boston mayor Samuel Abbott Green arranged for a steamboat to transport the Zunis and two hundred and fifty guests to Deer Island in a waterborne procession of anthropologists, Harvard and M.I.T. professors, city officials, and members of the public. On the island the Zunis performed ceremonies, scattered meal on the rising tide, and scooped water from the Atlantic into large vessels. This saltwater from the “Ocean of Sunrise” they carried westward back across the continent, reportedly bringing it into the pueblos and using it at the summer solstice.221 They reportedly referred to the area as Bostonkwin.222 The visit captivated newspapermen. They interpreted the Zunis as exotics mystically interested in touching the Atlantic’s waters, Indigenous specimens and “pagans” on display for the edification of EuroAmericans:

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Figure 11. A delegation of Zuni tribal members traveled from their Southwestern pueblo to the East Coast in 1882, in the company of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. They visited major centers of political and economic influence, including Washington, D.C., and also traveled within the Northeast. In March they spent time on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, forging connections with the Atlantic Ocean. Local and national periodicals avidly covered their visit, intrigued by the claimed novelty of Indigenous presence on the island. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper printed several images of activities in which the Zuni participated. Because of the potentially sensitive nature of ceremonies conducted on the island, the image here only includes the top portion of that newspaper page, not all of the scenes. (Image courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College)

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The spectacle of a number of Indians uttering prayers and incantations to strange gods, and casting votive offerings upon the waves of the sea, as they chant the songs of their religion and celebrate mysterious rites, is not a common one on the shores of Massachusetts Bay in the present year of grace, however ordinary it may have been three hundred years ago. The occurrence of such an event would naturally have a profound effect upon the people of New England, who are notoriously fond of seeing a show, and so . . . everybody who could obtain an invitation to attend . . . made haste to do so.223 The thrust of this Boston Daily Journal commentary was that Indigenous people were uncommon, even out of place, on Deer Island by the late nineteenth century, hence the novelty of Zuni presence. It treated their ceremonies as spectacles to be gawked at for entertainment value, or carefully recorded for ethnographic purposes. Yet problematic popular and anthropological commentaries aside, these Zunis used their own placemaking agency to weave Deer Island into their tribe’s historical and sacred geographies. Through their journey and seaside ceremonies they demonstrated the island’s evolving significance to multiple communities, in addition to Algonquian ones. Just before the turn into the twentieth century, the Boston Art Club held a Tenth Anniversary Exhibition. Its displays in 1897 included specially bound editions of canonical Puritan narratives. William Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England (first published in 1677) appeared in “dark blue levant morocco” crafted by F. Bedford, who also fashioned a version of Hubbard’s Indian Wars in New England. They shared space in the Early New England History section with a newly bound version of the Nativelanguage Up-Biblum God, which scarcely resembled the restrained original pulled from the Harvard press. James Printer might have scarcely recognized the sparkling Victorian one: “richly and elegantly bound . . . in grosgrain levant brown morocco, sides double panelled, blind and gold, with centre ornaments; gilt edges, with gilt inside borders, and lining and guards of vellum; in a Solander case of olive morocco lined with velvet.”224 At this show put on for the benefit of the city’s cultural elite, foundational colonial narratives about King Philip’s War and early Native-settler encounters shimmered as elegant objects for leisurely delight, making their material surfaces the prime attractions, rather than the troubling contents within. Histories of violence and colonialism: exquisite pleasures.

2 • Protesting the “Perfect City” Reorganizing Native Memoryscapes across Greater Boston

1900: the number resonated as self-evidently significant among certain peoples around Boston Harbor, bespeaking a chronological watershed as the nineteenth century turned over into the twentieth. But temporality is socially dependent, shaped by societies’ particular conventions for marking passages of time. Algonquians dwelling in Maushop’s domain maintained complex understandings of temporality involving solar, stellar, lunar, seasonal, and intergenerational considerations. “They are punctuall in their promises of keeping time,” colonist Roger Williams wrote about Algonquians in 1643. “They have no helpe of Clock or Watch,” but instead finely gauged time by nonmechanized means in the world around them, “Sunne and Moone” included. European migrants carried other temporal frameworks to New England and used the birth of an ancient Galilean—Jesus of Nazareth—to denote the year “zero,” demarcate one era from another, and commence a linear movement toward eventual end-times. Natives who chose to affiliate with Protestantism likely developed fluency in multiple temporalities, including Christian millennialism. After long years of contacts with Euro-American neighbors, many Northeastern Natives could understand perfectly well what time-markings of the Julian and later Gregorian calendars signified, even if they still maintained alternate systems.1 And so it was that in the year sometimes called 1900, in a place almost daily gaining new ground for urban “improvements,” and among populations increasingly laboring on industrial timetables regulated by factory whistles, many individuals and communities engaged in public ruminations about past, present, and future. Transformation, progress, modernity: these contested concepts inflected many strands of urban life in the ensuing years, including a major city

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theatrical production titled “From Cave Life to City Life”: The Pageant of the Perfect City, performed in the Boston Arena on November 10–12, 1910 (fig. 12).2 Part of a civic improvement campaign, the pageant offered a vision of Boston as a city on the rise toward an urban utopia. Rehearsals brought together a thousand residents from the metropolitan area. The performance caricatured Indigenous pasts, beginning with a crude tableau of a “cave man . . . crouching at the mouth of his cave,” followed by generalized scenes of Indian camping and early contacts with English. Real Natives participated in the performance—the tribally diverse actors of Frank Moore’s Hiawatha troupe. The American Revolution and an episode on “The Passing of the Indian” rounded out the show’s first section. In that scene, “the Indians are summoned from their native forests; and group themselves around the central mound representing the site of the city of Boston, where they remain until they are displaced by the appearance of Boston accompanied by her Neighbors. . . . The Indians slowly retire before the advancing city, and withdraw to their distant forests in the west.” Actresses embodied Boston and the surrounding suburbs and towns, and the staging meant the Indians were literally chased offstage by the city.3 It was an astonishing dramatization of mainstream convictions that Native people had no place in the capital and largest city of Massachusetts. It forcefully animated, in a Northeastern context, the fictive premise that “indigeneity and modernity were mutually exclusive” (as Coll Thrush has written about Pacific Northwest placemaking).4 Yet diverse Natives pursued Indigenous modernities in Boston before, during, and after the 1910 pageant. The names, occupations, and “races” of those dwelling in the city were recorded in U.S. federal censuses and other records that thoroughly demonstrated the metropolitan area supported active Native homelands. John Milton Earle’s 1861 report on the whereabouts and situations of Massachusetts Natives noted many residing in Boston (like Wampanoags and Nipmucs), and likely overlooked others, given its limited frameworks for assessing identity. Census records noted David and Bertha Arapahoe, living on Worcester Street in 1930; Catherine Stevens and her family, living on Harrison Avenue in 1930; Sylvia Attin, Christina Willis, and Erilda Bernard, all teenagers from Maine, living in the House of the Good Shepherd in Roxbury. The Penobscot Molly Spotted Elk launched her transatlantic career as a dancer and show business performer from Boston, where she joined scores of other Wabanakis who came south for new opportunities. Hundreds of other individuals and kin groups appeared in other lists.5 Census takers were not interested in recording tribal affiliations or fine-grained self-descriptions, only

Figure 12. At the turn of the twentieth century Bostonians reflected on contested issues of modernity, progress, and urban change. In 1910 residents staged a pageant called “From Cave Life to City Life”: The Pageant of the Perfect City, using scenes of Indigenous life to contrast with the presumed modernity of the expanding metropolitan area. The program cover of New Boston visually situated ancient indigeneity and the present/future as opposites, at a time when significant numbers of Algonquians and other tribal people made their homes and livelihoods in the city. (Image courtesy of Harvard University Library)

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“race” in broad categories, a problematic and frequently arbitrary designation since substantial numbers of Natives had intermarried with Euro-Americans and African Americans. The diverse tribal heritages of Boston’s contemporary Indians became partially obscured through bureaucratic mechanisms of documentation. But the lived realities of Indigenous urbanism endured as successive generations sought avenues for employment, education, and sociability, and responded to ongoing land and resource loss across large swaths of tribal homelands.6 The Wall Street crash of 1929 and Great Depression hit metropolitan Boston hard, shuttering factories and theaters, decimating mortgages, and breeding a “Hooverville” of makeshift dwellings near Columbia Circle. Federal relief money trickled more slowly into Boston’s coffers than to other U.S. cities.7 Mayor James Michael Curley’s administration could only do so much to stem the economic hemorrhaging, offering stopgaps like wages to the unemployed for raking leaves on the Common. At least forty thousand were jobless in the spring of 1930. For Native residents, many already leading economically precarious lives, the sharp downturn likely exacerbated daily stresses. Yet in that distressing year, certain heritage-minded residents rallied resources to commemorate the city’s colonial roots. Boston buzzed with historical fervor from September 14 to 20, seven days designated “Boston Week” for programming around the tercentenary of English colonization in 1630. The city prepped for the anniversary all year and staged a flurry of pageants, exhibitions, and speeches.8 Festivities culminated in a parade featuring forty thousand marchers, two hundred floats, and over a million spectators (as tabulated by enthusiastic promoters), very possibly including resident Natives. A float depicting a tableau of “King Philip on [His] Way to Plymouth” joined the partly motorized procession. By dramatizing the seventeenth-century moment at which Plymouth authorities attempted to coerce the sachem into submission to colonial jurisdiction, parade organizers endeavored to formally reenact Indigenous subjection and Euro-American ascendancy—though their need to do so intimated anxieties about the very legitimacy of those claims.9 The tercentenary also produced material culture trails that gave tangible forms to commemorative sensibilities. At a fine arts exhibition held in the buntingdraped Horticultural Hall, colonial topics included a honorific painting of John Eliot, while “Indians” received representation through the highly stylized sculpture Appeal to the Great Spirit by Cyrus E. Dallin, who made a career out of transforming Natives into art primarily for non-Native audiences. Dallin’s original Parisian-cast sculpture stood outside Boston’s Museum of Fine

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Arts on Huntington Avenue (and remains there today). But even that bronze, evoking a generalized vision of static, masculine Plains equestrianism that visually signaled indigeneity to American popular minds, was a multivalent site of interactive placemaking. Eight years earlier contemporary Natives posed alongside it, likely at the behest of a photographer documenting their travels through town as part of a “Wild West” show that provided employment for a host of tribal people. As they rode horses to the Massachusetts State House and held an audience with the governor, they turned their own gazes upon Boston, rather than being solely subjects of observation for entertainmentseeking city dwellers.10 As part of the 1930 commemorations, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary Commission installed a series of historic signs throughout the state, bearing white backgrounds, black borders, and blue seals showing a stylized Indian derived from the state seal. Frequently located by roadsides for visibility to auto travelers, they are mostly still extant. One sign the commission placed by the Hassanamisco Indian Reservation reads: THESE FOUR AND ONE-HALF ACRES HAVE NEVER BELONGED TO THE WHITE MAN, HAVING BEEN SET ASIDE IN

1728 AS AN INDIAN

RESERVATION BY THE FORTY PROPRIETORS WHO PURCHASED THE PRAYING INDIAN TOWN OF HASSANAMESIT.

These eight lines opened up a web of historical relationships with land. Importantly, the text acknowledged the land’s continuance as tribally held grounds, constitutively distinct as a “reservation” from their surroundings. The brief wording also stressed colonial “purchase” of Hassanamesit lands and the ostensible legality of that acquisition, without conveying complexities about land negotiations or postwar pressures on Native survivors attempting to maintain traditional places. Across Massachusetts, Natives, including those most closely associated with this site, confronted mounting state efforts to vest authority in white trustees or guardians, despite their acknowledged mismanagement of tribal funds; to dissolve collectively held tribal lands in favor of “fee simple” individual title; and to unilaterally confer Commonwealth citizenship upon selected tribal peoples through an “Indian Enfranchisement Act.” All of these developments posed challenges to community cohesiveness and

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place-connections. But land at Hassanamisco remained in Nipmuc possession through family lines (passing from Lucy Gimbee to her son Harry Arnold after her death in 1843).11 The sign’s stark demarcation of “Indian” and “White Man” categories also elided the myriad identities and affiliations that shaped intercultural interactions in the seventeenth century and afterward, including family connections to African American communities. The Hassanamisco marker shared conceptual terrain with a tercentenary sign erected at Musketaquid, the Indigenous place that colonizers called Concord, which emphasized that colonial associates “bought from the Indians” six square miles in 1635 (fig. 13).12 Such signage used English-language text strategically situated on specific grounds to visually promulgate a memoryscape valorizing colonial settlements and Indigenous relinquishments—though occasionally recognizing more complex Indigenous continuities. Altogether the Bay Colony tercentenary aimed to shore up the confidence of Massachusetts residents in a moment of pervasive social uncertainty by reaffirming ties to the “City Upon a Hill,” messaging that needed Indigenous people, but as historical touchstones rather than contemporary actors or sovereign communities. Anglo-American filiopietism could only be partial, however, in a heterogeneous area increasingly populated by African Americans, Irish, Italians, Germans, French Canadians, Eastern Europeans—many of them Catholics as well. And given the larger circumstances of 1930, the commemorations’ progressive tone could only be more muted than in 1910, the brashly confident year of the “Perfect City.” The Great Depression did generate cultural activity across the United States, including a colorful though melancholy public revisitation of the events of King Philip’s War. A mural in the U.S. post office at Natick, John Eliot Speaks to the Natick Indians, arrived in 1937 as part of a New Deal–era set of public works. Hundreds of murals materialized nationwide under a federal program sponsored by the Section of Fine Arts (distinct from the better-known Works Progress Administration), aiming to beautify buildings and provide labor for the underemployed. These murals developed in close consultation with local communities about themes and styles, and many depicted uplifting scenes, shying away from weighty social realism. But the Natick mural visually represented a grave historical episode: the removal of Natives to Deer Island. Hollis Holbrook, a non-Native Natick resident, served as the artist and executed his tempera fresco painting directly onto the wall. Holbrook referenced a portrait of John Eliot when painting the missionary but lacked a source image for Waban, the Native leader shown meeting with Eliot. Holbrook

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Figure 13. During the tercentenary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1930, a series of historical signs were erected across the Commonwealth, frequently pertaining to Native and colonial interactions. At Musketaquid in MassachusettNipmuc country, this publicly viewable text addressed the topic of land negotiations. Asymmetric in its description of actors (individual colonists are named, but not even a tribal designation is afforded to the Natives), it stressed the claimed legality of the acquisition. A related sign at Hassanamesit stressed the ongoing tribal title over a parcel of land there, with the implication that everything around it had become colonial space. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

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invited Natick postmaster P. Victor Casavant to pose as Waban. Casavant came from French Canadian stock, a common ethnic mixture in town, so the Gallic contours of Casavant’s face became the template for Waban’s Algonquian physiognomy. Similarly a state representative posed as the English captain leading the internees to the island. By amalgamating the seventeenth-century past and Depression-era present, the mural also became a memory-site for families of the individuals whose likenesses Holbrook immortalized.13 Holbrook adopted a muted color palette, rendering landscape, carts, and Puritan garb in a subtle range of earth tones that underscored the scene’s mournful character. The blankets and minimalistic clothing of a few Natives appeared in eye-catching scarlet. Holbrook likely had read Sarah Sprague Jacobs’s Nonantum and Natick and took inspiration from her detailed call to memorialize the Deer Island removal in public space. The one-story brick post office in Natick was a modest substitute for the gold-domed State House on Beacon Hill, but in Natick the piece resonated directly with local audiences. Holbrook described the painting process: “You wouldn’t believe it but there are dozens that come in every day just to see the forms take shape. They include not only the housewives but more than twenty tradesmen, plumbers, mechanics, chauffeurs, and taxi drivers. And every person who enters asks the postmen about it. I haven’t heard one remark that hasn’t been highly flattering.”14 The completed mural developed into a familiar touchstone for Natick residents who posted letters and picked up packages, a reminder that their very townscape constituted part of this past. The somber subject matter stood out in comparison to other Massachusetts post office murals, which tended to showcase affirmative scenes devoid of intercultural conflict.15 Yet for all its conscientious insistence on the obligation to recall historical violences, the mural, like many other period commentaries, stressed Indigenous dislocations and dispossessions rather than signaling return to and continuance within Algonquian homelands. The complex Natick mural competed with more widespread hagiography about John Eliot and Puritan missionizing, which had already shaped regional memoryscapes. From Massachusetts to England, Eliot’s admirers published biographies about him, named a school in his honor, spruced up his burial site, installed a memorial water trough, underwrote a stained-glass window at Harvard, and offered high bids at auction for documents in his hand. In 1903 the Massachusetts State House unveiled a panel showing The Apostle Eliot Preaching to the Indians. H. O. Walker painted Eliot addressing rapt Native

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converts, a partial realization of Sarah Sprague Jacobs’s vision for public art in the capitol. Crucially, however, this version showcased a sanitized moment of evangelization, not the more contested aspects of praying-town development or Deer Island removal. Most curious from Indigenous vantages: the 1904 installation of a pumping station “for supplying water to the Indian town of Tucson,” a gift from Laura Eliot Cutter. The Indian Training School served the Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham (then referred to as Pima and Papago Indians) in Arizona, and the pump was a critical means of irrigating adjacent ranchland, since they had lost water rights.16 These Euro-Americanunderwritten publications and installations formalized images of Eliot beneficently preaching to Natives eager to receive his counsel. By glossing over the contested character of his and Puritan colleagues’ actions, the autonomy exercised by diverse Algonquians who decided how to receive missionaries (if at all), and the violent by-products of English settler colonialism, such commemorative projects contributed to foreshortened historical sensibilities. Only rarely did these activities become even partially dialogic rather than monologic, by including contemporary Natives themselves. An “Indian girl of sixteen years, the only lineal descendant known of the Indians once residing at Natick,” participated in an 1846 tea party held by Natick residents to raise funds for the purchase of a so-called Eliot Bible. Her impressions went unrecorded, though almost surely she had different impressions than the antiquarians as she witnessed this unfolding spectacle.17 Historical landscapes mattered intensely in many of these commemorations, particularly the symbolically vital grounds of Natick. Descendants of Eliot gathered there in July 1901 to celebrate Eliot’s “settlement” two hundred and fifty years prior.18 Supporters erected a fifteen-foot obelisk honoring Eliot, on the site of a Native burial ground, where it shared space with the grave of Native preacher Daniel Takawampbait. (The existence and extent of this Native burial ground was well recognized by Euro-American neighbors. Yet they had repeatedly disturbed Indigenous remains during construction projects, and, strangely enough, installed a water pump at its center.)19 A striking white oak tree in town also gained widespread acclaim. Underneath this oak Eliot had supposedly “first gathered the red men together” and spoke to them the Christian Word. Local traditions asserted the oak stood at the eastern end of the first meetinghouse constructed at Natick, while a red oak anchoring the other end fell to the axe in 1850. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned an ode to the storied surviving oak, imagining that it alone remembered the language of “a lost race” that once sat beneath its branches. Dozens of postcards de-

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picted the tree and streetscape, while someone chiseled “The Eliot Oak” into a stone at its base, textually claiming the tree for colonial interpretations as well as providing a convenient seat for visitors as they posed for photographs.20 Mobilizing this organic feature to promote straightforward paeans to missionization and racialized discourses of Native erasure would have been problematic enough to enduring tribal peoples, for whom trees and this specific locale—within a wider web of relations—held alternative meanings. Arguably more detrimental were the collecting practices of the Historical, Natural History and Library Society of South Natick. Like many local antiquarian organizations, the society, established in 1870, amassed Indigenous “relics” and human remains, some excavated during municipal water projects. Yet these items disappeared when a fire started in the society’s building in March 1872, burning the repository and its contents to ashes.21 For all the momentum around Eliot and Puritan filiopietism, alternative Euro-American accountings of the seventeenth century’s intercultural entanglements also gained public voice. In the mid-twentieth century the poet Robert Lowell probed Puritan New England’s “original sin” with unflinching eyes. Born and raised in Massachusetts and counting various prominent Winslows among his ancestors, Lowell found himself drawn to King Philip’s War as a theme. Yet as a Catholic-leaning pacifist who served prison time for conscientious objection during the Second World War, Lowell maintained complex perspectives on his ancestral past. He published “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” in 1946, in the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Lord Weary’s Castle. It was a meditation likely linked to the memorial site of John Winslow, located behind the Anglican King’s Chapel in Boston.22 The poem opened with a quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Gray Champion” about “the veterans of King Philip’s War, who burned villages and slaughtered young and old with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer.”23 Using this ironic indictment as a launching point, the poem critiqued pious valorizations of Boston’s Puritan worthies in a manner divergent from popular antiquarian commemorations. Juxtaposing colonial human remains with features of the city’s twentieth-century built environment, like Green Line “T” trains rattling underground, the poem considered the ephemeral quality of both. It used the imagined voice of King Philip, projected from his disarticulated head, to underscore their transience. By choosing the sachem as an excoriating mouthpiece, the poem reminded readers that the New England colonial project had had fervent detractors from its earliest days. It also added a sharp twist to Euro-American literary tendencies

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to ventriloquize real and fictive Indians, typically for romantic-tragic ends: this version of Philip appeared a savvy, even mocking, observer of colonial pretensions. Formal, dense, allusive, ambiguous at points in its referents, the poem exemplified an aesthetic circling back to Puritan wartime “heroes” and a revisitation of the legacies of English settler colonialism more generally, reexamining iconic layers of downtown Boston to critique WASP complacency. The defeat of Philip culminated a deeply violent New England colonial project predicated on wholesale overrunning of land and its Indigenous inhabitants, as the remainder of Philip’s invented monologue insisted. Yet voices and dismembered bodies of “Indian War” still haunted these spaces centuries later, in a new era of total global war.

Place-Maintenance, Relocations, and Urban Homelands As Lowell penned his trenchant versified critique, and an assortment of antiquarian organizations continued largely monologic commemorative undertakings, Natives themselves around Boston and the interior pursued alternative forms of memorialization, collecting, and placemaking. To consider just one example from the diversity of Native families, kinship groups, communities, and enclaves across the region: in the postwar era a Nipmuc museum began operations at the Cisco homestead at Hassanamisco, on that tract of never-colonized land on the slope of Brigham Hill, near the Quinsigamond River. A notable supporter was Zara Ciscoe Brough, a descendant of Wowaus / James Printer. Her family acted as “stewards” of the reservation, remarked Rae Gould, a Nipmuc scholar who has conducted archaeological and preservation work at the homestead.24 Trained in engineering and active in advocacy capacities, Ciscoe Brough, who also identified as Princess White Flower, cultivated connections with Nipmuc relations, other tribal communities, and the emergent pan-Indian movement in New England.25 When Narragansett-area Natives organized a ceremonial commemoration of a 1675 massacre at the Great Swamp, Ciscoe Brough (whose lineage already contained Narragansett relations) participated in several iterations and likely developed an enlarged sense of wartime landscapes pertinent to community remembrance. She also made inquiries in the late 1970s–1980s about beginning the process to gain federal acknowledgment for Nipmucs, and even explored the possibility of having a modern “Indian town” created in the town of Grafton.26 The museum, housed at the homestead originally constructed in 1801, served multiple purposes as it interpreted Nipmuc and Eastern Native

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heritages for the community itself and for non-Native publics. It did so through means different from antiquarian repositories, which frequently disinterred and appropriated Indigenous materials for use in declensionist narratives. These included the nearby American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, which had amassed from donors numerous “Indian relics” in its collecting cabinet—stone tools from local sites, for example, and at least one funerary object taken from the Natick Indian burial ground.27 (Some items like these eventually were transferred to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.)28 Activities at Hassanamisco occurred within much wider Nipmuc and Native geographies around the Blackstone River Valley and interior towns that sustained Indigenous enclaves or clusters, particularly the urban crossroads of Worcester. As Thomas Doughton, a Nipmuc historian, has documented and remarked, since the nineteenth century these clusters (which typified intentional movements to foster prospects for employment and marriage, for example) were hardly “marginal,” despite Euro-American claims to the contrary.29 A wave of Native people relocated to the Boston area at the mid-twentieth century, coming from tribal communities across the Northeast and the continent. Boston was not alone in this influx: urbanization by Natives across the United States transformed geographies and social networks as they moved away from traditional homelands and reservations into cities like Los Angeles, Tucson, Seattle, Detroit, Denver, Cleveland, and New York.30 “Relocation” was partly state-driven, a cornerstone of assimilation programs spearheaded by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1950s–1960s during the so-called termination era, which aimed to foreclose on tribal sovereignties and curtail the federal government’s trust obligations. Within New England, urban gravitation had already been underway for many Algonquians as they sought different prospects in port cities and mill towns like New Bedford, New London, Springfield, Hartford, Worcester, and Providence. But the decades following the Second World War altered these migrations’ scale. The Boston Indian Council (BIC) organized circa. 1969/1970 to provide health care, education, job training, and cultural resources to Natives in the city, eventually establishing offices near Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Boston’s Native population doubled between 1970 and 1980, reaching almost five thousand and becoming more visible to politicians and other city residents.31 While Algonquians formed an important part of Boston’s rebounding Native population, the demographic mix was thoroughly multitribal, with substantial representation from Northeastern Wabanaki areas and Western reservations. “Urban Indians” challenged non-Native

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perceptions that cities and Natives were fundamentally opposed or incompatible. Adapting to Boston’s ethnically and socioeconomically heterogeneous neighborhoods and a high-density built environment required changes, certainly. Yet Boston Natives forged meaningful senses of place in the city, creating pathways within a milieu that had long been antithetical or outright hostile to Indigenous presence. They also used their growing mass to organize public commemorations related to contested pasts. BIC members connected with the newly founded American Indian Movement (AIM), and in 1970 participated in an inaugural “Day of Mourning” in Patuxet/Plymouth, less than an hour’s drive south of Boston and near several Wampanoag communities. On the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday they gathered at the replica Mayflower II, pitched overboard a small cannon, removed British flags flying overhead, and proposed to cut the ship’s moorings and set it adrift. Frank James (Wamsutta), an Aquinnah Wampanoag, delivered a speech that he described as having been suppressed by Pilgrim affiliates who had invited his remarks at a three-hundred-and-fiftieth-anniversary event. “We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. . . . We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. . . . [W]e still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians,” James remarked.32 These provocative interventions at a place with iconic stature in New England and American popular consciousness deliberately framed an alternative narrative. It was one invested not in benign visions of intercultural harmony and gradual Indian replacement by colonists, but instead bearing witness to a fuller, more critical account of long-standing Indigenous presences, as well as the devastations of colonialism that followed from 1620 and reverberated through the present day, even in an era of civil rights advocacy. These interventions closely engaged extant settler memoryscapes in a potently dialectical form of placemaking. Subsequent years’ activities involved meeting on Cole’s Hill at the prominent Massasoit statue— sculpted by Cyrus E. Dallin, and like his MFA equestrian bronze also subject to Indigenous revisitation—and replacing British flags with a banner bearing a red tipi, like those recently flown at the headline-making multitribal occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay (1969–1971). In Plymouth’s Post Office Square, the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) later placed a plaque commemorating Metacomet / King Philip. Its text characterized the conflict of 1675–1676 as a defense of “their homelands against encroachment,” and stressed that Philip’s “head was impaled on a pike and was displayed near this site for more than 20 years,” underscoring pervasive violences that

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dominant narratives of Pilgrim piety tended to skip over. The town of Plymouth underwrote the plaque as part of a settlement reached with UAINE following acrimonious clashes during the 1997 Day of Mourning.33 These highly public protests against continuing colonialism, and remembrances of alternative histories and losses, reclaimed symbolically influential memoryscapes in eastern Massachusetts. They gave visible, even Western-style, memorial presence by land and coastal waters to Native perspectives and reaffirmed ties to places that colonial legal frameworks had defined as no longer Indigenous. These critical energies and testimonies would soon resonate just up the coast at the Boston harbor islands.

The “Harbor of Shame” and Contested Redevelopment at Deer Island The harbor approached an environmental crisis point in the late twentieth century as a result of Boston’s extraordinary growth in population and industry. The city had long attempted to manage pollution through an array of wastewater treatment facilities, including pumping stations on Deer, Moon, and Nut Islands. In 1968 the Metropolitan District Commission, predecessor to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), expanded these facilities. But waste continued to flow directly into the harbor untreated. The “solution” was simply to direct the noxious outflow farther from shore and human presences. It was a partial stopgap at best and did little to benefit the fish, shellfish, aquatic vegetation, and other marine life that depended on habitable waters. Boston Harbor by the 1980s earned condemnation as one of America’s dirtiest harbors—the “harbor of shame.” When the Boston Harbor Project began in 1985 as a court-ordered cleanup to correct violations of the 1972 Clean Water Act, Boston transferred Deer Island to the MWRA.34 The project’s proposed alterations to Deer Island did not sit well with area Native groups. They decried potential damage to intensely sensitive cultural landscapes, particularly those related to the King Philip’s War internments. A Native lobbying group called the Muhheconneuk Intertribal Committee on Deer Island pressured an influential U.S. senator in 1995 to oppose funding for this massive public works initiative.35 Despite sustained protests, construction of the MWRA Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant proceeded, culminating in a facility that currently processes metropolitan Boston’s sewage (fig. 14). Wastewater influent from households and industries in contributing communities arrives at Deer Island through pipes, then undergoes a multistage pro-

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Figure 14. Deer Island today is a peninsula connected to the town of Winthrop, Massachusetts. It contains the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s sewage treatment plant complex, which processes wastewater from the greater Boston metropolitan area. The plant was constructed in the 1990s as part of a harbor cleanup effort but generated pushback from area tribal groups who viewed that development as an affront to the historically sensitive site. A Native American memorial has been proposed for the island, to be located on the side facing the city and mouth of the Charles River. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

cess to remove pollutants, odors, pathogens, scum, and sludge before being released into the open waters of Massachusetts Bay. From environmental and urban planning perspectives, the MWRA plant is a crucial part of Boston’s waste management infrastructure. It is a major node in a system attempting to restore harbor ecologies endangered by an ever-expanding population and capitalist economy.36 From many tribal perspectives, however, the plant is a visible symbol of continuing violations to painfully storied historical places. The sewage plant’s completion suggested that the demands of municipal infrastructure trumped those of cultural memory. It did not constitute a final blow to or silencing of Native interests, however. Indigenous calls to rethink the islands’ histories, values, and uses resounded in the course of formulating a comprehensive redevelopment plan for all of the Boston Harbor Islands. A U.S. congressional act designated the thirty-four islands part of a National

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Park Service area in 1996, and the redevelopment plan examined options for future uses of this space. Determining “best” uses was a daunting undertaking with a projected multimillion-dollar price tag, an endeavor that required weighing the relative merits of resource protection and visitor access, among other factors. The first stage of planning involved public hearings about possibilities for the redevelopment. From January to March 1998 the Harbor Islands Partnership sponsored public workshops throughout the region, where more than four hundred attendees voiced concerns and comments. This first stage concluded with production of a Draft General Management Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement (hereafter DGMP and DEIS) in April 2000. After an official period of public commenting, the second stage of planning produced revised versions of these texts, the General Management Plan (2002) and the Final Environmental Impact Statement (2003).37 Tracking editorial changes in this revision process can seem a tedious task with low and esoteric stakes. Yet for the communities affected by the planning, the subtleties of terminology and nature of discursive framing bore real consequences. Moreover, the dialogic revision process was emblematic of the avenues through which state-enabled colonialism and resistance are negotiated in the modern era, a moment when bureaucracy, protocol, and a dizzying paper trail of acronyms can be the inescapable terms of engagement for placemaking. During initial planning, Native heritages and contemporary presences seemed poised to form a cornerstone of the redevelopment vision. That vision, which emerged as planners whittled down three possible development schemes to one, affirmed commitment to proposals like “Educational programs, interpretive waysides throughout the island system [to] raise public awareness about presence, culture, and history of American Indians”; “Emphasis on King Philip’s War period and American Indians’ understanding of nature and ecology”; “Programs on several islands designed and led by American Indians”; and an “American Indian interpretive center developed on one island.”38 A century earlier—around the time that the “Perfect City” pageant hustled Indians offstage—such proposals for the harborscape would have been nearly unfathomable, given then-dominant Euro-American outlooks on tribal communities as vanished (or imminently so) and marginal to the region’s historical storylines and landscapes. What precipitated this shift? One factor was that the redevelopment discussions proceeded under the aegis of the National Park Service, which followed stringent federal procedures for solicitation and consideration of comments from interested parties or “stakeholders.” The feedback mechanism established a public forum in which

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tribal representatives could voice detailed concerns. Furthermore, Native representatives held seats at the planning table. In the Boston Harbor Islands Partnership, an advisory council formally included Edith Andrews from the Aquinnah Wampanoag. Also involved were John Sam Sapiel of the Penobscot Nation; Lawrence Snake of the Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma; and Steve Comer of the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.39 Native groups among which the DGMP and DEIS circulated for comment included the Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma; Delaware Tribe of Indians; Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation; Mohegan Indian Tribe; Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians; Narragansett Indian Tribe; Wabanaki Tribes of Maine; Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah); and other “culturally associated tribes,” including the Hassanamisco Nipmuc, Nipmuc Nation, Nipmuck Chaubunagungamaugg, Natick Nipmucs, and Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.40 A few of these communities held the designation of federally recognized tribes by the mid-1990s, while others were state recognized. As problematic as the very frameworks for “recognition” were (and are), being derived from colonial conceptions of identity, geography, and sovereignty, they could strengthen certain communities’ standing in negotiations. The Muhheconneuk Intertribal Committee on Deer Island (MICDI) offered another avenue for collective leverage.41 Considering this plurality of representatives, no one expected a singular “Native voice” to weigh in. Indeed, what emerged was a series of commentaries based on communities’ distinctive historical experiences, linked by common threads of navigating indigeneity within New England. Tribal communities also strategically allied with interest groups like environmentalists and the Irish American community, which mourns its own losses on Deer Island. Collaboration was not a new phenomenon. Natives and environmentalists canoed together along the Charles River in November 1992, for example, to support passage of two river-protection bills before the state legislature, and to alert the public about waterways pollution.42 Building coalitions and cultivating allies was an important tactical maneuver for Native representatives, since these diverse groups had differing degrees of pull in relevant political circles. Finally, city, state, and federal officials themselves recognized there could be mutual benefits to highlighting Native heritage in substantive ways. As they examined possibilities for increasing the harbor islands’ revenue-generating capacity through tourism, they noted that interpretive guides, memorials, and museums could be marketing tools to enhance the islands’ economic viability.43 This interest may have arisen partly from a

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soft version of multiculturalism and attendant possibilities for turning the islands into income makers, but it nonetheless raised Indigenous issues into the spotlight. Given these auspicious factors, the redevelopment proposals might have been expected to gain the support of Native consultants. But the plans that initially emerged generated tensions.44 Official public comments made by Native groups in response to the DGMP and DEIS heartily criticized the overall direction of the redevelopment process. Calling the draft text “entirely unacceptable,” MICDI decided to “reject entirely the draft park plan as written, and to call upon the National Park Service to negotiate with the tribes to create a new document that would be acceptable to them.”45 The bracing comments submitted by MICDI and other Native consultants enumerated serious reservations concerning the text and, more generally, the relationships between tribes and management authorities. They followed these criticisms with lineby-line suggestions for alterations. A two-part drafting method documented every change proposed or made to the original text, and the “Errata” appended to the final version cataloged these emendations, preserving an archival trail of dialogic debate. Many changes addressed comments submitted by Native representatives and the public.46 Seemingly subtle edits revealed substantive shifts in meaning. The original account of the island’s seventeenth-century history, for instance, read, “On Deer Island, the tragic internment of ‘Christian Indians’ during King Philip’s War marks a chapter in the region’s history and is a place of great importance to contemporary Indians.” This was edited to read, “Deer Island, where Native Americans were forcibly moved by the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the winter of 1675–76 and held in what has been called a concentration camp, is an important site in the region’s history and place of great importance to contemporary American Indians.”47 The original formulation elided attribution of responsibility for the internment, while the edited one specified the pertinent colonial actors. The revision extended the site’s significance, no longer deeming it resonant only among a particular ethnic/cultural group (“of great importance to contemporary Indians”) but instead calling it meaningful for non-Natives as well (“an important site in the region’s history”). Finally, the revision incorporated the controversial “concentration camp” language rather than more benign terminology. Word choices mattered intensely in the formulation of meanings, consulting parties realized. In response to mention of an “Indian problem,” for example, phrasing MICDI found reminiscent of genocidal rhetoric about the “Jewish problem,” they commented, “This lan-

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guage and its overtones are extremely offensive! The language that is found in this report is outrageous! The fact that [P]ark [S]ervice officials and all other officials responsible for this document are oblivious to these connotations is deeply disturbing.” This type of “chilling” language, they added, was different, and arguably more detrimental, than language that was merely “exclusive (i.e. ignoring our historic presence).”48 The revised document deleted the offending passage. Equally important revisions occurred where the following sentence was appended to a segment previously devoted only to the islands’ ancient shell middens: “Archeological evidence suggests that Native Americans also used the islands for fishing, hunting, gathering plants, agriculture, processing food, tool manufacturing, and social and ceremonial activities.”49 This revision highlighted the multiplicity of ways in which Native peoples maintained connections with the islands—some of which left few material traces—and gestured at the sophistication of Native lifeways long before any European contacts. Several paragraphs later, the following sentence from the draft was deleted: “Those that were finally released in May 1676 dispersed because their existing communities had become devastated.” Inserted in its place was: “Records indicate that the colonial government sold some Indians into slavery, or indentured them to English families. But other praying Indians who were released moved into and strengthened Christian Indian settlements. Praying Indians also dispersed to other Native communities including the Nipmucks, Nipmucs, Wampanoags, and Abenakis (Penobscots) and to communities farther south, west, and north in Canada. They were joined by traditional Indians who sought refuge in these communities.”50 This revision dispelled the “vanishing” mythology implied in the original phrasing. It acknowledged the complicity of colonial authorities in enslaving and exploiting Native laborers, and it underscored the persistence of Native presence in the postwar period by connecting the internees to Native communities still extant in the twentieth century, across a wide geography. Overall, the revised General Management Plan did not incorporate all or even most of the suggestions made by Native interlocutors and the public. But emendations made by the National Park Service suggested at least an effort to engage in dialogue about big-picture management dilemmas, as well as about the most minute points of historical interpretation: names, dates, sites, events—nearly all of which proved disputed rather than readily agreed upon “facts.” If nothing else, the fraught redevelopment planning of the early 2000s signified a pragmatic commitment to formulating historical meanings via intercultural processes of negotiation,

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at least to a limited extent. In that sense it marked a shift away from Yankee antiquarians’ tendencies to unilaterally determine historical truths through Anglo-American “expertise,” while silencing, ignoring, or simply not seeing enduring Native communities that maintained very different understandings. But this highly regulated planning process was not a panacea. While the “final” General Management Plan tentatively reconciled multiple interests on paper, real-world conflict over land and water use persisted. A seemingly trivial example was a proposed ban in 2003 of dog walking on Deer Island. “Two powerful forces—history and dog walkers—are heading toward a collision,” Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker remarked about the proposal. He termed it a “meaningless gesture”: “[c]ompared to what goes on each day at the waste plant, a little dog poop seems pretty inconsequential. And if a sewage plant can sit on top of the bones of the prisoners . . . isn’t this a pretty symbolic measure?”51 But Native representatives argued the dogs were desecrating a burial ground. MIDCI leader Sam Sapiel called the animals’ presence an “insult. . . . It’s terrible. We wouldn’t do it to their graveyards in Boston.”52 He and others suggested halting all planning for a Native Deer Island memorial until the dog matter achieved resolution, using political fallout from such a moratorium to build political leverage. The matter of burials remained among the most sensitive in all of the discussions. Natives’ concerns about the site centered strongly on beliefs that ancestors’ remains should be accorded respectful treatment. Yet there might be no Native remains still present on the island, an MWRA spokesperson told the press, citing archaeological studies that indicated remains were all removed before the MWRA occupied the area. MWRA director Douglas MacDonald concurred, asserting that any graves were probably destroyed during construction of a jail and military fortifications on the island.53 The MWRA had agreed in 1993 to resume a search for graves and artifacts, even though the Massachusetts state archaeologist noted five previous surveys failed to unearth material evidence of the internment camps.54 A MICDI representative acknowledged uncertainty about the persistence of Native remains on-island, yet concerns over the site did not—and do not—hinge solely on the physical presence or absence of burials.55 The redevelopment debate was intensely parochial in certain respects, shaped by the historically specific circumstances of greater Boston and its insular political apparatus. Yet the contestation engaged far-reaching questions about what treatment ought to be accorded to sites of historical trauma and violence and invited comparison to other sensitive grounds in the United

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States and globally. MICDI consultant Gary McCann gestured at this comparative dimension in 1992 when he protested the MWRA construction by comparing the island’s significance to that of European concentration camps: “In Europe, [redevelopment of concentration camp sites] isn’t done. They respect death camps and leave them alone. To have this done to Native Americans is discrimination.”56 Those European sites have been unevenly preserved, in actuality, yet the overarching point stood. Many landscapes of the Shoah, to which living survivors actively attest, have attained a sacralized quality that deflects redevelopment, while sites of Native incarceration and military devastation in the Americas have more frequently been overwritten.57 While no one would wish to simplistically conflate these places, or overlook the ways in which twentieth-century events shape memories differently than seventeenth-century ones, the decision to invoke other violent and memorial geographies was a rhetorical strategy, one perhaps necessitated by the ongoing unfamiliarity of Indigenous-colonial pasts and particularly Deer Island’s complexities to many Bostonians and Americans. Points of comparison closer to home, though not mentioned specifically in the harbor islands planning, would be the Japanese American relocation centers situated across the U.S. West. These centers housed 120,000 Japanese Americans after they were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast by executive order in 1942, and they remained in operation until 1946. Centers were generally dismantled and neglected in the postwar period, but following pilgrimages, rallies, and lobbying by Japanese American survivors and descendants, the sites have received more formal recognition of their significance—for all Americans, not only Japanese American communities—including U.S. National Historic Landmark and National Historic Site designations.58 These potential comparative touchstones also invite reflections on constitutively different qualities of Native American sites, where memorial placemaking involves additional considerations: of tribal peoples’ conceptions of having been created within specific terrain and water; of maintaining spiritual and ancestral obligations to particular homelands across deep time; and of asserting sovereignty within geographies where political authority remains thoroughly disputed. If the Deer Island debates did not directly achieve consensus about heritage practices and place-uses, they did inflect important relationships. The Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs wrote in 2000, “[A series of] Native Consultation meetings are viewed as historically notable, bringing our respective nations together after so many generations to commune with one another about a common ancestry and history.”59 The potential for reconciliation reso-

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nated with MICDI in 1998: “Just as Boston was the colonial center from where the master plan for the extermination was developed, it is only fitting that Boston become the place where our people are acknowledged, respected and where we can develop economic resources to thrive again.”60 (A few years later MICDI expressed dismay at the draft plans for not “mentioning the need for social healing of the Indian community, and of the need for reconciliation between the Indian and non-Indian communities.”)61 The island(s) opened certain avenues of communication and initiated—or compelled—dialogues between previously disconnected or oppositional tribal entities, U.S. government agencies, and private organizations. Deer Island provided a launching point for Native alliances as well. Members of tribes from Canada and New England held a commemoration onisland in October 1991 that also celebrated reconnection of groups once linked by common Algonquian languages. Participants underscored this panIndigenous solidarity by singing the anthem of the American Indian Movement on the banks of the Charles River.62 When Natives gathered at Deer Island in October 2001 to perform ceremonies and discuss possibilities for social and political regeneration, “There was talk of quelling intertribal rivalry, of working together as one confederation of Indians,” reported the press.63 Places “associated with some past wrong or act of violence [can become] the focus for further agitation in pursuit of a goal,” Kenneth Foote observed in his study of sites of genocide like Wounded Knee.64 That 1890 massacre ground, replete with painful symbolic resonances, served as a staging point for forceful Oglala Lakota and AIM activism in 1973. In a similar though more localized vein, the Deer Island commemorations have gathered momentum from a site of colonial trauma to galvanize contemporary expressions of Indigenous collective action and decolonizing resistance. Provisions also coalesced for creation of physical memorials to Natives and Irish once confined on the island. During the Native memorial planning, representatives including Nipmucs, Wampanoags, and Penobscots agreed that a site on the western side of the island, facing the Boston skyline and mouth of the Charles River, would be most appropriate. It would be a handicapaccessible locale, an important consideration for visiting elders. Supporters acquired a grant from an open-space improvement trust in Boston, and in 2002 a committee of tribal representatives selected Haudenosaunee sculptor Lloyd Gray-Nessatako to design the memorial.65 The initial design has morphed over time, encompassing figural elements and historical scenes at various points. As of my writing the memorial still awaits completion

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and installation, and the delay itself has generated conversations about memorialization’s logistical challenges. On one hand, the impetus to construct a Native monument sculpted in stone could be seen as a means of conveying Native history to “outsiders” in a mode conversant with Western traditions of commemoration. Such a monument would allow Native groups to invoke the perceived permanence and communicative stability of Westernstyle monuments, and to remind non-Natives of what transpired in this place several centuries ago, especially at times of year when no gathering is happening to relay those accounts face-to-face. Euro-Americans across the Northeast installed myriad stone monuments of their own and have repeatedly deemed those features legible and noteworthy, so speaking that symbolic language can be a strategic choice. Yet this monument-in-process may require a more capacious reading. Northeastern Indigenous artisans have pursued stoneworking since the earliest times as ample archaeological and ethnographic evidence attests, as well as oral traditions about stone features extant across regional landscapes. Moreover, material adaptation and hybridity have long been the norm as individuals and communities selectively take up other materials, forms, and systems of signification and incorporate them into new—but still Indigenous—practices.66 And as the repeated Indigenous encounters with Cyrus E. Dallin’s oeuvre made apparent, even a sturdy sculpture invites ongoing meaning-making.

The Meanings of Mishoonash During the Deer Island Sacred Run and Paddle of 2010, the three wooden mishoonash venturing downstream to the harbor carried multilayered material stories of their own. They came from Plimoth Plantation, a major interpretive site and visitor attraction by Cape Cod Bay, southeast of Boston Harbor. Plimoth’s origins lay in colonial living history and preservation (arising from founder and Boston financier Henry Hornblower II’s enthusiasms after the Second World War), but over the decades it developed a concerted aim of being a “bicultural” institution that conveys the complexities of a world of “cultural fusion” among Native and English peoples. Since the establishment of the Wampanoag Homesite in the 1970s and Wampanoag Indigenous Program, it has collaborated with area Natives by employing them as consultants, interpreters, and craftspeople.67 Achieving genuine biculturalism has proved an enduring challenge, Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag), a former associate director of the Wampanoag Homesite, has noted: “This is a gradual

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and ongoing process that must be consistently maintained and monitored. It is the process and not just the end result that is important—the process of the museum’s two cultures working collaboratively when necessary, separately if that is what is needed.”68 Plimoth affiliates have produced over thirty mishoonash in the last twenty-five years, created by the banks of the Eel River in sight of the thousands of American and international visitors who pass through annually. Research into wood-carving techniques informed the vessels’ construction, and many have been used for educational purposes and traveling exhibitions, with one mishoon presented to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2013.69 In 2010 the mishoonash arrived at the Charles River aboard a trailer from Plimoth, and early-morning participants welcomed them with tobacco scattered on the water.70 Wooden dugouts were vessels of long-standing importance for many Amerindian communities. One of the most celebrated images Europeans saw of “New World” inhabitants showed mid-Atlantic Algonquians burning and scraping out enormous tree trunks to fashion dugouts, as well as paddling them to fish in open water. Created by English watercolorist John White in 1585 and replicated by engraver Theodor de Bry, the widely circulated images helped solidify dugouts in European minds as quintessentially Indigenous modes of transportation.71 Multiple tribes in the Northeast used versions of these vessels, though in certain places and times turned to lighter birch-bark canoes.72 Colonists quickly appreciated dugouts’ maneuverability and adapted the form for their own transit, especially before horses and colonial roadways became commonplace.73 In recent years mishoonash have become compelling mobile touchstones for Wampanoags, some of whom have undertaken openwater paddles from the mainland to the island of Noepe, and for Nipmucs, known traditionally as “people of the fresh waters” for their ancestral links to inland waterways. Nipmucs have supported an initiative called Project Mishoon, which began circa 2000–2001 when a diver sighted a mishoon resting on the bottom of Lake Quinsigamond.74 Someone had filled the vessel with stones to make it sink, a technique used for storage over the winter to keep dugouts from drying out and cracking. A mishoon is heavier than a birchbark canoe, which can be transported overland as seasons change, so this was a pragmatic, labor-saving method of preservation. Community members had to remember where they buried the mishoonash in order to raise them to the surface in springtime, of course. For reasons unknown, this vessel was not reclaimed. It may have slid too far underwater, making retrieval difficult. Or perhaps the community shifted its locus of habitations, violence disrupted

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customary patterns of mobility, or some other cause led to its remaining submerged. Carbon testing dated the mishoon to circa 1640–1680. This range is a provisional estimate, possibly skewed by industrial pollution, but it is provocative. Those decades span a period of tremendous change among Native societies negotiating intensifying English colonialism in southern New England, including the localized matter of Daniel Gookin’s colonization enterprise at Quinsigamond.75 Several more mishoonash have since been located in Quinsigamond’s depths. Nipmucs invited underwater archaeologists to assess the sites and document the vessels, and together they are considering ways to protect them. (Care ought to be taken to recognize that while the vessels lie within Nipmuc homelands, characterizing them definitively as Nipmuc might elide complexities about origins.) The process by which Project Mishoon has taken shape reflects broader shifts in cultural resource management practices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Community heritage projects, archaeology, and preservation often are seen as pitting Native practices against Western academic or state ones. But in actuality these processes have become thoroughly multilateral, connecting tribal memory-keepers, institutional research agendas and scholars—including Native Ph.D.s—and a multitude of townspeople, landowners, and avocational historians. The Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston has participated in projects with Nipmucs, prompting investigator Stephen Mrozowski to comment on archaeology’s capacity to aid in “production of knowledge concerning the past that is used to influence or make decisions concerning the future,” and in “the ending of historical silence.”76 Project Mishoon manifests this collaborative, consultative, authority-sharing approach, even as it has confronted challenges en route. At a future date it may display the vessels for educational and heritage purposes if they can be appropriately stabilized. (The issue of exhibition generated critique nearby when the New Hampshire Historical Society Museum placed a pine dugout in its galleries. Some Abenakis suggested it ought to be reburied where it was left centuries ago until collectors wrested it from the Lake Ossipee area.)77 For now, the fragile mishoonash demonstrate the importance of historical methodologies that are more than document-centered, and foster intercultural dialogues about movement, materiality, and memory. Around the time that these mishoonash began coming to light, Nipmuc groups faced the dismaying prospect of being denied U.S. federal recognition as Indian tribes. After decades of work toward that goal, and having submitted

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thousands of pages of historical and genealogical documentation to the Office of Federal Acknowledgment at the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (an endeavor that raised internal debates about Nipmuc descent and membership), the Hassanamisco and Chaubunagungamaug petitions were denied in 2004 and lost on subsequent appeal. Federal assessors who reviewed the petitions challenged various forms of community continuities, as defined by a stringent seven-criteria framework.78 As a result, Nipmucs presently do not have formal tribal standing in the eyes of the U.S. government and cannot have land taken into trust on their behalf to serve as reservation space. Given this intensely painful context of ongoing dispossession, periodic gatherings and mobility across land and water, like regularly occurring powwows and the Deer Island commemorations, are ways of reaffirming places as Nipmuc, contrary to colonial attempts to diminish those spatialities. The commemorative journey to Deer Island attained prominence in 2010 partly because of the mishoonash, but that journey built upon a long-running series of travels. In 1996, for example, the Deer Island Memorial itinerary involved meeting at South Natick Common, then moving to the Indian Burial Ground on Pond Street, the Natick Center Post Office, where Hollis Holbrook’s mural was a point of interest, the put-in for modern canoes at Watertown, followed by landing at Esplanade Park, arrival at Deer Island, and ending with a potluck and social. Other years’ events followed similar routes.79 These itineraries animated an archipelago of memory-sites, discrete but not disconnected nodes ranging from interior fresh waterways to saltwater. A series of “removes” was how Mary Rowlandson narrated her wartime captivity in Nipmuc country and the Kwinitekw River Valley, as a progression of collective movements across terrain and rivers. These contemporary commemorations could be read as similar processes of “removing,” though with opposite effect. Rowlandson found herself disoriented and increasingly out of place with each decampment in the “howling wilderness,” whereas the modern Indigenous gatherings were daylong processes of reorientation, regrounding in meaningful memorial geographies. For the mishoonash journey in 2010, inspiration came from several sources— previous commemorations, certainly, and more-distant events. Penobscots and allies have staged long-distance runs and canoe journeys from their reservation on Indian Island (across from Old Town, Maine) to Ktaadn, a hundred-mile trek culminating on the culturally significant peaks of the area’s highest mountain. That journey bodily reclaims the highways and rivers of Maine as Wabanaki space and serves as a social ritual encouraging solidarity and collective

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purpose, especially among Wabanaki youth. Penobscot and Passamaquoddy members also undertook a long-distance run in August 2010 to commemorate an Abenaki massacre at Narantsouak (Norridgewock) and removal in 1724.80 That journey was one inspiration for the Deer Island Sacred Run and Paddle, according to Pam Ellis, an organizer. “The purpose of both the run and the paddle is to trace the journey our ancestors took on the forced removal,” Ellis commented in 2010. “It is a sacred journey for us, not a reenactment.”81 When the mishoonash and modern canoes moved through the Charles River and harbor, traveling approximately twenty miles to the island, complex narratives arose as paddlers retold the meanings of river space. The river is intensively used today, crisscrossed by university crew teams, sailboats, and other watercraft jockeying for room. Fast traffic clusters near the river’s deep center, slower traffic near the banks where the water flows only inches deep in spots, and overhanging branches threaten to ensnare careless drifters. Paddlers noted the many crew teams practicing on the river, some of whose coxswains expressed annoyance at having to share the waterway. The paddlers in return called out phrases like “Welcome to our river,” informing them that the Charles is Native space. The stretch of water by Harvard animated discussions because of the Indian College’s legacies. While the Indian College itself was a short-lived institution eventually overbuilt by Harvard Yard, it reemerged in the twenty-first century as a locus of fresh investigations and relationships. Students and staff from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology—a repository for many Indigenous artifacts and ancestral remains, which continue to generate debate—excavated pertinent grounds for several seasons, revealing that older traces endure in the Gothic shadows of the Matthews Hall dormitory. Among the items located during excavation were pieces of lead alloy printing type, which were shown to match specific texts produced at the press operated by James Printer and others in the seventeenth century, and a type of decorative brick referred to as a plinth squint, which indicated more complex architecture and embellishments of the Indian College than speculative older drawings of the building had represented.82 A slate plaque commemorating the Indian College has been affixed to Matthews’s exterior wall since 1997, and Indian College students Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoomes received posthumous recognition, including a portrait of the former in the first-year dining space of Annenberg Hall.83 “As I head for class each morning, I find myself going out of my way, wandering behind Matthews Hall to that spot where the Indian College once stood,” Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux and Harvard College class of 1983),

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wrote in a semifictional reflection on the university’s Native heritage. “I was taught to believe that time is not a linear stream, but a hoop spinning forward like a wheel, where everything is connected and everything is eternal. In this cosmology, I am here because Caleb came before me, and he was here in anticipation of me. We are bonded together across time, and I will recognize him when I see him.”84 Power’s evocative imagining of the Indian College milieu and its ongoing resonances invited readers to reckon with the long-term implications of a Native space, enduring in the midst of an exceedingly colonial institution. Given certain New England Natives’ sense of Harvard as a place with enduring responsibilities toward tribal communities, it seemed especially revealing when university boathouse staff declined to let the paddlers pause at their docks for a rest. Beyond Harvard, floating trash drew remarks concerning the river’s health. The Charles River has suffered from an array of environmental woes that make it questionably safe for swimming and fishing, though environmentalist interventions since the 1990s have substantially mitigated the worst toxicity.85 The river’s locks near the Museum of Science sparked another set of narratives, since the river was not freely navigable at that point. Paddlers had to whistle for controllers to open the locks and permit passage out to the harbor. Likewise for the section of the paddle winding by Logan International Airport’s runways, where the Coast Guard, Boston Harbor Police, and Homeland Security cautioned the vessels to remain a certain distance from shore, illustrating the thoroughly monitored and regulated nature of the twenty-firstcentury harborscape. The irony of being warned away as potential invaders of historic homelands was lost on no one. Finally, the approach to Deer Island and the visually unmistakable white “digester eggs” of its sewage treatment plant (processors that anaerobically break down scum and sludge) prompted discussion about the brutal character of that landmass for a winter internment camp. Only some of the vessels that embarked downriver completed the full transit to Deer Island, though not for lack of trying. The vessels ride low to the water and in rough waves can be swamped. Even when completed by other means (such as being towed in by harbor support boats), the journeys inspired a multilayered set of narratives, many centered on the physical challenges of skillfully maneuvering ancient technologies in modernized waterways. These events concluded on-island inside a cavernous brick pump station with a potluck meal, participants’ sharing of their experiences, and affirmations to be present next year.86 In ensuing years the travel route proceeded in the other direction, beginning on-island and winding toward the city and upriver,

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utilizing shifting tides for momentum. Social media brought selected dimensions of these events into wider visibility.

Legacies of Internment and Survivance In 1896 a photographer paused to capture a South Natick landscape: a child posed in the foreground, not far from the “Eliot Oak,” that tree so famous in Yankee minds. In the background water flowed near a dam on its way downriver to Boston Harbor (fig. 15).87 The photographer could not have anticipated that in the twentieth century that same spot would be a key stop on decolonizing journeys. Throughout east-central Massachusetts, place-meanings continue to morph despite attempts to freeze them for posterity, one carefully

Figure 15. The Charles River flows through this point in South Natick, Massachusetts, shown in an 1896 photograph, near one of several dams along the river. The grounds of Natick became potent symbolic terrain for Massachusetts antiquarians endeavoring to memorialize Puritan missionizing and the “praying towns,” though their accounts tended to leave out the hybrid complexities of these Algonquian settlements and the connections that linked multiple Indigenous places. In recent years the falls at South Natick have become stops on a multitribal commemorative itinerary linked to Deer Island. (Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

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composed frame at a time. The oak was a fragile thing on which to pin memories anyway. Underground gas-line construction in the 1930s killed its root system, and the tree had to be taken down, a casualty of “progress.” The built environment proved hardly more stable than the organic one: Natick’s post office mural deteriorated as a leaky roof made the paint yellow and flake off. The Natick Historical Commission lobbied the U.S. postmaster general for help, and a conservation firm completed stabilizing restorations in 2007. Historical Commission member Maureen Sullivan described the rationale behind this preservation: “The mural could have been a farm scene, the great fire of 1874, it could have been the world’s largest shoe (which was made in Natick)—it could have been anything—but Hollis Holbrook chose a dark time in Natick’s history, a time that was changing it from a Praying Indian Village to a regular town. . . . It’s important that it be preserved. . . . We care about our history and how it is preserved and how it is presented.”88 Historical Commission chair Stephen Evers affirmed the value of maintaining this mural and countering public history tendencies to erase or downplay the war’s landscapes: “The early colonial Indian wars, there’s very little known about them. . . . The battle sites and places where there were massacres remain unmarked and no history was put in front of the public about this.”89 The cultural work enabled by the mural in its silent urging to remember hinges on more than the durability of paint, however. As the U.S. Postal Service struggles to remain viable in an economic downturn and era of cyber-communications, circumstances that threaten to shutter local branches, the enduring visibility of the Natick mural remains an uncertain prospect. “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” Robert Musil contended in a 1927 essay on monumentalization. “Anything that constitutes the walls of our life, the backdrop of our consciousness . . . forfeits its capacity to play a role in that consciousness.” Judith Dupré reiterated this curious vanishing act in a study of monuments in American contexts, noting their tendency to become “yet another piece of urban furniture, competing with the visual chaos of traffic signals, billboards, cars, and shop windows for our attention.”90 I learned as much—to my later chagrin—while an undergraduate at Harvard College. I lived for an entire year in Matthews Hall, but during that time never noticed the dark-colored Indian College plaque on its red-brick exterior wall. Perhaps the fact that so many campus buildings were encrusted with markers, monuments, and memorials diverted my attention. Only in subsequent years, through deliberate engagement with Native issues, did I become able to “see” this important signifier, along with a multitude of other historical

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memoryscapes. The blindness was mine, of course, not universal. For Wampanoags and other descendant communities who have long been connected to and knowledgeable about the Indian College, this plaque would be a central rather than peripheral feature. For groups still lobbying for a monument at Deer Island, the invisibility can be double-layered: the ongoing struggle to have anything at all built in that space, and the question of whether a completed monument would register with those it aspires to address. Not because it would be swallowed up in an urban visual cacophony of competing signs, but because the island remains miles apart from the everyday routes of most Bostonians. More pressingly, a monument that underscores histories of forced confinement, among peoples possessing their own sovereignties, stands to undermine greater Boston public memoryscapes that promulgate identities linked to revolution, liberty, social progress, and the emergence of the United States. It is a metropolitan area, after all, where a red-lined “Freedom Trail” attracts thousands of visitors. Yet even that narrative shows signs of modulating to reckon with other, less triumphant and less colonial or nationalistic heritages.91 To take just one example, within the past year, amid ongoing conversations about institutional inequities and exclusions, a plaque has been installed in Harvard Yard recognizing the names of enslaved individuals who labored under President Benjamin Wadsworth in the 1700s. When Wadsworth erected the King Philip’s War monument to his father at Sudbury, with all its antiIndian resonances, he scarcely could have expected that people of color, in bondage—Venus, Bilhah, Juba, and Titus (the last of whom is believed to have had Native ancestry)—would one day attain their own memorial, on the side of the very house built to accommodate Harvard leaders. “The past never dies or disappears,” the current university president, historian Drew Gilpin Faust, remarked at the unveiling. “It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore.”92 In August 2013 I took a daylong hiatus from documentary research at the Massachusetts Historical Society and drove to Deer Island to attend a tour of the MWRA plant.93 I had a sense of what the island can look like from a canoe. Now I wanted to hear how it and the debates that engulf it appeared from water managers’ perspectives. Over the course of several hours inside and around the labyrinthine plant, it became evident what a formidable hurdle the metropolitan region faces as it grapples with expanding, costly demands on aging infrastructure, across systems involving scores of decision-makers. I also heard explanations of why Deer Island is more aptly suited to specific engineering requirements than other harbor sites. I did not hear historical discus-

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sions of the island’s Algonquian connections. Still, it was difficult not to imagine that other approaches could have accounted better for compelling Indigenous place-ties, ones not quantifiable in gallons or particles. As I looked past the wind turbines to the fluid harborscape beyond, an even larger question loomed: How did matters arrive at this point? When did the continuities and reciprocities underlying Maushop’s world become overridden in so many places by mentalities that almost unthinkingly conceive of certain kinds of water as “waste”—and certain kinds of people? The island can seem discordant today. Gently contoured recreation trails contend with looming digester eggs, fenced-off areas, guardhouses, and until recently Homeland Security terror-level warning signs. Benches with commemorative plaques offer picturesque vantages over the harbor, but aircraft flying low around Logan International Airport disrupt the calm. Loudspeaker announcements reverberate from the sewage complex. The entire island can read as a fractured landscape, evidence of disconnected communities vying for space and still not quite knowing how to settle the matter. For Native communities seeking memorial ground of their own on the island, it could be argued that this “multiple use” is actually loss, that only a moratorium on island construction, or even deconstructive reversal of the present built environment, would grant due respect to ancestors and descendants. At the bend in the island pathway where a monument might one day stand, the plot of windswept grass evokes a wave of expectations. This small place, situated in a corner of the harbor so remote that few Bastoniak may ever see it, seems a tiny challenger to the major Indigenous territorial and political losses sustained under settler colonialism. Yet it remains a magnetic locus for old and newer place-traditions, and for memorial sinews stretching across the Northeast that persist regardless of colonial bids for overwriting. The proposed monument has been conceived partly as a tool for communicating with non-Natives unfamiliar with Deer Island’s past or Native-settler conflicts more generally, accomplishing cross-cultural education. Yet in other respects the several commemorative strands are not for a large nonNative public, but activities valuable among the smaller circles of those who participate—Native elders, youth, mothers, fathers, leaders, activists, allies. “Performance” versus “ritual” or “ceremony”: the first of these terms connotes a staging for the benefit of outside observers, while the latter two signify ingroup value. Performance is public; ritual or ceremony, private. The commemorations have not manifested a single, simple intention, and part of their power lies in their ability to shift across these registers. The mishoonash jour-

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neys were both provocative gestures to passersby who witnessed them winding down the river, and internal rituals indelibly meaningful for those inside the vessels or awaiting their arrival. Ritual works as a “creation of memorable experiences.” It carries real consequences in the world, shapes the order of things; “much depends on its completion, into which is built an expectation, be it of peacemaking or rainmaking”; it cannot be abandoned partway.94 With or without a monument, these environs continue to signify for those who have tapped into these individual and collective placemaking efforts. “Histories of places only exist . . . when they are recalled, either by those associated with the landscape or by outsiders connecting a certain history to a place,” Rae Gould has remarked in the context of reexamining the Hassanamisco homestead.95 Without human involvement a landscape (or waterscape) and its material traces can fall silent or become dormant, until they may be reanimated in the future. “[P]oints in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse,” Mikhail Bakhtin called such interpenetrations of time, space, and stories. “Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people.”96 In tandem, narratives and material features coalesce into legible, usable memoryscapes. When Wampanoags, Nipmucs, Abenakis, Penobscots, and others gathered at first light along the moving currents, they were animated by convictions that the losses of the seventeenth century demanded remembering, and that it was worth putting their bodies on the line in that pursuit. From a colonial or state vantage, the formal land base maintained by tribes in the Northeast is miniscule today, whittled down by centuries of sales, appropriations, and outright fraud. Prospects for territorial reacquisition in a legalistic sense seem especially unpromising for communities denied recognition like the Nipmuc. Yet beyond the conscribed boundaries of reservations, the entirety of the Northeast remains Native space—its river headwaters, its hills and marshes, the old planting fields by Menemesit, and even its cities, where built environments can appear to have erased or subsumed all traces of Indigenous pasts and presences. The ability to posit ongoing Native place-connections in these seemingly conquered or ceded spaces, then, is a key function of tribal reclamations of heritage through movement, performance, and ritual. “Time is not a linear stream, but a hoop spinning forward like a wheel, where everything is connected.”97 Early in the morning of the 2010 Deer Island Sacred Run and Paddle, mishoonash floated tranquilly on the Charles River as the sun rose, awaiting paddlers to propel them downriver (fig. 16). Later that day they

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Figure 16. A mishoon floats on the Charles River at daybreak on October 30, 2010, just before the Deer Island Memorial commenced. The wooden dugout had been created at Plimoth Plantation, which is also home to the Wampanoag Indigenous Program. It was transported to the greater Boston area for a daylong journey through land- and waterscapes connected to the forced removal of Natives from the vicinity of Natick in autumn 1675 and their subsequent internment on Deer Island in Boston Harbor that winter. The memorial journey retraced segments of this route and forged ties between those ancestors and present-day Native communities in the Northeast. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

formed a striking scene as they approached the heart of Boston. The skyline stood in the distance, dominated by downtown high-rises, modernist architecture, and towers of the Financial District. Moving toward this were the mishoonash, creating an arresting juxtaposition of the ancient and the ultramodern, of rough-hewn wood in a glass-and-steel milieu. Colonial officials, urban planners, and other Bastoniak who micromanaged this built environment through the centuries hardly anticipated such use being made of this space. But the paddlers—and a multitude of Native city dwellers past and present—fashioned their own pathways, bringing into being an Indigenous countercity unlike the Boston typically seen or understood. It was a “different space” of memory, mourning, critique, and potential for social transformation.98

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3 • Habitations by Narragansett Bay Coastal Homelands, Encounters with Roger Williams, and Routes to Great Swamp

In June 1935 Theodore Dennis Brown, a Narragansett man who had been only three years old when his community was forcibly “detribalized” by the State of Rhode Island and its reservation dismantled (1880–1884), earned praise for his tour-guide expertise. “Mr. Brown will be very helpful to any one seeking the historic landmarks of Rhode Island,” read his biography in the tribal magazine The Narragansett Dawn. “He knows the location of every interesting spot in South County and the full story, tradition or history of the place. He can direct or guide you, into Big Swamp, Royal Burying Grounds, old forts, Devil Paw Rock, Hannah Robinson Rocks, Crying Rocks and other interesting historic spots.”1 Locals and travelers had crisscrossed the lands of “the Narragansett Country”—areas largely west of Narragansett Bay—for centuries, aware that it had been an epicenter of war in 1675–1676. A good number gravitated to Great Swamp, site of a massacre on December 19, 1675, in which colonial troops killed or burned to death hundreds of Narragansetts, along with Wampanoag refugees. It was a deathtrap for the previously neutral Narragansetts (including scores of women, children, and elders) and a blow to Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut soldiers and their Mohegan and Pequot allies, who also suffered in the assault and winter snows. Yet the scorched grounds did not remain desolate for long. Niantic sachem Ninigret’s men descended there after the “Great Swamp Fight” to bury the dead. Newport minister Ezra Stiles roamed among the brambles in the 1750s seeking material remnants, and a parade of Rhode Island antiquarians, farmers, archaeologists, environmentalists, and tribal members continued the procession. Of all these itineraries, Theodore Dennis Brown’s stands out as a recorded instance of a Narragansett memoryscape, intricately embedding

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points of traumatic loss within wider geographies of modernization, reinvention, and survivance. The lands and waters west and north of Narragansett Bay saw some of the most direct devastation during King Philip’s War, and in the aftermath Narragansett, Niantic, Wampanoag, and other Algonquian communities, along with settlers from the colony and then state of Rhode Island, jostled for control of terrain and historical narratives. Swamps, common features here, forcefully shaped these practices and discourses. Understood in the late seventeenth century as vital places of power and refuge by Native peoples, and as miserable, disorienting haunts by English colonists, swamps featured prominently in two wartime events in this area. At Great Swamp, the December 1675 massacre pervasively changed Narragansett demography—but it did not spell the tribe’s demise, despite colonial claims and monuments to the contrary. To the north, a swampy area called Nipsachuck lay at the crossroads of multitribal borderlands. It was twice devastated by colonial troops, first in the early stages of war, and again in July 1676 when soldiers forcefully surprised Narragansett sunksquaw Quaiapen’s encampment, essentially massacring her people. Yet these two swamps have followed different trajectories in their collective uses and imaginings. Great Swamp has been visited, memorialized, and visibly contested, becoming a frequent touchstone in debates about contemporary Narragansett politics (fig. 17). Nipsachuck has been comparatively marginalized, kept invisible, and nearly forgotten by many communities (but not all) until very recently. The swamps’ evolutions have taken shape within larger struggles over Narragansett tribal identity, cultural coherence, and political autonomy in relation to Rhode Island and the United States. Tensions have flared most sharply in South County, as Washington County, the southernmost of Rhode Island’s five counties, is colloquially known. There and in nearby areas, “Swamp Yankees” and other non-Native residents have fashioned their own complex attachments to coastal landscapes and vehemently defended their “home” against unwanted development, with major consequences for Indigenous descendants. “Places, like families, tribes, and states, can have many histories,” former Rhode Island state archaeologist Paul Robinson has remarked. “Some of these are written and memorialized, while others are forgotten, concealed, or simply ignored. Histories of places are shifting stories, negotiated among people with different perspectives on the same geographic area.”2 Around the swamps west and north of the bay, multiple remembrances of place have generated social frictions: sometimes simmering in low-level disputes between tribal

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Figure 17. The Great Swamp, situated west of Narragansett Bay, has supported human and other-than-human activities for thousands of years. Rather than being a dismal, marginal place (as colonial commentators frequently described swamps, which they often attempted to drain and manage), the swamp is an ecologically critical formation, supporting a wide array of animals, plants, birds, and other resources. It also filters and stabilizes regional hydrography, being an important component of the watershed. Narragansett people have accessed the area for generations, including for spiritual purposes. In 1906 Euro-American antiquarians constructed a monument within the swamp, featuring a naturalistic obelisk and four surrounding stones commemorating a devastating colonial military campaign in December 1675 against Narragansetts and refugee Wampanoags. But equally vital have been an ongoing series of Indigenous memorials and engagements with the place, which affirm tribal endurance and solidarities. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

members and neighbors, occasionally rising to prominent arenas of adjudication, like the U.S. Supreme Court, where legal ramifications of placecontestation can be severe. The grievous engagements at Great Swamp, Nipsachuck, and related locales left behind tangible ruins, and they also begat painful sociocultural legacies spiraling well beyond the seventeenth century. “Imperial debris,” Ann Laura Stoler called these multifaceted, lingering effects of colonialism and its attendant harms. To understand colonialism’s

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long reach, she argues, we must account for this debris’s protracted political resonances, “the longevity of structures of dominance,” and a “range of violences and degradations that may be immediate or delayed, subcutaneous or visible, prolonged or instant, diffuse or direct.”3 To venture into the swamps of the Narragansett country is to enter a tangled thicket of meanings, a shifting bed of layers prone to inundation, and a realm where memories of place propel historical action.

Narragansett Homelands and the Groundwork for War Great Swamp is a vast, teeming freshwater area slightly west of the bay. Today it encompasses over three thousand acres, more than half that wetlands, the rest forest cover and mixed uses. Ospreys and box turtles, dragonflies and mergansers, beavers, raccoons, muskrats, and river otters all live there, while deer, coyotes, foxes, rabbits, wild turkeys, and others frequent the margins and field-forest uplands. Ferns, rushes, red maple, and cedar thrive in thick tangles of vegetation. Paths worn by human feet twist through its depths. In rainy weather Great Swamp’s waters rise, its green brilliance heaving and swaying in restless animation. In drier weather it quiets. In the cold of winter it can freeze partially, or even fully in a rare year. Along its southern border a large pond sustains other ecological complexes, and out from it flows the Pawcatuck on its meandering way to the sea.4 The swamp is only one of many around the bay, a low-lying landscape replete with salt ponds, kettle holes, moraine, brooks, and rivers. This landscape has been in flux for millennia, partially stabilizing after glacial retreats and rising sea levels.5 Within these landscapes, swamps have played critical ecological roles. Besides providing habitat for fish, birds, and animals, their absorbent qualities prevent flooding and erosion, filter and cleanse the water supply, and cycle nutrients to support new growth. Their ability to store water and release it slowly keeps the region hydrated and fertile.6 Narragansetts have lived west of the bay since “time out of mind,” as traditional accounts put it. They knew this bay not as a unitary, static space—nor one that could be easily encapsulated by a single place-name—but instead as a series of smaller coves, tidal flats, open expanses, fast-moving and deep channels that swept around islands and rocky protuberances. It was a zone constantly in motion and linked to interior lands by spiderwebs of rivers and brooks. In earlier times Indigenous people here inhabited extensive geographies that included large coastal villages as well as inland encampments, all

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interconnected, and some now partially submerged as sea levels rose substantially.7 “Homelands” encompassed core sites and surrounding grounds where long-used spots supported fishing, tool knapping, medicine gathering, maize planting, dwelling, burying, petroglyph making, and other everyday and ritual activities. These places were connected to specific activities, social networks, and memories. While individual sites came into being, fell into temporary disuse, and returned over time depending on community needs and environmental capacities, the whole was familiar and relatively stable over the longue durée.8 Oral traditions and archaeological evidence affirm this landscape’s enduring significance for generations upon generations of Narragansetts.9 Great Swamp itself was a site in slow flux, morphing in size and character with the seasons and larger climactic trends. Its wettest depths were not suitable for permanent settlement. But drier parts and margins were accommodating, and diverse flora and fauna made it rich ground for periodic human uses. The values of such a swamp were more than strictly utilitarian. In these liminal, fecund places, boundaries between land and water, dark and light, surface and underworld frequently blurred. Powerful things were known to happen in swamps, as Narragansett oral traditions attest. To engage with these forces, selected tribal members would need to move carefully and respectfully.10 For Narragansetts, Great Swamp constituted a critical place in the heart of tribal homelands. Lying amid a network of trails that put it only a few hours’ walk over low ground to the saltwater, it was woven deeply into coastal, terrestrial, and maritime spaces that the People navigated, cultivated, and tended to ensure their continuance. In the context of such long-standing Narragansett habitation, Indigenous contacts with Europeans were a recent phenomenon, though one that significantly affected Narragansett lifeways. Narragansetts first encountered European explorers in 1524 when Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian sailing for the French, passed through Narragansett Bay en route from Long Island Sound to Casco Bay, spending two weeks with flourishing Indigenous coastal villages. This prolonged encounter gave tribal people time to gauge the foreign mariners’ manners and designs, while keeping them away from the majority of tribal habitations. Following Verrazzano’s visit, European documentary silence about the bay lands took hold until the 1600s. By the early seventeenth century, however, Narragansetts’ worlds increasingly touched European imperial spheres, particularly those of the Dutch and English whose sails appeared more frequently over the horizon. While epidemics ravaged Algonquian communities east of the bay, in Massachusett and Wampanoag homelands,

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and some afflicted the Narragansetts, the sweeping biological devastations of 1616–1619 largely spared them. Narragansetts took advantage of the ensuing regional power instability and capitalized on oversight of the bay’s shellfish beds, replete with the quahogs and whelks needed for producing wampum, the purple-and-white shell beads instrumental in commerce, diplomacy, and ceremonies. These factors assisted them in beginning to consolidate hegemony over a broad area.11 As a signal of Narragansett clout, when the sachem Canonicus learned of English arrivals east of the bay by Patuxet/Plymouth, and of colonists’ emerging alliances with Wampanoags, he transmitted to their governor William Bradford a bundle of arrows bound in the scaly skin of Askùg. Upon receiving the cautionary missive (the full import of which may have eluded him), Bradford returned the snakeskin filled with gunshot and powder, an equally forceful declaration of intentions.12 Narragansetts’ interactions with Europeans intensified after 1635–1636, when the English religious dissenter Roger Williams, fleeing south from Massachusetts Bay in exile, arrived at the head of the bay. Here Canonicus, his nephew Miantonomo, and advisors agreed to make space for the new arrival near a freshwater spring. While many accounts have characterized this as a simple “gift” of land, it was a considerably more complex interaction, wherein Native leadership strategically decided to bring Williams into Native space and into a preexisting web of relations, rights, and responsibilities. The colonial settlement took shape at the confluence of major and minor rivers flowing from the interior into the bay, including the Moshassuck (where the moose drink) and Woonasquatucket (where the salt water ends). New Providence, the physical grounds for Williams’s “lively experiment” in religious freedom, emerged not within a “howling wilderness” but within ancient Indigenous homelands—indeed, within a well-traveled crossing-place. It rested on the margins of the Great Salt Cove, a fertile habitat for fish, shellfish, birds, mammals, and humans. Here multiple Indigenous peoples seem to have moved and interacted for generations.13 The mention of the Native “town of Mashapogue” in discussion of the boundaries for an early land transaction signaled just how populous this Native territory was.14 Williams’s arrival commenced a series of English settlement-building projects around the bay: at places English colonists called Providence and Warwick on the mainland, and Portsmouth and Newport on the island of Aquidneck. These disparate collections of houses, fences, pastures, and mills were tenuously connected, from colonial perspectives, by emerging paths, roads, and ferries, all of which lay within well-traveled Native trails and water routes.15 English presence accelerated re-

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gional trade in wampum and furs, as well as European goods like metals and firearms that transformed some Narragansett practices, and fostered dependencies as well as intimacies. “Contact,” it is important to remember, was not a discrete event that neatly or meaningfully divided Narragansett chronology into pre- and post-European eras. It was a continuous process of exchange, encounter, and strategic reckoning with how to best manage new relations. Narragansetts’ relations with colonists in early Rhode Island remained stable for many years, and Williams proved instrumental in negotiating constructively with their sachems. Unlike John Eliot of Massachusetts, a proponent of the praying towns, Williams did not seek to missionize and convert the Narragansetts or relocate them to Anglicized enclaves.16 Yet tensions were building. Narragansetts and nearby communities experienced considerable pressures in the wake of colonial efforts to acquire Native lands, such as the vast—and dubiously legal—Pettaquamscutt Purchase (1657–1658) of southern bay lands, and the myriad islands that speckled the bay. As colonists desirous of new land to farm moved farther into Native spaces, accompanied by their roaming, trampling, squealing Côwsnuck, Gôatesuck, and Hógsuck, they posed challenges to traditional Narragansett subsistence and dwelling practices, which required extensive mobility across lands and waters.17 Certain Indigenous tributary groups also began to push back against Narragansett authority in bids to recalibrate regional power.18 Within this increasingly difficult context of multiple parties jostling for influence, Narragansetts became embroiled in intertribal and intercolonial warfare. The effects were devastating. In May 1637, during the first major military conflict to unfold in southern New England, they fought alongside English troops by acting as bowmen at the massacre of Pequots at Mistick in May 1637. Mistick was the scene of a wholesale slaughter that appalled the Narragansetts, running counter to traditional notions of limited warfare. “[I]t is too furious, and slays too many men,” they complained to the English afterward.19 Narragansett and English colonial leaders grew mutually frustrated over matters of trust and the disposition of surviving Pequot refugees/captives, some of whom were brought into Narragansett kinship networks.20 In response to these conditions, the sachem Miantonomo labored in the early 1640s to gather together diverse Algonquians, hoping they could act with greater strength and solidarity as they faced colonial presences. Miantonomo’s visionary call for multitribal unification—a project that arguably laid intellectual and social groundwork for the resistances of the 1670s—ended prematurely, however, with his capture. English leadership in Connecticut desired

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his execution and requested that the Mohegan sachem Uncas do it, within Mohegan space, to avert any Narragansett reprisals on English settlements. Negotiating pressures of his own to satisfy English expectations, Uncas did so.21 Miantonomo’s death distressed Narragansett-Mohegan relations and fed cycles of violence in the ensuing decades, when Narragansetts were under the principal leadership of Pessicus, Miantonomo’s younger brother. Narragansett leaders tried several tactics to strengthen their position relative both to Native neighbors like the Mohegans and to neighboring English colonies, particularly Massachusetts Bay, that were attempting to treat Narragansetts as their subordinates. In 1644, via the conduit of dissenting colonist Samuel Gorton, Pessicus, the now-aged Canonicus, and other tribal representatives proffered their ostensible “subjection” to “That great and mighty Prince, Charles, King of Great Brittaine,” deploying a provocative strategy of appealing directly to the English monarch in order to bolster their own standing against colonies that increasingly overran their sovereignty.22 This maneuver—which reflected astute Narragansett insights into imperial and colonial forms of governance, and desires to exploit divisions among Europeans and Euro-Americans—only inflamed tensions with colonial authorities. Narragansetts nearly fell to war in 1645 with the newly confederated United Colonies of New England (a defensive military alliance of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven), and only averted outright conflict through an onerous peace “covenant” and fine of two thousand fathoms of wampum—an enormous labor and ecological resource burden for Narragansetts to shoulder. English fears of Narragansett conspiracies with the Dutch and Mohawks during the 1640s– 1650s, fed by recurring rumors of war and uprisings, only exacerbated these difficulties. As Narragansetts attempted to address colonial demands and hold together increasingly fractious communities, they faced internal instabilities as well: growing social stratification, and a constellation of emerging leaders who interacted with colonists in divergent ways.23 Among peoples living west of the bay in the early to mid-seventeenth century, the Narragansett language was the dominant tongue, interspersed with pockets of English, Dutch, and new “pidgin” forms. Roger Williams was no linguistic expert. But he took a keen interest in the sounds around him, and in the 1630s and 1640s he began to record Narragansett-language words and phrases. Albeit colored by English concepts and habits of expression, his attempt at translation was published in London in 1643 as A Key into the Language of America.24 Within the rich Indigenous vocabulary he heard linguistic traces of trauma: “Chickauta wêtu (An house fired) . . . Nickqueintónck-quock

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(They come against us) . . . Paúquana (There is a slaughter) . . . Tashittáwho? (How many are slaine?) . . . Cummequaùnum cummíttamussussuck ká cummuckiaûg (Remember your Wives, and Children).”25 Violence had become threaded into Narragansett cultural landscapes prior to the 1670s, in both intertribal and Native-colonial forms. The speakers Williams heard had developed fine-grained terminology for describing conflicts’ aftermath. While many histories of Rhode Island have interpreted Narragansett-settler relations as unproblematic or even amicable in the early to mid-seventeenth century, thus seeing King Philip’s War as erupting from thin air or inherent “savagery,” it is clear that by 1675 deep cycles of antagonism were in motion. The Quaker and pacifist leanings of influential Rhode Island colonists did affect policies of waging war. But the colony was not an exceptional bastion of tolerance and peace in this period, however much contemporaries and later historians liked to imagine it as distinct from its Puritan neighbors.26 When skirmishing broke out around Kickemuit and Mount Hope in June 1675, it was not a foregone conclusion that Narragansetts would enter the conflict—never mind in alliance with Philip. Relations between Narragansetts and the embattled Pokanoket Wampanoags, who inhabited the eastern side of the bay, had previously been wary or outright hostile, though in the 1660s they began to forge closer ties.27 As the localized crisis of 1675 evolved into a regional conflict, English colonial leaders strongly pressured the Narragansetts to remain neutral, or even to become supportive of English aims, sensing the consequences of an assertive Narragansett resistance. While many of the Narragansetts positioned themselves as neutral at the war’s outset, they soon radicalized. In this process they began to absorb refugees from other Native groups, some of whom were related through complex kinship ties and concomitant obligations. Narragansetts’ growing repulsions of English overtures attracted the suspicion and ire of colonial leaders. When the Wampanoag sunksquaw Weetamoo’s people fled with Philip’s to the swamp at Nipsachuck in August 1675, seeking safety in the hilly interior northwest of the bay, they survived an ensuing English attack but remained under immense threat. Shifting once again, Philip headed north to the Nipmucs while Weetamoo moved south to the Narragansetts, both leaders seeking to bring their people into protection with sympathetic Native neighbors. (Weetamoo, formerly married to Philip’s elder brother Wamsutta/Alexander and then a sequence of other Algonquian men, was by this point married to the Narragansett Quanapin, strengthening a strategic intertribal alliance.) To their chagrin, colonists learned that Narragansetts were accommodating these refugees and

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enabling the kinds of fugitive geographies that undermined colonial bids for containment and surveillance of Indigenous populations during wartime. By late autumn 1675, as colonial aspirations for rapid, decisive victory faded, colonial leaders believed it necessary to rein in the Narragansetts. But as the harvest season waned, and skeins of geese, ducks, and birds began their annual migrations, many Narragansetts had also made themselves elusive. The depths of Great Swamp buzzed quietly yet urgently with human activities by late December.28 Hundreds of Indigenous men, women, children, and elders gathered here, in a place that was a central part of traditional homelands (for Narragansetts) and a relatively proximate site of refuge across the water (for Wampanoags). Together they labored to prepare an encampment for winter by assembling and insulating their homes and packing away maize they had carefully set aside from the harvest. Why did Narragansetts and some of their Wampanoag relations put themselves here in such a frigid season? “Cuppì-machàug (Thick wood: a Swamp).”29 Understanding their decision to locate in this particular spot, at this particular time, requires an accounting of the mobile character of Narragansett land uses and war tactics. Narragansetts inhabited specific homelands and did not wander randomly or nomadically over the terrain, despite what colonial commentators often alleged. Yet there were signal differences between colonial and Narragansett dwelling practices. Narragansett architecture—circular or elongated wood-and-mat wetuash that could be efficiently assembled and later taken down—permitted ready movement between homesites. “I once in travell lodged at a house, at which in my returne I hoped to have lodged againe there the next night, but the house was gone in that interim, and I was glad to lodge under a tree,” a bemused Roger Williams related.30 A wetu was a process, a renewable form that could exist at multiple sites, rather than a singular structure locked to the ground like colonial houses constructed from timber, stone, and glass and furnished with weighty objects. Dwellings could be moved in response to disease or trauma, as well as during regular seasonal mobility between coast and interior. “If death fall in amongst them, they presently remove to a fresh place,” Williams observed. “If an enemie approach, they remove into a Thicket, or Swampe, unlesse they have some Fort to remove unto.” Narragansetts considered swamps to be havens from danger, where the environment itself thwarted assaults, he reported: “These thick Woods and Swamps (like the Boggs to the Irish) are the Refuges for Women and children in Warre, whilst the men fight.”31 By contrast, as Williams’s derogatory parenthetical invocation of Irish environmental knowledge suggested, seventeenth-century English colonists

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detested swamps as forbidding. They knew from hard experience that mucky reaches were anathema to any traveler astride “Naynayoûmewot (A Horse).”32 Where possible, they, like many other Euro-Americans, began draining swamps to “improve” the land for their preferred version of agriculture and pasturage or to curtail disease.33 But given the extent of swamplands around the bay, colonists faced an impossible project in attempts to subdue their surroundings. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the regional topography is how thoroughly swamped it is, at places Narragansett residents knew as Quonopoag, Ohomawauke, Tiscatuck, Mishnock.34 Ecologically these swamps varied widely. Some experienced regular inundation, while others remained dry in most seasons. Conceivably, Narragansetts and refugee Wampanoags could have chosen other swamps for wartime protection and regrouping. But Great Swamp had the situational advantage of being extensive and thus amenable to concealing a sizable group. It was also adjacent to a large pond and its freshwater supply; within a reasonable walk of coastal resources, planting grounds, and cached food stores; and relatively removed from both English settlements and Native nonallies like the Pequots and Mohegans to the west. When Narragansetts and the Wampanoag refugees retreated to Great Swamp in late 1675, they sought out a dryland protrusion they knew lay in its interior (an “island,” or hummock), using the firm, slightly elevated ground as a basis for constructing a substantial “Fort,” or palisade, of wood buttressed by a stone or clay wall.35 Defensive architecture like this had become an ever more common sight across the region in recent decades at places like Shantok, Massapeag, Block Island, and Montauk as intercultural conflicts mounted. The swamp structure’s architects likely drew upon both Algonquian and Eurocolonial forms, such as bastions that enhanced defensibility.36 Normally the water surrounding the island would have provided protection as a natural moat. But by mid-December 1675, winter cold set in with unusual severity. Temperatures were already cooler than normal owing to the ongoing Little Ice Age. This time, it was enough to cause the water to freeze over and permit crossing by colonial troops.37 Led there by a Native informant—a mentally unwell figure, as contemporary Narragansett traditions have described him38—soldiers from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Plymouth attacked under the command of Plymouth’s Josiah Winslow (fig. 18). What arguably began as a military confrontation devolved into undiscriminating slaughter of noncombatants, reminiscent of Mistick in 1637, as troops set fire to wetuash and the stored maize. (A few colonial soldiers thought they should have preserved and appropriated these provisions for their own use.) The Sunday

Figure 18. Narragansett country, particularly the coastal and interior reaches west of Narragansett Bay, formed a crucial theater of engagement during wartime. The “Indian fort” denoted by number 19, at left on this map, was where Narragansetts and refugee Wampanoags had retreated in late 1675, before being attacked by United Colonies troops who were able to cross the frozen swamp to assault an interior palisade. This map by John Foster appeared appended to Puritan minister William Hubbard’s 1677 Narrative about the war, and it privileged colonial sites of casualties, perceiving few nuances of Algonquian geographies and representing the majority of Native space as blank. (Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

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attack was extensively described by colonial participants and commentators in the aftermath, some heroically inflating their deeds, others unnerved by the degree of devastation wrought.39 The roles played by Native allies to the English remain only sparsely outlined. A few queries about their conduct emerged in testimony afterward, contentions that “Monhegins and Pequods proved very false, fired into the air, and sent word before they came they would so, but got much plunder, guns and kettles.”40 If accurate, this may suggest the contingent quality of Mohegans’ and Pequots’ support of Connecticut troops, or their reluctance to fire in undifferentiated ways upon their near relations. The fallout was devastating. Native casualties at the swamp have been estimated from three hundred to one thousand. Natives gathered around Menemesit who spoke with James Quanopohit later that winter reported losses of forty “fighting men” and “about 300 old men women & children.”41 Survivors who made their way out of the acrid smoke moved in several directions, including presumably to interior lands farther west from the bay, such as Mishnock Swamp, where English presence was almost nonexistent.42 Other retreated to the multitribal fishing grounds of the mid-Kwinitekw River Valley, still an apparent haven from English incursions. In the aftermath of this cataclysm, debate continued between Pessicus and his nephew Canonchet about whether to continue resistance against the allied English. Narragansett warriors participated in subsequent campaigns around the bay and afield, including a near-comprehensive burning of Providence in March 1676. Several months later, Narragansetts suffered another concentrated blow during a second attack at Nipsachuck Swamp on July 2, 1676. Major John Talcott’s troops hammered the encampment of sunksquaw Quaiapen, also known as the Old Queen or Matantuck.43 Little was written about details of this assault— Talcott’s July 4, 1676, report to the General Court at Hartford constituted the primary eyewitness documentation (hardly objective),44 followed by William Hubbard’s second-hand account in his popular published Narrative (1677). According to Hubbard, English dragoons (horse-mounted infantry) and their Mohegan and Pequot allies rushed down upon an encampment of “the enemy securely lodged in the hollow of the Swampe,” and Talcott’s men “girt the sd swamp and wth English & Indian souldrs drest it.” The attack “put [the encamped Natives] into a horrible fright, making a lamentable outcry, some getting into the Swampe, the rest that were prevented by the Horsemen, and the friendly Indians coming so suddenly upon them were all taken prisoners.”45 The war nominally ended in southern New England soon after the second Nipsachuck encounter with Philip’s death at Mount Hope in mid-August

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1676. But in actuality little was settled. The struggle wore on in a new set of arenas: slave-markets, courts, reservations.

Postwar Testimonies, Traumas, and Regatherings Great Swamp and Nipsachuck became mass graves for Indigenous men, women, children, and elders, sites where Narragansetts’ and Wampanoags’ complex funerary rituals, which ensured the safe conduct of ancestors to the afterlife, had not been permitted to take place in traditional ways. Survivors of the Great Swamp conflagration quickly left the scene for their own safety. In the aftermath, Ninigret, sachem of the nearby community of Niantics, “sent to General Winslow word that his people had buried the dead of the English left at the fort, and that the number was twenty-four, and he asked for a charge of powder for each.”46 Ninigret benefited from English desires to see their own dead properly interred, strategically using necropolitics to further ingratiate himself with colonial authorities.47 While there was no direct mention that the Niantics did likewise for Narragansett and Wampanoag casualties (possibly Mohegans and Pequots as well), it is plausible they gave them respectful burials, motivated not by material rewards but by other long-standing obligations to neighbors and kin. The Narragansett sachem Miantonomo, after all, had professed to colonial officials in 1642 that the Niantics were “as his own flesh . . . being allied by continual intermarriages, etc.”48 The war’s immediate aftermath was chaotic for Narragansetts, with prisoners being sold into slavery and long-term servitude, widows and children begging for subsistence, wounded and dead unaccounted for.49 One Narragansett, captured and sent for execution, was asked by Massachusetts officials in August 1676 to “say how many Indians were killed at the Fort-Fight” at Great Swamp. “He replyed . . . that as to old men, women and Children, they had lost no body could tell how many.”50 In addition to demographic devastation through casualties, many Narragansetts were forced into servitude in colonial households, or amalgamated with Niantics to the west, causing substantial realignments (though not undoings) of social groupings. All of these stresses and diasporas bore consequences for collective remembrances of the recent conflict. The tribal networks and structures that regulated oral transmission of knowledge had been severely challenged by dispersions that disrupted the antebellum community’s ability to gather, collectively speak, or recount. The loss of elders, as reservoirs and caretakers of cultural memories, would have been especially problematic for these practices.

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“How those Algonquians who survived King Philip’s War commemorated and remembered the war is, sadly, mere speculation,” Jill Lepore wrote in The Name of War.51 Tracking the state of Narragansett remembrances in the war’s immediate aftermath is indeed challenging. Did traumatic experiences foster involuntary or deliberate silence among survivors, who remembered specific violences but declined to recall them aloud, or deflected memorialization for several generations?52 Did culturally specific protocols about memory that made community members “abhorre to mention the dead by name” compound these silences?53 Does the fact that English commentators almost never mentioned Narragansett postwar mourning at sites like Great Swamp mean they were not engaging such places? Lepore’s assertion is incisive but troubling. Even as silence itself can be an index of violence’s fallout, foreclosing the possibility of saying anything at all strikes as an uneasy resolution. Moreover, Narragansetts and other Native communities were actively remembering, speaking about, and marking the meanings of war, in ways that are partially legible to contemporary scholars and descendants. Narragansetts did survive the Swamp and the rest of the war, taking refuge with receptive communities elsewhere or reestablishing themselves in protected parts of their own homelands. Their survival ensured that perspectives of Narragansett witnesses to the massacre persisted in the postbellum period, surely relayed to others though seldom recorded in the documentary record. Provocative glimpses of these tellings exist in court testimony given at Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1676, where colonial officials coerced Native men present at the Swamp and other actions into speaking. Charging the men with “wicked bloody Minde and trayterous, rebellious, roietous and routous Acts,” they drew out confessions. Quanopen, also called Sowagonish, “owned, that he among the Rest was in Armes against the English Nation, and that he was at the swamp Fight,” also admitting his presence at offensives against Pawtuxet and Nashaway. The court deemed him guilty and sentenced him to “be shott to death in this Towne on the 26th Instant, at about one of the Clock in the Afternoone,” two days later. His brother Sunkeejunasuc met the same fate. Another brother, Ashamattan, was also tried but received a suspended sentence. Additional Natives underwent cross-examination and sentencing in Newport, some being consigned to slavery or servitude, and others to execution. The places of their deaths in town do not seem to have been recorded. The price of recounting wartime involvement proved extremely high, but the court left them little choice: they must remember aloud.54 Yet the contents of such testimonies, extracted under extraordinary duress, and possibly with

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awareness of impending death, may have been more complex and variably truthful than English authorities realized, hasty as they were to attribute culpability and conclude proceedings. In the years closely following the war’s end, Native remembrances in the lands west of the bay were not wholly dominated by perspectives of Narragansett resistance. Views of other communities that had strategically allied with the English sometimes moved more readily into the public eye, as well as colonial and even transatlantic archives. In April 1680, Weeounkkass, daughter of Ninigret and sunksquaw of the neutral or English-allied Niantics (who had herself been a leader during the war), wrote to Charles II in England recalling that her people had not fought against the English. Like Pessicus, Canonicus, and other earlier Native leaders who had savvily reached out directly to the English Crown for support of tribal goals, Weeounkkass pitched her petition in a manner that appealed to the monarch’s perceived interests in protecting the New England colonies. She emphasized that other Algonquians (Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs) had been belligerents: “sum of thos Sachims contrary to their great and larg promises have fallen from it, & raisd up a bloddy war in thees parts not only against English but allso against us.” She thus reminded the King to take furder notis that our Father was the Great and Cheifest Sachem in the Nihantick Cuntries, who was much sought too for to joyn with the rest of the Ingions in the late war against your subjects in thees parts but could never be parswaded to it although much sought unto, allwais remembering his faithful alleganc to your Majtey, so to the utmost of our fathers ability whils he lived he was not wanting in strengthing boath his heart and his arm in helping to sopres the publick Enemy, who for want of truth seated in their hearts, ros up in rebellion against your Majty subjects in these parts and according their desearts recived a just recompence. She implored the English Crown to remember Niantics’ wartime loyalty, in other words, with the expectation that it would favorably inform current relations. She also relayed fears that Connecticut authorities were trying to install the Pequot Catapezet as a ruler who threatened her authority, and she expressed anxiety about contentious land claims still wracking the area. This remembrance-as-grievance concluded with a concrete plea to the king, affirmed by Weeounkhass’s council, that he should “caus all unjust pretenders to withdraw, and be pleased to settell us in peac on thos lands that wee have

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enjoied in peac for thees many years.”55 Remembering Niantics’ loyalty during the war was an argumentative strategy designed to shore up postwar territorial claims and sovereignty—of Indigenous female leadership, no less.56 Colonists remained in contact and conversation with Narragansetts and other Natives in the postwar period, most noticeably when matters of pressing legal importance or land tenure were at stake. In August 1679 colonial commissioners convened an audience with Pequots and “some ancient & noated Narrogancetts” (Corman and Pamotequett) regarding historical names and limits of Narragansett Bay. The commissioners were trying to ascertain which colony’s boundary claim was correct—Rhode Island’s or Connecticut’s. The answer hinged on the geographical definition of Narragansett Bay as it had been cited in earlier documents, so they turned to Native elders’ memories of place for confirmation.57 Overall, however, Native affairs dropped away dramatically from Rhode Island records in the late seventeenth century as the colony began to view Narragansetts as dispersed, diminished, and conquered people no longer meriting sustained attention.58 The two groups were moving apart spatially as well. Rhode Islanders remained wary about Natives they considered former enemies, and implemented restrictive local regulations, blanket policies that prohibited Natives from walking town streets at night, required they have guardians, ordered that “no person shall suffer any Indian wigwam to be built upon his land,” and otherwise attempted to forestall large Native gatherings and unrest.59 Providence, built atop the ancient Indigenous crossing-place, became a locale increasingly inhospitable to Native presence. Colonial residents were so unnerved by their coming in (the Natives “doe thereby damnify our inhabitants greately”) that they prompted a town order in 1683 that “for ye future no Indian nor Indians shall come within our towneshipp . . . to hunt or fish, or to inhabit.” Natives already in town had seven days to vacate. If any flouted the law, they stood to lose their firearms— a costly penalty for simply being in the wrong place.60 As with the anti-Indian wartime ban promulgated in Boston, none of these measures necessarily equated with the actual removal of Natives from townscapes. But Native presence in settings like Providence was an increasingly dangerous enterprise, where Indigenous bodies became subject to hostile scrutiny, or worse. Providence was still reeling from a successful Native offensive in March 1676 that burned nearly all its structures to the ground, while Newport and Portsmouth on the island of Aquidneck, though never assaulted directly, staggered under an influx of colonial refugees from outlying areas. Their arrival stretched those communities financially and socially as residents struggled to

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house, feed, employ, and absorb men, women, and children who brought along almost nothing in their flight.61 Given the difficulties of rebuilding here, it may be unsurprising that while elite colonists in Massachusetts Bay rushed several war narratives into print before flintlocks had even cooled, no similarly comprehensive writings emerged from Rhode Island. These settlements were scarcely in positions to devote energies to shaping the print record. Providence may have been lucky to have any records survive the war at all. Settler tradition held that its town clerk saw Native warriors intending to set fire to everything, so in a flash of archival heroics, he tossed the town records into a millpond. The precious documents got waterlogged (so the story goes) but were spared total destruction.62 Perhaps an embellished or apocryphal tale, to be sure, but one that hinted at just how deeply threatened Rhode Island colonists felt by the specter of having Natives undermine not only their material existences but also the very foundations of their own histories. Not until 1739, when Baptist preacher John Callender published An Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations in New-England in America, did Rhode Island’s colonial past and wartime conduct receive historical scrutiny in sustained fashion. Yet Callender’s peculiarly unresolved work was as much memory as history, a conflicted amalgam of oral testimony from aged residents and documentary research.63 Colonists were keen to articulate their roles in the war for certain concrete ends. West of Narragansett Bay, Connecticut and Rhode Island colonists waged a vitriolic paper war over territorial spoils, pleading transatlantically to Whitehall for arbitration. Quaker-led Rhode Island failed to defend settlers and their property during “the late Indian warr,” so jurisdiction ought to revert to Connecticut, alleged Richard Smith (whose trading house had possibly been partially burned by Native forces) and other petitioners from the bay area.64 They recalled that after denial of military aid, “their townes, goods, corne, and cattle were by the savage natives burnt and totally destroyed: whereby the petitioners are become great sufferers in their estates and fortunes.”65 Colony faced down colony, airing long-simmering religious grievances and charter controversies—and omitting Native peoples’ ongoing presence from the discussion altogether, so the contest became an intercolonial one that largely discounted enduring Narragansett territorial claims.66 That boundary took decades to settle. Elsewhere in “the Narrhaganset and Niantick countries,” colonists received encouragement from representatives of the Atherton Company, a large and questionably legitimate landholder in the area, to settle lands “very pleasant and fertile, fit and commodious for

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plantation,” and considered a new vacuum domicilium, safely vacant space.67 Colonial pursuits of Native lands around the bay commenced long before the 1670s, as a tangle of deeds attests. Yet the war’s closure precipitated an aggressive new phase of acquisition and expansion.68 While Rhode Island had “managed to spend little on the war either in blood or money” in comparison with the United Colonies’ crushing expenditures, the colony stood poised to benefit from the war’s effects.69 The “fort fight,” as colonial commentators of the time tended to call the massacre at Great Swamp, giving it the air of an evenly pitched encounter rather than asymmetric devastation, also lingered in remembrances. Soldiers from the United Colonies who fought in the war, and their families, were among the most vocal proponents urging authorities to remember their service—and provide material compensation.70 Abigail Lay of Lyme, Connecticut, petitioned officials at Hartford in May 1676 for aid in paying off the debts for medical care incurred by her son, who was wounded at Great Swamp. He remained in Rhode Island and was not permitted to return home to Connecticut until his accounts had been settled.71 Clement Minors of New London, also wounded at Great Swamp, petitioned for payment as well. He succinctly recalled the trials of that December engagement, saying he would not be so “tedious” as to recite all of his “great hardship & difficultyes,” but would only reiterate, “I Received my wounds at yt hott service at ye swamp in ye Narragansett.”72 By October 1676 the court at Hartford realized it was on the verge of being deluged by calls for recompense, as “there are many souldiers that doe complayn of great damage that they have received in the late wars by wounds and disabilitie.” It empowered a smaller council to hear and dispose of any such cases as it saw fit.73 There was a portable quality to colonial memories of Great Swamp, since most soldiers involved hailed from Connecticut, Massachusetts, or Plymouth and dispersed back to these places after their service yet remained haunted by the violence experienced in the Narragansett country. Rhode Island did not endear itself to these itinerant soldiers, either. Some petitioners from the other colonies indignantly recalled that after leaving Great Swamp (“when in the sharpest of the winter, our souldiers had a cruel fight with the enemy, beat them out of their works and burnt them with fire”) they retreated to Rhode Island for aid but found a lukewarm welcome and “were forced to pay dearly” for medical treatment.74 While some soldiers and their families managed to win monetary payments for services, others received grants of land. This practice had notable precedent in the grants given to colonial veterans of the Pequot War.75 At the

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conclusion of King Philip’s War, the colonies may have been cash poor, but officials readily allocated tracts of land to those who asked for compensation, as long as they did not infringe upon previous grants. Certain troops involved in the assault at Great Swamp had been promised beforehand that “if they played the man, took the Fort & Drove the Enemy out of the Narraganset Country, which was their great Seat, that they should have a gratuity in Land besides their Wages.”76 These claims for land as recompense took decades to settle. Some soldiers died before seeing any resolution, and the burden fell on their descendants to persist in petitioning. When the actual land grants were made, they were not in the Narragansett country itself but scattered across a checkerboard of northern landscapes. By the 1720s and 1730s grants had been made by Massachusetts to its veterans at seven sites known initially as the Narragansett Townships: “Narragansett No. 1” (later incorporated as Buxton, Maine), “Narragansett No. 2” (Westminster, Massachusetts), Nos. 3–6 (Amherst, Goffstown, Bedford, and Templeton, New Hampshire), and No. 7 (Gorham, Maine). For an interval after the grants’ initial disposal the toponymic affiliations with violence stood, or shimmered between old and new, as on a 1755 map that showed “Sowhegan East or Narraganset No. 5.”77 But soon they sunk into the map. Colonial memory enabled acquisition of Algonquian lands beyond the immediate site of conflict; then the initial violent conquest in the Narragansett country was forgotten or erased through toponymic transformations that obscured the dispossessive moment of origin. Little in these landscapes today bespeaks the moment of traumatic creation, though a few signs linger. The Narragansett Grange stands in the center of Bedford, New Hampshire, while Gorham, Maine, claims the Narragansett School, as well as an old stone pillar memorializing the “Narragansett Soldiers” on a side street (fig. 19).78 As late as the 1880s, Gorham featured a wooden statue of King Philip on a main street—a stylized Indigenous leader seemingly out of place in Wabanaki country, but in fact deeply connected to the origins of this colonial settlement.79 Colonial men from Connecticut who fought at Great Swamp had not been guaranteed such land, but families nevertheless pushed for it. In 1718 Thomas Marshall of Windsor petitioned for land as payment for the death of his father, Samuel Marshall, at Great Swamp. He received one hundred acres.80 Samuel Chapman of Windsor filed on that same date for land related to the loss of his father, Edward Chapman, at Great Swamp. Chapman sought one hundred and fifty acres. He embedded his request within details of the hardships caused by loss of a male head of household in a patriarchal society: “That

Figure 19. A stone monument in Gorham, Maine, notes the town’s connection to the “Narragansett soldiers.” This area constituted one of the “Narragansett Townships” (numbers 1–7) awarded to colonial veterans after the Great Swamp military assault, as recompense for their service against tribal communities. The townships are dispersed across central and northern parts of New England, and for many, their original links to dispossessive violences have been forgotten or subsumed in collective memories. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

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Whereas my Hond father Deceased Edward Chapman was a volunteer in the old Warr and fitted himself with arms ammunition &c on his own Cost, and at the Swamp fight was Killed, and never any of his armour or Cloathing Returned; he Left a family of Small Children under great necessities, one wherof is now a Criple and so Will be all his days.”81 It is tempting to speculate on the process by which petitioners like Marshall and Chapman went about filing requests. Did their families urge them to do so? What made them wait until 1718, nearly half a century after the bloody clash at the frozen swamp? Were they pleased with the allotted acreage, or did they ponder whether a patch of ground was fitting recompense for paternal loss? Unfortunately, the documentary archive tended to record only the terse instance of request. Such petitions nevertheless are reminders of how directly entwined military violence and land possession came to be in the postwar period. In the Narragansett country, settler land acquisition and development accelerated in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One investor was Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall, who inherited lands from his father-inlaw John Hull, mint master at Boston and one of the original Pettaquamscutt proprietors. Sewall was an avid diarist who keenly documented King Philip’s War and Native affairs in other parts of New England, and he recalled Hull’s wartime losses in nearly the same breath that he detailed his own property investments near the Bay: “Capt. Hull, my honored Father-in-Law, built, and settled Tenants, in the Narragansett Country long before I was related to him. He lost a good Tenant (Crofts) House, Barn, Stock in Phillip’s War. I have Spent Hundreds of Pounds in Settling upon Point Judith. Fifteen pounds I paid Ninicraft for a Quit-Claim, though the Land had been purchased of others before, in Captain Hull’s time.” Sewall operated primarily as an absentee landlord, but he periodically traveled to the Narragansett area to keep watch on the lands and “promote the peopling and Improvement of the country.”82 The postwar condition of Native communities greatly interested him. In 1696 he gifted five hundred acres to Harvard College “for and towards the support and education at the said college, of such youths whose parents may not be of sufficient ability to maintain them there, especially such as shall be sent from Pettaquamscutt aforesaid, English or Indians.” Proceeds from the farmland were earmarked for scholarships at the college, which had precedent in crosscultural education in its promising though short-lived Indian College. Sewall made an altruistic and ironic bequest, predicated on the premise that the Narragansett country had only recently been opened up by war to this wave of colonial settlement. Two “Sewall Scholarships” were maintained from this

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fund and remained extant into the twentieth century.83 It is not known whether any Indigenous youth attended with their aid. Harvard eventually sold the land, divesting its portfolio of this tract fraught with stories of intercultural dissension.84

A Place Called “Mourning”: Oral Traditions in Colonial and Early Republic Rhode Island In the century following King Philip’s War, colonists erected few formal, permanent monuments upon the land to marks sites of violence. This absence arose from Protestant wariness about graven images and worldly veneration as much as from lack of fiscal resources in the wake of war, and it resulted in an intermittently visible commemorative landscape, where verbal accounts animated key spots. Consider how William Harris of Pawtuxet, a persistent thorn in Roger Williams’s side over boundary disputes, commemorated the wartime death of his son, Tolleration Harris. The elder Harris instructed in his will of 1678 that a piece of his farmland be renamed “Mourning” as a “monument of the death of my deare son.”85 Harris seemingly left no physical monument to this loss, no slate marker or wooden tablet, only a name. Folklore coalesced in Rhode Island around some sites, like the “grave appletree” that purportedly sheltered a settler mass burial of Great Swamp dead at Cocumscussoc. (The tree blew down in the unforgettable gale of September 1815.)86 Tradition held “that cows grazing in the yard would never eat grass on the Great Grave, even though covered with tempting clover blossoms.”87 A garrison or blockhouse during the war as well as a trading center, Cocumscussoc (also called Smith’s Castle in Wickford) accumulated ghastly stories of cross-cultural violence, which storytellers pegged to specific corners of the domestic architecture and grounds.88 What these accounts partially concealed were actual histories of ongoing interactions among postwar Native survivors and colonists, who in certain times and settings remained intimately connected in shared home- and taskscapes. At places like Cocumscussoc and the Jireh Bull fortified house (an intended rendezvous point for colonial troops, which was raided by Native parties on the eve of the Great Swamp massacre), material culture traces like glass shards, stone tools, and gunflints suggest that Natives continued to be present there well after the war had concluded, whether in free or unfree capacities. Some traces, like fragments of colonial glass bottles, bear signs of having been deliberately reworked in Native manners for new purposes (for

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example, as scraping and cutting tools). These exceedingly subtle signs are sometimes visible only under microscopic scrutiny, after the items have been painstakingly located and removed from the earth, as archaeologist Colin Porter has recently done. Porter has interpreted these assemblages of repurposed artifacts as evidence “that Native Americans were present and active participants in social relations in Narragansett Country during the postwar period of reconstruction,” in venues where these “former combatants” spent time in close proximity with former colonial opponents. Such materially supported histories of postwar rebuilding, reengagement, and renegotiation of Nativecolonial relationships are far more complex than the mythologies that coalesced around “garrison houses” as touchstones for colonial memories stressing Indigenous savagery and then subjugation or disappearance.89 And yet these actual histories may not be entirely separate from the postwar hauntings reported by Rhode Island colonists. “[S]tories of Native ghosts . . . express the moral anxieties and uncertainties provoked by the dispossession of a place’s Indigenous inhabitants,” Coll Thrush and Colleen Boyd have contended. “[I]ronically, Native hauntings disrupt dominant and official historical narratives as expressions of liminality that transcend fixed boundaries of time and space.”90 The ghostly folklore that arose among colonists in the near postwar era may have reflected, albeit obliquely, storytellers’ own ambivalence about the morality of what had transpired during wartime, and their knowledge that the Narragansett country had not been depopulated of Indigenous inhabitants—Natives who remained in transit through their homes, gardens, work yards, and roadways. Colonial commentators from this period generally noted historical grounds incidentally, in the course of other pursuits, rather than as self-conscious heritage tourism. Sarah Kemble Knight’s 1704 journey from Boston to New York took her through the heart of Narragansett country, where she did encounter local Natives, whose material poverty she disparaged rather than contextualized as an effect of massive Indigenous dislocations. Her journal said nothing directly about that area’s recent history of violence. Yet her account, which may bear other hands’ editorial traces, suggests how the war could sway colonial environmental imaginations. The journal imagined fantastic shapes in the land, sensing in the forests by Narragansett “a Sumpteous citty, fill’d wth famous Buildings and churches, wth their spiring steeples, Balconies, Galleries.”91 The mirage was an entrancing settler colonial vision of Anglo-American civilization emerging from the “wilderness” in the postwar period. The journal also mentioned Indianlike specters lurking in nighttime shadows: “Each

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lifeless Trunk, with its shatter’d Limbs, appear’d an Armed Enymie; and every little stump like a Ravenous devourer.”92 Surely the war’s legacy would have been well known in this region, and these phantoms may have been the spooked landscape legacies of remembered violence. As the eighteenth century continued, Anglo-American interest in local historicity began to grow. Colonial observers engaged war sites and “ruins” more deliberately, even academically, as formative pieces of the region’s past and their own ancestors’ lives (fig. 20). Great Swamp lured Ezra Stiles on a detour in early May 1755 as he journeyed through the bay lands. Stiles—soon to be installed as a minister in Newport, and decades away from the presidency of Yale College—jotted a private memo in his notebook: “Inquire where the Swamp Fight on Narragansett was.”93 A curiosity had lodged in his mind:

Figure 20. In the mid-eighteenth century Ezra Stiles, then based as a minister on the island of Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay (in the town of Newport), traveled among historical Narragansett terrain around the bay. He visited the Great Swamp at least twice in his adult life, engaging in disruptive actions within its sensitive grounds. He sketched this map of the central bay and eastern Sakonnet Wampanoag lands, based on documentary and oral sources that attested to numbers of Indigenous forces and populations. (Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

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How could he find the fort where, in December 1675, several hundred Narragansetts and Wampanoags had been attacked and burned to death? Stiles queried around for directions, assembled travel companions—presumably fellow colonists, not tribal members, as none were mentioned—and rode out on horseback to the fort site. He found it overgrown by vegetation yet seemingly undisturbed. There he probed around for remnants of the conflagration, “got some Bones” that “we dug up out of the Grave where Numbers were buried,” and recorded the features’ locations before resuming his journey back to Newport to preach the next day.94 Stiles knew from his prodigious reading of colonial histories and conversations with residents that the area was historically significant, but he wanted geographical verification. He wanted to personally touch the grounds of disaster. After his naive query and inaugural visit to Great Swamp in 1755, Stiles went back several times. Yet the site’s physical aspect changed dramatically in only a few decades, both from natural overgrowth and intentional clearance and plowing. In the final stretch of the Revolutionary War, a conflict that took significant numbers of Native as well as colonial men away from their homes for military service, Stiles reported that he had again “viewed” the swamp fort.95 In his Itineraries of May 1782 he sketched a “Plan of Swamp Fight in Narrags AD 1675.” A notation marked an “Oak 300 y. old measured 3 feet at Ground & two feet Diam at Eleven feet high”—but it no longer existed, as it had been “Cut down last Winter 1782.” He mapped a second oak as well, a “Tree near whose center a Bullet cut out 1782,” which, Stiles added, had likely been “shot there 1675,” judging from dendrochronological (tree ring) measurements he made. This too had been “cut down 1782.” Stiles’s amateur cartography recorded the memory of environmental traces of 1675: the fact that bullets had been lodged in the trees and noticed by landowners or visitors, but also that comparatively recent alterations—clearing of trees and brush—destroyed those traces.96 Clearance of the site indicated the nature of many colonial Rhode Islanders’ attitudes toward theaters of Native-settler violence in the eighteenth century. Rather than view the swamp island as sacralized terrain, ground with cultural power arising from mass death that would immunize it from violation through development, it had been treated as another parcel of privately owned property, open to management and cultivation.97 The swamp was largely secular space, in settler eyes, and the landowner was keen to get on with the business of living (and profiting) rather than preserving the past’s traces. Yet for enduring Narragansetts, the island remained sensitive, sacred

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grounds on which an unprecedented assault on community had unfolded, and where ancestors remained. In this light, Stiles’s casual site visitations and unearthing of bones appear more sharply as colonialist affronts, exercises undertaken in the name of Anglo-American augmentation of knowledge and protoantiquarian curiosity that reinscribed colonial power over a Native place. Stiles was not the first colonist to desecrate Native sites around the bay. In the 1650s enraged Natives demanded recompense for “the robbing of Pesiccush his Sisters grave” by a Warwick resident.98 But by the mid-eighteenth century, a new valuation of “antiquity” sanctioned thorough probing into such places, with the logic that knowledge of the local past was important to the collective consciousness of the maturing American colonies and soon-to-be-independent United States. In the context of Stiles’s world, his actions at the swamp were not reprehensible plundering but admirable efforts to record its past before too many ravages of time destroyed the evidence. Stiles relied on word-of-mouth and firsthand observation to deduce what had happened at Great Swamp. Such orally conveyed Anglo-American memories of King Philip’s War recurred throughout Stiles’s travel records. He used the war as a memorable chronological watershed, for instance, in measuring the passage of time and changes in the land: “This Morning viewed Mr Brightmans Orchard (which I suppose was set out since Philips War 1675) and tho it was set thick, yet the trees are generally above 30 feet and many above 40.”99 A ferryman at Narragansett regaled Stiles with accounts of a massive Native gathering before the outbreak of war: “Ferryman at Pt says, Tradition that day before the Narragans Ind 1675 proclaimed War they had a War Dance & drew out their Men & Marched two & Two & extended above Three Miles in Length.”100 Stiles also attempted to record Native memories. He reported in 1761 that Narragansett understandings of the war still existed in the area, mentioning one “Betty Cohoize I judge at 55. her Husband is Jos. Cohoize Br. to Toby Cohoize the oldest Indian alive, and who remembers K. Philips War & the Swamp Fight.”101 Eighty-six years after the Great Swamp campaign, Toby Cohoize still recalled it, though he must have been a child at the time of the devastation of his kinspeople. But Stiles registered nothing about the content of Cohoize’s recollections, only their endurance. Anglo-American oral traditions about such events are hard enough to retrieve from Stiles’s jottings, though they do surface. Native ones are even more elusive and inevitably mediated through this elite colonial man’s intellectual and theological frameworks. Stiles conducted his ethnographic listening outings primarily within colonial space, addressing the New England settler

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communities with whom he was most intimate. More rarely he ventured deep into Native geographies, including the areas inhabited by Narragansetts. Certain words and stories can only be heard in certain spaces, and Stiles, for all his roving, missed vast portions of the Northeast. “Nowecóntum púmmishem (I have a mind to travell).” Had Stiles traveled farther among Narragansett communities of the mid-1700s and been permitted access by their own pastkeepers, he might have learned this phrase and understood the impulse. “Wussaumpatámmin (To view or looke about)”: that could have resonated as well. Or perhaps they could have taught him this useful expression: “Nowánnesin (I have forgotten).”102 At the same time that Samuel Sewall and colonial proprietors were shoring up their holds on the bay lands, and intellectual pack rat Stiles was amassing fragments of evidence about the local past, Narragansetts experienced acute pressures. The designated tribal land base contracted severely as EuroAmericans eager to farm and pasture areas west of the bay acquired some parcels through legal purchases and others through de facto assumption of use rights by squatting and encroaching. The sachem Ninigret II sold away large tracts in the late 1690s and early 1700s, a controversial process that culminated on March 28, 1709, when he negotiated a reservation with the colony of Rhode Island. It preserved for the tribe a sixty-four-square-mile land base, a stunning reduction of antebellum homelands, on paper if not in everyday practice. The reservation’s bounds excluded countless sites significant to the community for material resources and cultural meanings. Though the 1709 arrangement secured tribal control over a small land base, this state of affairs did not remain stable for long. Rhode Island gradually undermined tribal sovereignty as it asserted managerial control (guardianship) over the reservation and its residents, partly in response to concerns that unscrupulous or financially strapped tribal leaders were illegally selling off lands. By the midnineteenth century Narragansetts had to secure Rhode Island General Assembly approval for land sales they wished to make. All the while, they navigated challenges to subsist. Some labored in indentured and low-wage positions that enmeshed them in debt. Some intermarried with residents of African descent, who also faced daunting prospects as “people of color” in an increasingly racialized and exclusionary society.103 And some—how many?— endeavored to endure in still-secure parts of ancestral homelands, away from colonial sight lines and policies. Surely they remembered recent upheavals and regroupings. But their voices will rarely arise from colonial archives scarcely aware of their continued existence.

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Christianity and Protestant missionizing contributed to transformations in historical sensibilities and attachments to place in this period. During the “Indian Great Awakening” of the mid-1700s, many Narragansetts as well as other southern Algonquians began to incorporate elements of Christianity into traditional lifeways, believing that public affiliation with the predominant religious systems of their Euro-American neighbors could be a strategy to help affirm political autonomy and land claims.104 A contingent of Narragansetts left ancestral grounds around the bay to join the Christian Indian community of Brothertown in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, participating in a large Northeastern Native migration westward that reshaped traditional connections to tribal identities, homelands, and cultural knowledge. Unlike the first wave of “praying towns” that allowed Algonquian affiliates to substantively remain in customary homelands, Brothertown members amalgamated into a new community as they worked their way to lands in Oneida (New York), then Wisconsin. Burial and mourning practices of Brothertown members suggested that aspects of their original tribal identities endured the passage west, though ethnogenesis gradually subsumed these discrete identifiers into a more communal sense of people and place in the new location.105 One of the Narragansetts who removed to Brothertown was Thomas Commuck. He published a hymnal in 1845 that incorporated a profusion of Algonquian names, including those of figures and places prominent in King Philip’s War: Sassamon, Wetamoe, Annawon, Pocasset, Assawomset, Seconet, Pokanoket, Tispaquin, and others—like the hymn titled “Philip” (fig. 21).106 “This has been done merely as a tribute of respect to the memory of some tribes that are now nearly if not quite extinct; also as a mark of courtesy to some tribes with whom the author is acquainted,” Commuck wrote in the preface to Indian Melodies, referring to this tribally diverse set of cultural touchstones, while invoking rhetoric of supposed Indigenous decline then prevalent in the wider culture. The handful of direct references to Narragansett heritage (such as hymns titled “Canonchet” and “Netop”) formed pieces of a multitribal mosaic, fittingly emblematic of the coalescent community at Brothertown. The names did not appear to bear any particular relation to the content of the hymns, and indeed, the earnest, Westernized expressions of faith would have been at odds with many figures’ anticolonial, antimissionary stances. But they signaled admiration for the stature of the real historical figures referenced. Commuck’s goal in publishing the hymnal was not strictly memorial. He also hoped to “make a little money, whereby he may be enabled, by wise and prudent management, to provide for the comfortable subsistence of his household,

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Figure 21. Thomas Commuck, a man of Narragansett descent who joined the multitribal, Christian-affiliated, migratory Brothertown movement, published this hymn titled “Philip” in his collection Indian Melodies (1845). The collection of worship music, harmonized by Thomas Hastings, invoked a wide range of Algonquian and other Native communities, leaders, and geographies in its pieces. Following the migration Commuck endeavored to sell off land in Narragansett country that he had inherited, to support his life in a new location. This copy of Commuck’s hymnal is now part of the Kim-Wait/ Eisenberg Collection of Native American Literature, used for teaching and research in the Kwinitekw River Valley. (Image courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College)

and be enabled, from time to time, to cast in his mite to aid in relieving the wants and distresses of the poor and needy, and to spread the knowledge of the Redeemer and his kingdom throughout the world.”107 Commuck pursued this mission of Christian charity, and of providing for his family’s material needs, through print-culture invocations of the storied Algonquian past. Not only literate in English, but also conversant with the musical conventions of Protestant worship, Commuck’s Indian Melodies demonstrated that Narragansetts of the mid-nineteenth century were capable of transporting and transmuting their heritage into newfound genres with potential to circulate far beyond the immediate tribal community.

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Yet at what cost did this migration come? In 1837, Commuck attempted to sell off ancestral land in Narragansett country, a farm inherited from his grandfather Joseph Commuck. The younger Commuck needed the money to support himself in the Brothertown venture but faced obstacles due to Rhode Island restrictions on Indian land sales. With luck, he hoped his forthcoming status as a U.S. citizen with clear individual property rights would enable him to complete the transaction.108 Paradoxically enough, losing land, from his perspective, could be instrumental to Indigenous continuance and reinvention.

Rhode Island “Nativism” and Detribalization of the Narragansetts Beginning in the early republic and gaining momentum over the nineteenth century, Rhode Islanders codified a memoryscape that recollected their area’s formative engagements with Narragansetts (and to a certain degree Wampanoags, especially on the eastern edges of the bay), establishing mythologies competitive with the Old World’s. A landscape built around Anglo ancestor-worship that valorized “conquest” of Natives, it understood King Philip’s War as an unfortunate and devastating but ultimately necessary chapter in the inevitable rise of white civilization on the eastern shores of a young nation. Whereas seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans marked little at all on the land to memorialize this violent era, Yankees of the nineteenth century became enthusiastically iconophilic, modifying the environment in ways that visibly expressed colonial losses and victories. Zachariah Allen exemplified these predilections. Born in Providence and educated at Brown University, Allen (1795–1882) built his fortune through a steam engine valve and textile enterprises at the Allendale and Georgiaville Mills, riding Rhode Island’s profitable wave of industrial transformation.109 Yet Allen remained devoted to the past. He became president of the Rhode Island Historical Society (founded in 1822) and a principal architect of public memory during the state’s Colonial Revival—a tireless speaker and writer on historical topics and a leader of outings to notable sites.110 Allen’s attunement to the past might have been conditioned by the precariousness of the present, which struck home when his mills failed and bankrupted him during the Panic of 1857. He continued, even intensified his antiquarian works after that, perhaps taking solace in thick layers of heritage that seemed to lend themselves to narratives of triumph apart from capitalist accumulation.

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Allen loped across Rhode Island as a preservationist whirlwind, ensuring the colonial past remained visible. He paid homage to “Indian-fighter” Benjamin Church’s gravesite in Little Compton / Sakonnet, personally spending to have its crumbling inscription rechiseled, and to “What Cheer” rock in Providence, where Roger Williams supposedly parleyed with Narragansetts on his flight-in-exile south, a feature that Allen wanted reinforced to prevent sand from consuming it.111 Allen led a convoy of two hundred antiquarians to Mount Hope in 1875, where they took a “tour of the localities of King Philip’s residence and death” before sitting down to a clam-and-chowder bake.112 He visited Great Swamp in August 1877 with two companions during an excursion to “explore the Marshy shore of the Worden pond for rare aquatic plants.” (The pond was the placid freshwater body stretching along the swamp’s southern edge.) They made a rowboat circuit of the pond, and that same afternoon “passed the Swamp where the great Indian fight occurred in 1675.” They returned home pleased with “a very agreeable excursion.”113 The swamp had been a magnetic place for antiquarians during the recent bicentennial of King Philip’s War in Rhode Island (1875–1876), and historical society followers, possibly including Allen, commemorated this by traveling to its storied island en masse “for the purpose of exploration and studying its topography.” Landowner John G. Clarke “caused several furrows to be ploughed in different places, and the party was soon diligently engaged in searching for mementoes of two centuries gone by. Their labors were rewarded by a few arrow heads and remnants of the conflagration in the form of charred wood.” The digging whetted appetites, so “an impromptu picnic followed in a cool and romantic grove near by.” All returned “feeling that a delightful day had been passed.”114 Swamp visiting was becoming a recreational activity, an antidote to city dwelling in an industrializing region. As a leisurely pastime for Euro-American historical enthusiasts with time and means to venture there, it framed the material remnants of tremendous violence as sources of casual entertainment (and probably souvenir collecting), attitudes that contemporaneous Narragansetts would not have shared. While Allen harbored a fascination with the landscapes of war and believed in the educational power of muddying one’s shoes in Rhode Island’s historic terrain, he also contributed to the realm of letters through local print culture. In 1876, he published Bi-Centenary of the Burning of Providence in 1676. Defence of the Rhode Island System of Treatment of the Indians, and of Civil and Religious Liberty.115 This minor tract, distilled from a spoken address, linked present and past through the vehicle of King Philip’s War and morally exonerated Rhode

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Island by contrasting its comparatively tolerant religious policies with those of other New England colonies, which he accused of relying on a Puritan “Jewish code” that repressed “heathens” and other dissenters. In reflecting on the wartime destruction of Providence, Allen proffered a mythology of amicable cross-cultural relations—with Roger Williams as the mediating linchpin—suddenly shattered by conflict. Allen distributed copies at home and abroad, including to Indigenous communities—though not necessarily the ones in closest proximity. The Sangeen Band of Indians of Ojibway on Lake Huron received a copy. They wrote back to Allen in 1877: “We heartily congratulate and shake hands in our hearts, and we appreciate the manner which you have undertaken by siding with the Aborigines of North America. We take great interest in the contents of the Book, and now affix our names and totems, showing how much we admire your undertaking.”116 Without interrogating further this supposed compliment from Indigenous readers, Allen responded in his diary, “They seem to be grateful to find that a white man has come forward to defend and do justice to them.”117 Allen was a complicated memory-agent, commemorating triumphs of Anglo-American “progress” while harboring moral reservations about the effects of cross-cultural contacts and violence, and seeking self-serving redemption through writing and public works. His interactions with the Ojibway, in the form of an extremely limited epistolary dialogue, pleased him because their response seemed to give Indigenous approval to his desired status as a champion for the Indian. The conservative heritage-claiming activities of Allen and fellow Rhode Islanders were partially responses to immigration of swarthy “whites” into the state.118 Grounding identities in the area’s seventeenth-century past distinguished nativist Rhode Islanders from ethnically different arrivals fresh from the Mezzogiorno or other parts of Europe and the world, millworkers and urban laborers who could claim no genealogical affiliation with participants in the early Indian Wars.119 Immigration reshaped many parts of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But longtime residents around the bay perceived their circumstances to be distinctively dire due to pronounced demographic changes in their industrializing centers. “In Rhode Island the situation is more than usually serious, the solution of the problem more difficult than in almost any other state,” Rhode Island Historical Society president and Brown University history professor Wilfred Munro told his membership in 1907, when the immigration “problem” (and attendant xenophobia) still weighed on local minds. Munro accused these culturally

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and linguistically diverse immigrants of “know[ing] nothing whatsoever of our history and traditions.” He posed a question to the society: “How shall we transform this mass of ignorance into an intelligent, law-loving, law-abiding community?” His solution was education: assimilation through historical programming and publications. On one level, Munro advocated a simple civic program of Americanization to inculcate national values, knowledge, and a common English tongue. But his proposal also involved localizing these immigrants, transforming them into “good Rhode Islanders” conversant with the particular conventions and history of that State.120 Munro’s vigorous defense of local historical studies belonged to a trend that began earlier in the Victorian period, in which compulsions to preserve Anglo-American pasts produced an efflorescence of antiquarian researches. Aimed at ultralocal readerships, these publications countered or complemented grand popular histories of the U.S. nation-state that omitted local pasts or sneered at them as parochial. “[L]ocal history is the A B C of all political and general history,” opined The Narragansett Historical Register in 1882: “It is frequently said that the subjects are ‘too trifling.’ Granted; but it is these trifles that make up the whole. It’s the trifles; families and villages that form the towns, and the towns that form the counties and finally the state, and the states that form our great united nation and glorious republic.”121 The authors acknowledged the U.S. nation-state’s significance, yet resisted homogenizing into an undifferentiated “American” fold. They clung to heterogeneity by articulating their own nativist versions of Narragansett identity, derived from the peculiar happenings, personages, and spots of South County and the bay. For years The Narragansett Historical Register undertook a massive project to reclaim and publicize Rhode Island’s colonial heritage, encouraging contributors to ferret out long-neglected traditions and data about the area’s historic nooks and crannies. The Register billed itself as “A Historical Magazine for the People,” an organ devoted to “antiquities, genealogy and historical matter.” Its democratic aspirations only extended so far, however. The “People” in practice meant a selective subset of those who lived around the bay, and hardly included Narragansetts themselves. The cultural by-products of Rhode Island Yankee nativism—most notably, a symbolic complex about Indigenous “vanishing” in the face of superior colonial growth—bore weighty consequences for actual (Indigenous) Narragansetts, as critics disputed their ability and right to maintain a tribal land base in South County. Narragansetts had been laboring since King Philip’s War and earlier to retain these homelands, as settler purchases and encroachments,

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westward emigration to Brothertown and movement to cities, decline of tribal monarchy, and vesting of trusteeship in the state all transformed tribal coherence and control over land use. Popular accounts from the Victorian period tended to link Narragansett people to the land itself, representing both as frozen atavisms. A “bit of Virginia set down in New England,” South County’s saltwater ponds, swamps, and rural plantations (sprawling estates once belonging to a landed aristocracy of slave-owning Narragansett planters like the Robinsons and Hazards) accrued a peculiar mythos, imagined as primitive zones cut off from modernity.122 A Providence Press correspondent took a driving tour in 1869 to observe Narragansetts: “You’re the first person I ever saw who seemed to care anything about these Indians,” [driver John] said, as we were rapidly making our way through the rocky country. “Most of the folks round here don’t trouble their heads much whether they live or die. They go down in their swamp and buy the right to cut wood in the winter, so that their own can grow; and that’s about all they have to do with them. You won’t find much Indian blood among ’em. You see they’ve got so mixed up with the negroes that it’s hard to tell which is Indian and which is negro. They are a lazy set any way!” Vitriolic, racist commentaries like this expressed widespread suspicions that intermarriage with people of African descent had diminished all “pure” Narragansett blood, making the contemporary Narragansetts miscegenated pretenders. “Living mostly by themselves,” continued the travel account, “even when but little Indian blood was in their veins, they have had no energetic life from without, and are in consequence nearly exhausted. Their lands were originally good, but are now almost worthless from lack of or bad cultivation.” On the way out, the journalist and his driver passed “a stray Indian but lonely looking and drear and without signs of life.”123 This view of the Narragansetts as a moribund people blocking land development continued to surface in “Last of the Narragansetts” stories insisting upon the dying out of the “race,”124 and mocking satires about Narragansetts as alcoholics incapable of managing their affairs.125 In the midst of such oppressive, anti-Indian public sentiments, actual tribal individuals, families, and communities—in contrast to their crude stereotypes—continued to inhabit, care for, and exercise sovereignty within ancestral homelands. Beginning in last decades of the nineteenth century, the state and the Narragansetts held a series of meetings about the tribe’s political status, setting in

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motion a process that culminated in an attempt to “detribalize” them. In Rhode Island and across the United States, Victorian reformers contended that Native populations were not capable of determining the best uses of their lands and attendant resources; they required oversight from outside and the intervention of non-Native “experts” to prevent mismanagement. The reformist impulse culminated nationally in the Dawes Severalty Act (or General Allotment Act) of 1887, which legalized the fracturing of collective landholdings and attempted to transform communal tribal societies into independent yeoman farmers. Yet detribalization in Rhode Island preceded national attempts to dissolve tribal bonds. In Rhode Island, a state-appointed committee of investigators—Dwight Adams of Warwick; George Carmichael, Jr., of Richmond; and George Carpenter of Hopkinton—investigated and deduced that tribalism kept the Narragansetts in a stagnant, dependent position. “Morally, the tribal relation exercises a pernicious influence, and encourages pauperism and vagabondism,” they alleged. “Could this idle and thriftless community be changed, within a decade of years, to an enterprising, industrious, and prosperous one, the value of the improvement would be of great price.”126 The commissioners pushed for self-sufficiency (as defined in Euro-American terms) among the Narragansetts, who then numbered about 119 persons on the reservation.127 The lead-up to the detribalization decision involved a series of meetings in 1879 between the committee and tribal members in which those present debated complex questions of identity, land use, and citizenship. The resulting published accounts of the proceedings were extraordinary documents. On the surface, they appeared to be nearly verbatim documentation of the acrimonious discussions, encompassing detailed articulations of the importance of particular places to the tribe, like the cedar swamp, wood lots, and Narragansett Church or Meeting House. But it is essential to recognize that these textual records were compiled and published under the auspices of the state-authorized committee, who had vested interests in packaging the diversity of tribal opinions in ways consonant with their own ends. Narragansett members who aired views during these hearings, but who did not control Rhode Island print-culture outlets, had no way to ensure that the “transcripts” adequately reflected their words, including their complicated characterizations of notable geographies. That being said, tribal representatives highlighted areas beyond the reservation proper—fishing and clamming locales, for instance, and “a great place for lamprey eels” north of Providence—as they described the terrain Narragansetts inhabited and used, giving compelling

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evidence of extensive Narragansett homelands well into the nineteenth century.128 The cedar swamp (estimated at several hundred acres, and lying west of Great Swamp) emerged as a major point of discussion. The commissioners doubted its importance: “These public lands, at present, are worth but little, and as they lie idle and unproductive, their income is necessarily small.”129 But tribal members disagreed. The swamp constituted part of what the tribe referred to as “public land,” areas not parceled out to individual title holders but instead left in common “for the advantage of the tribe.”130 Narragansetts continued to harvest and sell wood from the swamp, earning modest income. Gideon Ammons, president of the Indian Council, clarified this to Adams: MR. ADAMS: What is this swamp land worth according to your estimation? MR. AMMONS: It is worth for us to get out some stuff and some firewood, etc., but to take it and put it under the hammer and sell it, I suppose it might fetch two or three dollars an acre. MR. ADAMS: How many acres are there of that kind? MR. AMMONS: Something like four hundred. MR. ADAMS: What is it? cedar, or what? MR. AMMONS: There is a kind of swamp brush, hemlock, etc. MR. ADAMS: Do you get any profit from it? MR. AMMONS: O, yes, sir. Sometimes we sell from it some poles and sticks. It is a kind of relief for the tribe when there is nothing else to do. They can take a permit from the Council, and go in there and cut out some stuff for themselves.131

The Indian Council issued permits for cutting in the swamp and used the fees collected to support the meetinghouse and school.132 Maintenance of the swamp had direct bearing on the cultural and political life of the community, in other words. Yet tribal councilors feared this value would not register on the modern land market. “Put our Indian swamp at auction to-day, and it is only a mess of mud,” said Benjamin Thomas, a council member. “Once I went there, and I couldn’t find a single dollar’s worth that I could get out of it. . . . All the property we have wouldn’t be $1,500.”133 Moreover, the high expense of surveying and platting the swamp’s boggy terrain would diminish any profit margin.134 Councilman Daniel Sekater summarized the swamp’s value as a material resource and physical locus of political autonomy: “We have now here a little mite of property that belongs to the Narragansett Indians, conveyed to them by their foreparents, and it belongs to them; and it does seem to

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me that they ought to have the handling of it as they see fit. There is the Indian cedar swamp, whereby many in this tribe are benefitted by it. . . . If they want any wood, fencing stuff, or shingles, they can go in there and cut it; and if they come out as citizens, they will be deprived of that privilege.”135 In all this dialogue about Narragansett geographies, sites connected to the notorious violences of King Philip’s War seemed to have little presence. Great Swamp, which lay northeast of the reservation lands under direct discussion, was not noted as a vital locale. Nor did Nipsachuck Swamp in northern Rhode Island receive any mention. While Yankee antiquarians fixated on war sites like Great Swamp for their perceived romance and symbolic lure, the tribal community in attendance at these hearings focused their energies on a different swamp, an area pressingly in need of protection. It was not that Great Swamp had ceased to matter as a site of community meaning, identity, and subsistence (with its equally rich natural resources), only that immediate circumstances demanded a shift in publically expressed priorities for pragmatic purposes of community survival. Additionally, Native speakers may have recognized all too well the potential downsides of drawing state attention to their most sensitive terrain. The host of places not overtly mentioned in these hearings may have constituted a deliberately downplayed or concealed Indigenous cartography, a conscious public unmapping of Narragansett memoryscapes in a highly coercive setting. These interactions also raised foundational issues of epistemology—how various groups knew what they knew. When the state commissioners probed tribal members’ record-keeping practices, they seemed to infer that a primarily oral culture had only limited capacity to accurately convey information about the past across generations. Adams had this exchange with Gideon Ammons: MR. ADAMS:

You keep records? Yes, sir; a kind of a record of what we do. MR. ADAMS: How long back have you got that? MR. AMMONS: 1849. MR. ADAMS: And what were the records before that? MR. AMMONS: We didn’t have any then. MR. ADAMS: They were only legends handed down? MR. AMMONS: Yes, sir.136 MR. AMMONS:

Only legends. Yet the proceedings went on to show that Narragansetts maintained extremely specific knowledge of their past and their historical boundaries, knowledge passed down through families and community networks.137

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While some tribal witnesses called by the commissioners voiced support for the state’s detribalization plans, others vigorously criticized the dismantling designs. Resistance had been brewing for years. In 1867 a state committee reported that a “majority of the Indians, including the governing class, were evidently opposed to changing the existing relations to the State. They wished to be let alone in governing themselves. They objected to being taxed, to being subject to the draft, and especially to being made liable to be sued. They professed to be indifferent to the privileges of citizenship, and to set a low value thereon.”138 By 1879, state officials warmed to the prospect of putting the detribalization scheme into action. After hearing from “hundreds of witnesses” and “grop[ing] their way in the darkness through a mass of conflicting testimony,” the commissioners advised detribalization. On March 31, 1880, the General Assembly passed “an act to abolish the tribal authority and tribal relations of the Narragansett Tribe of Indians.”139 Rhode Island put 922 acres of the reservation lands up for auction in July 1882. The commissioners chose midsummer with the “hope that perhaps some of those who were then seeking rest at the sea-side might be induced to become purchasers,” and mounted an energetic publicity campaign, advertising the auction in newspapers and posting four hundred handbills across Washington (South) County. The auction took place over two days, first at 10:00 A.M. on July 11 in the Narragansett Meeting House, then on July 12 at the Fort Neck lot. Ultimately, the commissioners found themselves “disappointed” at the bids received, and openly doubted that non-Native purchasers would obtain decent returns on their investments.140 The only areas spared from sale were Fort Ninigret and three ponds (Watchaug, Cockampaug, and Deep), titles for which went to the state; and the immediate vicinity of the Narragansett Meeting House, which remained in Narragansett hands.141 Narragansetts received a total compensation of $5,000, or $15.43 distributed to each eligible tribal member, a paltry sum acutely remembered by recipients and their heirs.142 When the commissioners composed their final report about the proceedings, they gravely declared they were “recording the last act in the history of the Narragansett tribe,” and “closing the relations between the State and a once powerful tribe.”143 The illegal process of attempted detribalization was an ominous, detrimental event in the life of the community. In its wake, some tribal members moved away from the area to seek their livelihoods elsewhere. They left behind a complex human landscape of homesites, fences, stone walls, trail networks, burial grounds, a sawmill, an animal pound, and other features, which tended

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to fall into disuse over time and become overgrown, though some remained vivid sites of memory intimately connected to community stories.144 Yet while detribalization severely undermined Narragansetts’ physical center, it failed to substantively undo tribal connections. In the aftermath of detribalization, place-marking by antiquarians assumed a new function: mourning a people presumed dead.145 A monument installed in 1883 at Fort Ninigret commemorated the supposed demise of the Narragansetts and set the stage for monumentalization at Great Swamp twentythree years later.146 State and historical society representatives, along with a handful of Narragansetts, gathered at Fort Ninigret on August 30 to dedicate a memorial boulder. The five-ton stone, painstakingly hauled down from the inland hills, faced south and stood at the center of the fort’s grounds, surrounded by the beautifying additions of an iron fence, newly planted trees, and other landscaping (fig. 22). The goal of the dedication, as the ex-governor Elisha Dyer summarized it, was to “honor those [Indians] who, in the days of our State’s infancy and weakness, stood firmly and bravely by the side of our Colonial Fathers.”147 Not one of the Euro-American speakers at the ceremony found detribalization problematic. In fact, the day’s chief speaker praised Rhode Island’s historical relations with and contemporary approach toward Narragansetts, arguing that “Rhode Island has nothing to regret or to conceal. . . . Happy would it have been if her Indian policy had been followed by the other colonies, and by our nation.”148 Having emancipated Narragansetts from what it saw as antiquated tribal relations and forms of land tenure, the state concluded these individuals were ready to partake in U.S. citizenship. A discourse of Rhode Island innocence pervaded the discussion. Commissioner Dwight Adams asserted that no resistance marred the transition, saying that Narragansett tribal council members “have been in practical harmony with us through every stage of our labors.” Difficult questions involving tribal membership and distribution of compensation “were all settled without litigation, and with scarcely an appearance of friction.”149 Narragansetts had “melted away like hoar frost before the summer sun,” added Governor Augustus Bourn.150 Frederic Denison’s oration focused on how the boulder preserved historical memory for posterity. Tribal history prior to European contact could only be approximated because Natives lacked the technological apparatus and selfawareness to record it, he claimed. “Alas! without written language, without institutions, without a code of laws, without arts . . . the natives sat in darkness . . . and transmitted no lessons of knowledge to the centuries following

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Figure 22. Fort Ninigret in Narragansett country lies close to saltwater ponds, Block Island Sound, and Long Island Sound, important natural resources and travel routes for Native as well as colonial communities. Rhode Island antiquarians dedicated this memorial boulder in the 1880s, in the close aftermath of the contested “detribalization” process that attempted to dissolve communal bonds and landholdings among the Narragansett Tribe. The metal fence in the background purports to trace the outlines of the fortifications; material signs of engagement with the memorial exist nearby; and individuals or groups appear to have added a tire swing (as of October 2014). (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

them.”151 Only communicative modes that fixed meaning into textual form— as messages independent of both sender and recipient, not reliant on oral transmission—could adequately convey meaning. An even more ardent iconophile than most Colonial Revivalists, Denison concluded by calling for similar monuments to be erected elsewhere in Rhode Island.152 (Several of these later materialized.153) Poet of the day Millen Greene echoed these sentiments by clarifying that orality—the domain of Native peoples, as he saw it— was adequate for inspiring flights of romantic fancy, but deficient for record keeping. Meanwhile, he added, the inscription on the boulder locked in a meaning evident to all who read it:

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And future wayside travellers here will pause To read the magic words.154 In this colonial view, texts and monuments counted as meaningful and permanent, whereas oral tradition and storytelling were ephemeral, unreliable. The orator’s dismissive characterization of Native past-keeping practices was problematic enough; nor did he acknowledge the Narragansetts’ long familiarity with English-language literacy and print culture, a historical reality that would have compromised these easy oppositions. This self-congratulatory exercise began to lose its coherence when the final two speakers stepped forward. Gideon Ammons, one of two tribal council members invited to deliver remarks, initially praised the state commissioners, saying that in “all matters we met with joy and parted in love.” He seemed to agree with the historical narrative they proffered, confirming he was “highly gratified” by Denison’s description of the Narragansett past. But his final three sentences broke from these sentiments: “Our tribe now has no legal existence, and no person can be found to represent the Indian race. The change is so great, I feel sorry to think of it. I am done.”155 These bitterly laconic words threw into question the entire narrative constructed by Euro-American commentators. Resentment and sorrow were not supposed to have any place in what commentators limned as the inevitable, effortless, consensual decline of the Narragansetts, as in the penultimate stanza of Greene’s poem that envisioned them sauntering “Towards their setting sun” and the “happy hunting ground.”156 Fellow tribal council member Joshua Noka continued the deconstruction by insisting that despite their ancestors’ aid to settlers, “scorn and sneer and eye of contempt were cast on us.” He intimated an unsettling backstory to the tribe’s dissolution: “While we were trying to preserve and quietly maintain our government, some of our white neighbors were running to the General Assembly asking for the abolishment of our tribal authority.”157 Noka concluded not with paeans to the state, but with demands for Rhode Island to act justly toward the tribe’s property holdings at their church. He asked for an access road and aid in finishing construction on the building. This parting salvo attempted to hold state politicians accountable to pressing community needs at home. Earlier in the ceremony, state representative Jonathan Chace told the audience, “we, as citizens of the Union, are liable and responsible for the treatment of the Indians in the western territories,” displacing tensions onto a remote region and implying such issues had been satisfactorily settled in Rhode Island.158 Noka’s demurring remarks undercut that certainty. A minimalistic,

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conciliatory inscription on the Fort Ninigret boulder could not relate the fractious details of the detribalization hearings: MEMORIAL OF THE NARRAGANSETT AND NIANTIC INDIANS THE UNWAVERING FRIENDS AND ALLIES OF OUR FATHERS159

Nor could the inscription preserve in material traces Ammons’s and Noka’s protests. A lengthy newspaper account of the event omitted their criticisms altogether.160

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

While monumentalizing fervor reshaped Fort Ninigret’s landscape and put it on the map for Rhode Island antiquarians, Great Swamp remained unmarked by colonial monuments by the 1890s. Only one or two people ventured out to the battleground each year, according to landowner John G. Clarke.1 Clarke, esteemed locally as a judge and agriculturalist, gave an interview around 1891 to a traveler from New York. “Anonymous” (a critical outsider, not a homegrown Yankee) made a “pilgrimage” to the swamp, and a detailed account of his sojourn appeared in The Newport Mercury.2 Alighting from the train one Saturday in July at the Kingston station, he received a surly reply from the porter he asked about the site: “Never heard of King Philip’s war, and guess you’re mistaken about a battle ever having been fought in this neighborhood.” He fared better with the station agent, who “had often visited the island in his boyhood” and provided directions. A half-hour carriage ride later, he disembarked at the home of Clarke, “possessor of the island.” The grounds and house had been in the family for more than a hundred years, so Clarke had deep familial knowledge of land use at the site. Intriguingly, the house’s front entrance displayed a tablet carved with the date 1661 and the name Coginaquint, said to be the original Narragansett “owner of all the land in the vicinity” who deeded the area to colonists. It was a domestic memorial to the history of land tenure at the swamp, and visible affirmation of the supposed justness of the transfer.3 Almost certainly it made no gesture to the fraught intercultural diplomacy and coercions of the seventeenth century that underlay such exchanges. Clarke showed off artifacts he picked up from the grounds over the years: stone pipes and pestles, hatchets, wampum, arrowheads, spear points, and charred kernels of corn, a peck of which he had once

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collected. An elaborate Dutch spoon had also been unearthed. An earlier visitor to the site had spent a day digging and returned home in “triumph” with a rusty piece of a flintlock. The traveler donned rubber boots and slogged out to the island with a young guide, laboring through blueberry bushes and meadow grass. He learned that around 1770, Clarke’s grandfather plowed the land and planted corn, “on which occasion numerous relics of the great fight were found.”4 After that, the site lay “practically untouched” and accumulated a covering of brush. “There is no mistake about the identity of the spot,” the observer confirmed. “The soil is simply black at this point with charcoal, several good sized pieces of which we carried away with us.” His imagination roved in the solitude to imagine “the terrible scene of carnage that some of yonder ancient oaks may in their infancy have looked upon.” Given the historical significance of the conflict, he was perplexed about the site’s apparent neglect by state residents: “a greater popular regard ought to be shown for this old battlefield, which calls to mind the days of the second Charles, and the grim Puritans, and the red men who tinged our early New England history with so much romance. Indeed, are we not justified in thinking that Rhode Island ought at least to honor with a monument the spot where the dusky followers of Canonchet came to grief?” Overall, the swamp’s tangles were terra incognita for most Yankees in this period, not mapped or signposted in formal ways. Yankee desires for a monument came to fruition when the Society of Colonial Wars installed commemorative markers at the swamp on October 20, 1906.5 Participants reprised the repertoire of place-marking activities displayed at Fort Ninigret in 1883: they had rhetoric and ritual ready at hand for their performance before an audience of a hundred. The heightened sensitivity to detribalization that had been so palpable at Fort Ninigret abated somewhat by 1906, at least in non-Narragansett eyes, and less direct discussion of current circumstances took place. The monument—a shaft of solid granite twenty-six feet high, weighing eleven tons, tapering slightly from base to top—occupied a hillock in the middle of a clearing. Four midsize stones surrounded it, labeled with the names of the Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut colonies. Text inscribed upon a slate tablet at the base of the mound read: ATTACKED WITHIN THEIR FORT UPON THIS ISLAND THE NARRAGANSETT INDIANS

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MADE THEIR LAST STAND IN KING PHILIP’S WAR AND WERE CRUSHED BY THE UNITED FORCES OF THE MASSACHUSETTS CONNECTICUT AND PLYMOUTH COLONIES IN THE “GREAT SWAMP FIGHT” SUNDAY

19 DECEMBER 1675

The monument’s erectors intended it to stand as a signifier of Anglo-American ascendancy, a “perpetual memorial of the stern purpose and high valour of our forefathers.” The four outlying boulders were meant to “symbolize the strength of that fourfold bond [among the colonies], whose pact of peace shall stand in all the future years, the indestructible record of a rugged race.”6 They conveniently downplayed Rhode Island’s military abstention from most of the conflict and the dim view taken of that colony by the three United Colonies during the war. The material form of the monument supported its symbolic message. The “rugged granite shaft, frost-riven from the native hills, untouched by tool of man” was a “fitting emblem of the rugged and unadorned Pilgrim and Puritan of sixteen hundred and seventy-five,”7 one orator explained. Although the shaft was not hewn or sculpted in the manner of most contemporaneous monuments, it was hardly untouched. Quarrying teams had to wrest it from the earth and haul it overland, on the merest of roads, into the swamp’s interior. Moreover, it bore the imprint of thousands of years of Western cultural traditions surrounding monumentalization, echoing classical forms of commemorative architecture like the obelisks of Egyptian and Roman traditions. Nearer to home, its shape recalled the Bunker Hill Monument in Massachusetts (completed in 1842) and the Washington Monument in the U.S. capital (1884). The Bunker Hill Monument surely informed Rhode Islanders’ cultural consciousness since they perpetually weighed their neighboring state’s historical legacy against their own. The swamp monument curved slightly and bore no capstone, subtly distinguishing it from those urban obelisks. Rowland G. Hazard delivered the day’s oration, a lengthy recapitulation of the war’s events that must have tested listeners’ fortitude. Some of his remarks acknowledged the limits of conventional colonial chronicles and tried to recuperate Native perspectives of Philip “as he doubtless appeared to his own people: the gifted leader, wise Sachem and crafty general; the far-seeing

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and eloquent defender of his people’s right to maintain their ground against the tide of ever encroaching whites.”8 But the rest underscored Narragansetts’ alleged disappearance, bolstering the memorial tablet’s claim that the tribal community had been “crushed.” “The vanished Indian, once all powerful here, stands forth in memory as we survey the scene,” he intoned. “But let us not judge too harshly. The weaker race gave way to the stronger. Surely the sons of the strong can afford to be generous.”9 These lines he delivered at Memorial Hall in nearby Peace Dale, where the party decamped on account of rain after three decidedly unvanished Narragansetts tore away the veil concealing the shaft. Their thoughts can only be imagined, as well as their reasons for participating in this public theater, since no one recorded that dimension of the proceedings. Hazard’s oration neatly erased human presence from the swamp, substituting a mildly romantic nature: “To-day no sound breaks the silence of that secluded spot save only the snapping of a twig beneath the agile foot of the feeding fawn, or the whirring of the startled partridge as he circles behind the birches by the path. Time has brought peace to that island of Fate.”10 In no way, it intimated, could the tranquil swamp be an active site for Narragansetts or a place with meanings vehemently disputed. While this was the dominant storyline in this commemorative spectacle, and the one registered in a published account of the proceedings, it is worth recognizing that the Narragansett witnesses likely returned home to their families relating other stories, memories, and critiques. The Rhode Island Historical Society acted as more than a disinterested bystander in these events. The site’s legal claimants in early 1906 were the Hazard family, related by marriage to the Clarke family, and prominent landowners and manufacturers in South County. They transferred title of the “Great Swamp Fight Site” to the society on May 24, 1906, for the sum of one dollar, with the provision that only the monument should ever stand on its grounds.11 They did not want the roughly five acres sullied by other developments and stipulated that any other construction would negate the deed. The Hazards publically confirmed this transaction at the dedication by enacting a ritual of “title, turf, and twig,” formally handing it over to the society president Wilfred Munro.12 The turf-and-twig ritual was a feudal ceremony also used in colonial English America to assume possession of land, and the Hazards’ reenactment was a deliberately archaic act, calling up bygone rituals to legitimate land tenure in the present. A hardy subset of the audience also thrashed through wet underbrush to perform a ceremony of “beating out the bounds,” collectively confirming the plot’s parameters.13 The transfer delighted the society. Not

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only could it boast artifacts and rare manuscripts in its collection cabinets; it possessed the very grounds formative to early Rhode Island!14 “By this deed the Society has thus become proprietor or rather custodian of one of the most important historic sites in this State,” Munro later wrote, heaping praise on the Hazard family for their public spiritedness.15 The historical society thereby became legal custodian of the massacre grounds—and remains so, a situation that has occasioned ongoing conversations. The question of who “owned” the swamp site and access routes received one answer in the printed version of the commemorative proceedings assembled for public distribution. Three maps folded into the back of the volume depicted the land surrounding the monument. The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad sliced through the center. (Installing a railroad across Rhode Island had posed a formidable challenge for engineers, who struggled to lay tracks in the swamplands of South County.16) In the first map, placenames asserted settler presence: Wilbur Hill, Worden’s Pond, Kingston Hill. Not a single Narragansett toponym appeared. The second map zoomed in to the property-line level, where rigid geometry divided up the land into individual owners’ plots belonging to J. G. Clarke, W. Marchant, J. C. James, and their homesites. These holdings influenced access to the monument site, since roads leading to the island cut through private property. The final map zoomed in even farther to the island and monument, placing them at the nexus of a “new road to highway” and “old road.” Other contexts besides earlytwentieth-century traffic routes evaporated. This cartography spatially naturalized settler hegemony, visually denying Native conceptions of the local geography. More disturbing, the maps gave inquisitive readers explicit directions for finding the grounds, where they might pursue the kinds of destructive collecting that Stiles, Clarke, and other Euro-Americans had done for generations. Yet though the monument was intended to be public, the grounds remained largely sequestered due to the rough terrain. Only in the mid-1930s did an auto road and parking area arrive.17 1906 was a signal moment for colonial place-marking in Rhode Island, for the prosaic reason that in 1905 the historical society succeeded in lobbying the legislature to appropriate fifteen hundred dollars for “the purpose of suitably marking sites of historic interest in the State.” The idea of commemorating such sites had been long percolating, but this monetary infusion galvanized antiquarians into action. True to form, they convened a Committee on Marking Historical Sites. Within the next few years, they oversaw the installation of tablets at storied Anglo-American sites like the Gilbert Stuart House and

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Roger Williams Spring, as well as spots that exemplified violent cross-cultural interactions, like the “Swamp Fight Dead” grave of forty colonists at Cocumscussoc / Smith’s Castle in Wickford (installed June 15, 1907), and “Pierce’s Fight” in Central Falls (September 21, 1907).18 Never mind that the forty soldiers said to be buried at Cocumscussoc might in fact lie elsewhere.19 The Gorham Manufacturing Company in Providence produced the tablets, giving them stylistic uniformity. In addition to these vernacular venues, interest in King Philip’s War arose in more academic institutions. The John Carter Brown Library in Providence hosted a well-attended exhibition of rare narratives about the war and let its copy of a scarce 1676 imprint about the swamp campaign be used to create a facsimile in 1912, making that previously obscure account available as a souvenir to a wider readership. This reproduction cleverly used the swamp shaft as the initial “I” (the enlarged, ornate capital letter beginning a paragraph) on its first page, typographically weaving the modern commemorative landscape into an older narrative.20 One of the swamp site grantors was Caroline Hazard (1856–1945), a life member of the Rhode Island Historical Society, who brought a feminine sensibility to place-marking and history-writing practices, which were oftentimes considered masculine enterprises. Born in Peace Dale just up the road from the then-intact Narragansett reservation, and educated in Providence and Europe, Hazard composed romantic ballads and short stories infusing racialized nostalgia into the Narragansett country.21 These partially fictionalized sketches intimately engaged a landscape she enlivened through folklore and anecdotes. Animating the past with color was important, Hazard believed. “We must have facts, but they must be clothed, not in the cerements of the grave, but with some reflection of their own life and light. So traditions spring up, fancy plays with them, and they take their place in the furniture of the mind.”22 The colonial past and its brutalities had become grist for the artiste. Hazard published Narragansett Ballads in 1894. The collection led off with a three-part verse account of the swamp fight.23 “Blow, blow, thou south wind, blow,” it began, a Shakespearean allusion that elevated the subject matter to lofty aesthetic heights and referenced Narragansett hopes in December 1675 that warm wind would “break the bands of frost”—the frozen-solid swamp water permitting colonial troops to march into the palisade.24 Domestic quiet reigned inside the palisade, but something was amiss: “The frozen swamp lies hard / As rock, along the shore, / Where all should be soft marsh.” The poem read the Great Swamp encounter as the end of the Narragansetts: “So was the Indians’ power gone, / Avenged were Englishmen, / For from the night of

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that Swamp fight / They never rose again.” Hardly a trace persisted of the catastrophe: “All that remains are some few grains / Of corn parched on that day.”25 The final piece in Hazard’s poetic swamp trio was a retrospective narrated by a colonial survivor fifty years later (1725), who transformed the December 1675 Native attack on Jireh Bull’s garrison, a closely related event, into morally instructive reminiscence.26 Whereas male historians of the period who wrote and orated on the subject tended to present their accounts as indisputable factual truth, Hazard chose the mode of song or poetry to convey more self-consciously subjective views. When she helped deed away the swamp site in 1906, Hazard was in the midst of her tenure as the fifth president of Wellesley, the women’s college in Massachusetts, where she built a reputation for dramatically recontouring the land with Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Wellesley neighbors the town of Natick, an important locale for Nipmucs and tribal relations. The campus hosted the Zuni contingent visiting greater Boston and Deer Island in 1882, an episode that perhaps Hazard learned about. Hazard had retired from the college by the time she wrote another local history-inspired collection, Anchors of Tradition (1924). That volume bore signs of unprecedented social upheaval in the United States, as the nation was still recovering from traumas of the First World War and keen to seek reassurance in a past whose moral coordinates seemed—to some—more stable. Hazard traveled extensively around South County visiting historic spots, colonial as well as Native, about which she later published in essay form.27 Her itineraries wound by the swamp, where the monument she helped dedicate years before had become a signature landmark on the modern railway route: “It can be plainly seen from the train approaching or leaving Kingston, a few miles south of the station on the west side of the track. It stands in a wilderness of blueberry bushes and small bayberry trees. An occasional cedar, the small pointed cedar of the coast, shows almost black against the misty autumn colors. Cranberries grow at its base, and creeping pine brightens the ground. A lonely spot it is, far from any dwelling place, given into the charge of the Rhode Island Historical Society to keep forever as a memorial.” Her attention soon shifted away from this tableau, as her tolerance for difficult subjects had limits: “one turns with relief from these deeds of blood and slaughter to the more familiar thought of the every-day life that was lived on these lovely Narragansett meadows and hillsides.”28 Hazard ended the essay by turning to stones under trees near her house, thought to mark Native graves. She used a series of poetic verses to meditate on scenes of past Indian lives, all nestled within sedate cycles of seasonal change and the

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assurance that her own home was safe from dangers in the present.29 This gently, even nostalgically, rendered landscape concealed a problematic narrative. Natives simply passed away, a naturalized melting that affirmed the propriety of the current land-tenure regime, where an auteur not only asserted the right to treat the Narragansett past in imaginative terms of her own devising, but also laid claim to the burial sites themselves.30

The Narragansett Dawn and Great Swamp Memorial Pilgrimage The turn of the twentieth century marked a political ebb for Narragansetts. Their constrained legal status, the forced dismantling of their reservation, and the proliferation of Anglo-American place-claims might seem evidence that Narragansett memoryscapes had been irreparably diminished or eradicated. Yet despite these transformations, Narragansetts retained important connections to ancestral grounds and traditional practices. These connections continued even as they took jobs and established homes in urban areas like Providence, served in the U.S. military, and otherwise negotiated modernizing economies, social formations, and modes of communication. A tribal magazine called The Narragansett Dawn commenced publication on May 1, 1935, and though short-lived (1935–1936), it accomplished vital work by keeping community members connected with each other and other Natives and by transmitting cultural knowledge.31 The frenetic publishing activities of The Narragansett Historical Register, Caroline Hazard, and like-minded Yankee antiquarians may have dominated the regional literary marketplace in terms of sheer numbers, but The Narragansett Dawn offered a significant print-culture counterweight to their colonial interpretations of the area’s past and present. The Dawn’s essays helped maintain older Narragansett cultural geographies and enabled the emergence of newer ones that critiqued or simply sidestepped nativist constructions. In the July 1935 issue, for example, Theodore Dennis Brown penned an essay called “Narragansett Territory,” noting that “unless you have a guide who knows the route,” it was difficult to access the area’s historic grounds. Brown’s tour, grounded in lifelong experiential knowledge of land and water, as well as intergenerational Indigenous insights, included Great Swamp near the beginning of his presentation. He described it as the place “where the Narragansetts, under King Philip, made their last big stand for their homes. Back in the woods from the monument is the old Indian Fort, the Indians [sic] stronghold, until Capt. Church broke it.”32 Yet Brown did not linger there. The rest of his itinerary roved to the Narragansett

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Church and School, both critical structures in the life of the community; to storied landforms and burying grounds; and to a rich constellation of places with long-standing significance. Brown and other Dawn correspondents who described meaningful places acknowledged sites of traumatic loss, but embedded them within dense geographies incorporating locales crucial to contemporary survival and ancestral memory, like the cedar swamps.33 These descriptions exemplified a broader characteristic about the parameters of remembrance. While colonial communities zeroed in on discrete sites and episodes of violence, using them to encapsulate narratives about the alleged final destruction of Algonquians, Native-authored interpretations like Brown’s tended to contextualize such sites within the longue durée—millennia-long histories of Native habitation and persistence in the shadows of colonialism, encompassing far more capacious homelands (fig. 23).34 Or as Brown expressed it in a piece about “Historic South County” that acknowledged the contested “sale” of the reservation lands: “we have plastered it with Narragansett names and traditions and legends, that cannot be wiped out, nor bought, nor sold, nor lived down.”35 The Narragansett Dawn originated from the labors of Princess Red Wing (1896–1987), a woman who identified as Narragansett–Pokanoket Wampanoag, and a prominent voice for area Natives in the mid-twentieth century.36 Red Wing played an instrumental role in the pan-Indian movement that swept New England Native communities in the early to middle years of the twentieth century, in which tribal communities selectively took up regalia, practices, icons, and stories from other parts of Indigenous North America and incorporated them into their own expressions of heritage and culture. These borrowings were partly strategic decisions, ways of making Algonquian peoples legible as “Indians” to Yankees and other non-Natives who tended to read Western or Plains practices as signs of authentic indigeneity.37 For Narragansetts, still enduring detribalization’s effects and their delegitimation by the state as tribal people, the pressure to broadcast indigeneity was acute. Red Wing understood the social and political stakes of communicating crossculturally to Rhode Islanders uncertain of Narragansetts’ continued existence. The Tomaquag Indian Museum she developed with avocational historian and anthropologist Eva Butler gave material presence to this work, operating for decades at Dovecrest (Exeter) as a popular stop for tourists and students.38 While museums originated from Eurocentric assumptions about collection, display, and visual consumption—often based on the artifacts of “Others”— tribal peoples in the twentieth century began shaping museums for their own

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Figure 23. This roadside sign, erected by the state of Rhode Island in 1933 and installed by the entrance to the dirt road connected to the interior monument site, addresses the 1675 colonial attack on Great Swamp. Its text conveyed a message about military conquest of the Narragansetts (“decisively defeated”), and, like similar commemorative markers from the area, implied tribal discontinuance. Yet in the same era of the 1930s, tribal members were regathering and reorganizing while broadcasting their own accounts of these pasts through the magazine The Narragansett Dawn. This sign was photographed in 2010 but has been absent from its holder in recent years. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

purposes. The Tomaquag accomplished this reversal, as did the Tantaquidgeon Museum at nearby Mohegan, established during the Great Depression. Rather than isolating artifacts as curiosities of bygone peoples (as antiquarians tended to do with “Indian relics”), these Native-run museums showcased Indigenous perspectives and curatorial practices and used material culture to make tangible connections between ancestors and present-day descendants.39 Yankees coded the landscapes of South County as quiet, rural enclaves for rejuvenation, but other readings that questioned these premises and symbols endured in the early and mid-twentieth century. In 1936 Red Wing recorded from a Native “old-timer” an unsettling tradition about South County’s spruce trees:

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It is said, that each of those spruce trees grow where a drop of Narragansett blood was shed. They will ever grow in South County, no matter how much civilization crowds them. It is said of one settler, that he decided to cut down every spruce on his 500 acres of Indian land because they haunted him, and he was killed in the attempt. He cut with such vengeance, when he heard the story, that each spruce was the soul of a Narragansett killed by a white man, that a stately spruce which he set out to destroy, fell upon him, and killed him. They really do look, as they stand here, there, and everywhere throughout Narragansett country, that they were souls of departed Red Folk.40 The very trees reproached non-Natives, reminding them of the dispossession and violence underlying contemporary claims to private property. More pragmatically, the story warned away those who would cut down the spruces, using rhetoric of haunting to protect the environment from overzealous buildup. Great Swamp was especially resonant ground for Red Wing. She helped inaugurate an annual memorial gathering there called the Great Swamp Massacre Ceremony. Seeking to keep the swamp animate in community consciousness, she and others worked to ensure a place for Native women in a space frequently coded as masculine by antiquarians (and their granite shaft, symbol par excellence of phallocentric machismo).41 A ritual that connected past, present, and future, the ceremony drew Narragansetts and other Natives into the swamp with renewed collective clout. Pilgrimages took place throughout the twentieth century, transforming the massacre grounds into a venue for radical protest, traditional sociability, and sacred engagements. In 1945, the program honored Second World War veterans and ended with a rendition of “God Bless America.” The gathering was advertised as free and open to the public in 1968. The 1972 event dissolved into honking car horns following remarks that some of the three hundred attendees found contentious.42 These emotional—and occasionally contested—rituals contradicted the erasure narrative inscribed on the monument, still proclaiming Narragansetts “made their last stand” there. “When I go to the Great Swamp, I have an odd feeling,” Emeline Thomas Colbert reflected in 1979. “I couldn’t explain that to anybody, the kind of feeling that I personally have when I go to the Great Swamp. It’s just like a vibration or an overall feeling of something around.”43 While Great Swamp has been potent as a signifier for Narragansett people, it has also resonated with and encompassed other communities. Red Wing

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repeatedly invited Zara Cisco Brough from the Hassanamisco Nipmuc to read poetry and take part in the ceremonies during the 1960s, for example, embracing Nipmucs—already linked to Narragansetts through kinship ties—as an integral part of the commemorative circle. Other Native and non-Native people from the region and beyond have also traveled there to reflect and commemorate.44 The flier from the 1968 Great Swamp Memorial Pilgrimage included a road map plotting the swamp’s location on a highway plan of southern New England, highlighting routes to Hartford, Boston, New York, and Worcester. This oriented participants from afar, among them “urban Indians,” who might not have intimate, passed-down knowledge of the site’s geographic situation but nevertheless wanted to take part, so it outlined the location relative to the standardized network of U.S. roads.45 Narragansetts routinely invited “outsiders” to participate in certain of their commemorations and celebrations, demonstrating that the circle in which they stood was an organically evolving grouping that expanded or contracted depending on circumstances and community needs.46 And beyond these semipublic proceedings, tribal individuals and groups continued private, internal engagements with these meaningful grounds. The swamp overall accommodated a variety of uses in the mid- to late twentieth century. The Rhode Island Department of Agriculture purchased it for $23,400 in 1950 (except for the monument site), taking it out of private hands, with the intent to use it as a wild game and fowl refuge.47 Hunters ranged along its deer runs.48 U.S. Navy pilots from the nearby Quonset Naval Air Station marched through its depths on multiday survival tests.49 Boy Scouts and 4-H clubs took educational field trips along its trails,50 while busloads of tourists stopped by on cultural outings.51 Trains continued to chug through its heart, an occasionally dangerous stretch of rail.52 State regulations attempted to control access, but the swamp was becoming a social commons, an environmentally complex space that could support multiple uses by diverse communities who perceived it as a shared resource for South County and Rhode Island residents. Political mobilization intensified among Narragansetts and American Indian communities in this period. Yet even in the consciousness-raising 1960s, Yankee geographies gave scant weight to Narragansett senses of place that understood the swamp as grounds seared by settler colonialism’s violences. “Highly industrialized Rhode Island has one of the wildest and most impenetrable areas in New England almost smack in the middle of rural South County,” The Providence Sunday Journal reported in 1960. It did mention the

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massacre—the occasion when “the New England colonists combined forces to whip the leggings off the Narragansett Indians during the King Philip’s War.”53 A rising tide of environmentalism and backlash against urban overdevelopment fed popular views of the swamp as a place to be appreciated primarily for its ecological value. The swamp fascinated non-Natives as an exotic venue ideal for connecting with nature: a “primitive” place where “a small Noah’s ark of harmless creatures walk, crawl, swim, glide and fly” amid varied vegetation, according to a 1964 description. This account did note the Great Swamp campaign of 1675 in some detail, fixating on how the swamp had frozen solid, enabling attack. But it did not dwell on this past. Instead it beckoned visitors to solitary trails where “Breezes ruffle the tree tops, but down below, on the well-marked path, it is hot, humid and shadowy.”54 No longer a dismal, forbidding place as the Puritans had seen it, the swamp now appeared to many as a shielded, ecologically significant retreat from the incessant whir of the modern built environment. In coming years, however, the very valuation of “nature” in this region occasioned major conflicts between Euro-American residents and a sovereign tribal nation still very much present in their midst.

“Ruining” the Land: A Lawsuit, a Reservation, and a Casino Debate Fortunes began to change politically for Narragansetts in the 1970s. They filed suit against the town of Charlestown in 1975 for thirty-two hundred acres, claiming that during state-sponsored detribalization and selling of the reservation in the 1880s, their lands had passed out of tribal ownership in violation of the Nonintercourse Act (1790), which requires federal oversight in land dealings with Indians in the United States. This was a legal gambit that proved successful in the high-profile lawsuit about aboriginal title brought by Penobscots and Passamaquoddies against the state of Maine (1975), the first in a series of landmark rulings along the Atlantic seaboard that caused ripple effects across Indian country.55 The Narragansett suit clouded the legality of property titles in parts of South County and worried local residents who feared they could lose their holdings. It also sparked debates about the tribe’s political legitimacy. “The question is whether the Narragansetts are still a tribe,” one legislator said in 1977. “Some say the Narragansetts were wiped out in the Great Swamp Fight with the British. . . . They say they’re individual Indians and not a tribe as such.”56 The matter was “resolved” in 1978 by the Rhode Island Indian Claims Settlement Act. It awarded the tribe eighteen hundred

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acres, just over half their original demand.57 On April 11, 1983, Narragansetts gained federal recognition through a congressional act as the Narragansett Tribe of Indians in Rhode Island. The recognition findings took King Philip’s War as a watershed in the tribe’s history, one of many public airings of history to come in the name of legal and policy proceedings. They foreshadowed later debates over tribal continuity by claiming the present community was clearly close-knit, but showed “no readily distinguishable survivals of the aboriginal culture, although there have been some revivals and adoptions of pan-Indian cultural traits.”58 Resecuring a land base was an emotional moment. “For the first time in the history of the tribe,” remarked tribal medicine man Lloyd Wilcox in 1985, “we have reversed the process wherein the Indians must always lose the most valuable thing there is, and that’s their small portion of the mother earth.”59 Tribal secretary Lawrence Ollivierre also affirmed the reservation as integral to identity: “It’s pretty difficult to be an Indian and not have your own land. It’s like being a people without a country.”60 Yet the award came with strings attached that would lead to protracted acrimony. The eighteen hundred acres had been granted in exchange for Narragansetts’ agreement to drop all subsequent land claims, an extinguishment of “aboriginal title” that also applied to Wampanoags in Rhode Island’s East Bay, who received no benefit from the Narragansett settlement. It permitted Narragansetts to develop only 13 percent of the land, or about two hundred and fifty acres, and made the tribe subject to civil, criminal, and regulatory laws in the state of Rhode Island. This was a stringent set of requirements, subjecting tribal autonomy and sovereignty to an extremely high level of scrutiny and compromise. When the possibility of building a tribal casino surfaced a few years after recognition, the legal question was whether the 1978 agreement was valid, thereby leaving the tribe subject to state controls, including restrictions on high-stakes gaming.61 On the table in Rhode Island were two basic yet potentially transformative questions: Did the Narragansett Tribe have the right to build a casino on its reservation—and if so, what effect might it have on nonNative residents? The casino debate rose and fell away within a decade, nominally ending in the early 2000s with a veto of a Narragansett casino. Yet it left behind animosities about the futures of local lands and their human inhabitants. What the 1990s crystallized was a centuries-long struggle between Indigenous communities and their settler neighbors over who should shape “the Narragansett Country.” While the casino question ought to have been a strictly legal matter revolving around tribal status in relation to federal and

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state laws, the debate spiraled into public soul-searching over the meanings of place. What constituted roots in particular grounds? Whose connections to land and water were most significant? Which communities’ visions of humanenvironment relations ought to hold sway? The tribe’s casino proposal came to light in mid-July 1992, taking locals and Rhode Island officials by surprise.62 The image of successful tribal casinos in neighboring Connecticut loomed large in the public imagination and policy discussions. Following the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and attainment of federal recognition, two Connecticut-area tribes—the Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegans— developed gaming operations that transformed the economic landscape for previously marginalized tribes and for surrounding communities in southeastern Connecticut. The casinos they built at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun attracted enthusiasm from locals who saw them as economic engines, and ire from critics who saw them as ill-gotten gain among newly self-identified Indians leveraging tribal status into undeserved wealth. Debates over the prospect of “rich Indians” had been taking place in many corners of North America, long before casino gaming’s arrival (pertaining to oil and mineral rights, for example). In the regional context of southern New England, it tended to become polarized and moralized disputation rather than nuanced discussions about the historical roots and futures of Indigenous economic sovereignty.63 When Narragansetts took interest in developing gaming of their own, it seemed to be a straightforward proposition. The IGRA prohibited states with Indian reservations from banning gaming outright and required them to negotiate compacts with tribes pursuing such enterprises. But matters took a different turn in Rhode Island. Local outcry about the proposal quickly gained volume as residents debated whether a casino would irreparably harm a South County way of living, transforming what they represented as an idyllic, rural backwater into an overdeveloped, crime-ridden zone.64 The Alliance to Save South County organized as “grassroots opposition,” deeming the issue “an enormous threat to our way of life.” It invited residents to consider “just what is rising up out of the cornfields of Connecticut, [to] see the future of South County.” Casinos, they feared, would result in “farmers being squeezed in by the rampant development.”65 They characterized the modernistic towers at Mashantucket and Mohegan as out of place in the landscape, shimmering Xanadus that loomed incongruously over forest and field. Unnatural. Their call to arms urged preservation of the rural vistas deemed vital to the cultural identity of southern New England.

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Near the Narragansett reservation, one South Kingstown resident laid out a doomsday scenario in 1993. A casino would bring “an overwhelming increase in traffic,” “[l]ow-income rental property” for workers in minimumwage jobs, skyrocketing crime rates, and “[i]ncreases in sound and light pollution.” Worst of all was the (erroneous) prospect of tribal “annexation” of nearby private property.66 Fearful that house and land prices would crash if the casino and its anticipated social ills materialized, critics mobilized their neighbors to resistance by invoking the need to protect property investments.67 Gambling was a “spreading infection,” declared a local paper in 1992. It was a “grave mistake” and “absolutely the worst kind of economic development,” threatening to corrupt Rhode Island into “another Atlantic City.”68 Ecological well-being was a potent vector in this controversy. The author of a popular natural history column took aim at the casino specter in an essay titled “Gambling away the land.” To build Foxwoods, he argued, “the local Indians paved over a very large stretch of fox habitat.” Even so, he granted a nod to tribal entrepreneurship: “Now, I don’t begrudge the tribe their industry, which has turned out to be a license to print money for a group of people who certainly needed an infusion of cash.” (He deemed this turnaround a kind of “cosmic justice.”) But he ultimately read the casino pursuit as Native hypocrisy: “burying land under blacktop to make a buck . . . strikes me as an affront to the Great Spirit whose presence was invoked by Slow Turtle, the medicine man of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, at the casino’s ribboncutting ceremony.” He concluded, “I always thought environmental degradation, even classy degradation, was a tradition the heirs of Columbus brought to these shores.”69 In this view, authentic Narragansetts were not allowed to act in ways that might compromise the health of an ecological commons. The popular stereotype of the “ecological Indian”70 was at work, and in response, Narragansetts repeatedly insisted on their commitment to mitigating environmental repercussions.71 The saga dragged on through the 1990s. One Charlestown resident questioned in a 1993 Narragansett Times editorial whether Narragansetts’ claim to being a “sovereign nation” would mean “these 1,800 acres become an unregulated zone, exempt from taxation, state environmental regulation.” Reeling off rare plant and animal species around a nearby aquifer, she outlined concerns over water quality in what she called “Our aquifer, wetlands, ponds, streams and the Pawcatuck River.”72 Our: this collective pronoun described local ecosystems as fundamentally shared resources in which multiple communities in the state had stake. The piece sharply inverted the usual power dynamic by

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positioning nontribal locals as marginalized victims facing down formidable Narragansett-backed forces and legal teams. (This was a striking counterpoint to narratives about Narragansett dependency and pauperism aired during the detribalization hearings.) The piece’s final lines painted a dystopian picture of intruding modernity: “In recent weeks, we’ve seen luxury cars from New York and Florida exploring our narrow, winding roads. Sometimes they stop; the men in dark suits walk to the pavement’s edge and stare into the woods. They aren’t bird-watching. They have a vision. They see thousands of acres of undeveloped land as a place to build their seaside entertainment city. It’s a vision that should break the heart of anyone who cares about groundwater, open space or wildlife habitat.” What a dramatic sea change in environmental sensibility from 1704, when Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal breathlessly envisioned city walls rising from the shadowy woods and swamps. Settlers then desired rapid transformation of “nature” into civilization, but nearly three centuries later, the pendulum swung the other way. Anticasino advocates realized that environmentalist lines of argumentation were persuasive rhetorical techniques, giving them the moral scaffolding to argue that certain interests—nature and community wellbeing—trumped tribal political claims and economic aspirations. Terminology had shifted as well: “wetlands” eclipsed “swamps” as the preferred description, connoting fragile ecosystems in need of protection rather than the more gloomy or ambiguous associations of swampiness. A final argument hinged on intangibilities of place-connection. A different Charlestown resident worried about gaming’s effect on “each and every one who calls Rhode Island home”: South County has always been known for an undeniable charm, a unique characteristic affectionately referred to as “Swamp Yankee,” often discerned in the singular qualities of South County’s old-timers, and sometimes in the spirit of relative newcomers, who look upon this part of the state as their home. There are many who have adopted South County as their heart and soul’s refuge from a hurried and fast-paced world. . . . That special spirit that is uniquely South County will certainly be snuffed out in the looming shadow of a high-stakes gambling complex located in the heart of rustic South County.73 A “Swamp Yankee,” as one linguist defined the type, is “a rural New England dweller who abides today as a steadfast rustic and who is of Yankee stock that has endured in the New England area since the colonial days.”74 Pawtucket-

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born Yankee Magazine cartoonist Don Bousquet once remarked, “If you’re a Swamp Yankee, it means your family’s been here for hundreds of years,” while his interviewer compared them to “cowboys.”75 The term can be admiring or pejorative, so as one South County resident put it, she preferred the term “native.”76 Swamp Yankee–ness became shorthand denoting deep AngloAmerican affiliation with the land, a way of staking claim to territory by right of long familial habitation. It demonstrated little awareness of Indigenous homelands and similar place-ties among Narragansetts, which chronologically outstripped colonial ones by millennia and which contained a cosmology about Narragansett origins, an understanding of having been created here and given responsibility for specific lands, waters, and other-than-human beings.77 Vitriolic assertions that Narragansetts would ruin South County were terribly ironic statements of Yankee nativism. Narragansett tribal council member and future chief sachem Matthew Thomas pointed out as much in December 1994. The “Johnny come Lately’s (‘English Settlers’)” had already devastated the land through colonization, he argued in a brilliant rhetorical display in the Chariho Times. “We have seen some of the richest clamming beds, crabbing areas, and fishing spots become contaminated. We have watched while stores and highways were built over the graves of our people. We have watched while wetlands were filled in so people could build their homes near the water.” Those Yankees hurling accusations of environmental ruination at the tribe “need to look no farther [than] the mirror,” Thomas trenchantly concluded.78 As non-Native critics looked ahead to a future of impending loss, Thomas looked backward, invoking memories of what had been ground under during Narragansetts’ struggles with colonial expansionism. Not every South County resident or Rhode Islander decried the prospect of a tribal casino. It might boost the flagging regional economy or increase property values.79 Some castigated their peers for reactionary or racist viewpoints, calling for greater respect and willingness to work with Narragansetts. Others invoked the Columbus Quincentenary to upbraid critics of the tribe. “You have a lot of nerve telling any group of people what they ‘should’ do or be,” two non-Native Peace Dale residents argued in 1992, recalling “this year when the nation is gearing up to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the enslavement, torture and genocide of the native people of the land we call America.”80 Still others tried to smooth over the divide with conciliatory language of neighborliness. “We are concerned about what they can do with the land,” the Charlestown town council president remarked about tribal land development more broadly. “But we’re not asking for anything more than we would ask of a

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neighbor.”81 This formulation appeared benign, even magnanimous. But it also obscured Narragansetts’ distinct political status. They did not have the same relationship to Rhode Island towns as one of simply municipal neighbors. To the contrary, the tribe was trying to affirm the political difference and rights of a sovereign Native nation in their bid for gaming and development less constrained by the state. While tensions ran high in the thick of the casino debate, an act of arson stunned Narragansetts and Rhode Islanders. A person or group set fire to the Narragansett Church on December 17, 1993. The conflagration destroyed the historic structure’s interior, reducing wooden pews and an archive to rubble, though the granite exterior walls remained standing. The loss received extensive press coverage, and people from diverse backgrounds rallied to fund-raise and rebuild the church. The church also generated complicated discussions about its status within the tribe: an emblem of assimilation, of community endurance, of entangled histories? Astute observers noted the timing of the arson was uncanny, occurring only two days before the anniversary of the Great Swamp massacre. “We’ve been putting up with this for 300 years,” remarked the tribal medicine man. “It’s beyond the bounds of coincidence.”82 Through the mid-1990s diversity of opinion persisted on the casino matter, but locals aired enough grievances to capture the attention of high-ranking politicians. In September 1996, U.S. senator from Rhode Island John Chafee, a Providence-born Republican, blocked Narragansetts’ gaming aspirations. He sponsored a federal budget amendment that required the tribe to obtain Rhode Island voters’ approval for high-stakes gaming on tribal land. This closed a loophole, Chafee argued, by clarifying that the Narragansett reservation was subject to state laws as defined in the 1978 Settlement Act, and thus for IGRA purposes “shall not be treated as Indian lands.”83 Incensed about the “midnight rider” passed with no debate, tribal members descended onto Providence and into the media spotlight in November 1996 to protest at the state house. “Massacre Revisited,” they called the event, directly and provocatively linking contemporary politics to the violences of December 1675. “[I]t, too, is motivated by prejudice, ignorance and greed,” remarked tribal council member Randy Noka about the legislation.84 Great Swamp echoed once again in contestations over land use, and Narragansetts understood that the 1675 massacre was an instrumental reference point, a powerful allusion legible to a substantial swath of Rhode Islanders. The casino question waxed and waned in subsequent years, but tribal hopes for gaming had been effectively quashed by the 2000s. This chain of events left Narragansetts in a noticeably distinct

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socioeconomic situation from that of the nearby Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegans, and it was the particular state contexts that made the difference.85 The casino debate unfolded in Rhode Island alongside controversies regarding management of cultural resources and historical preservation. While Charlestown and other South County towns pushed for active input into Narragansett initiatives, Narragansetts called for more substantive roles in town and state development, specifically citing the need for tribal consultations about archaeological work.86 Rhode Islanders had been unearthing Native artifacts and ancestral human remains nearly from the outset of colonization. Recall Ezra Stiles’s eighteenth-century activities at Great Swamp—part of a larger pattern of amateur digs by antiquarians, who showcased their finds in private and public collections.87 These repeated, intrusive probes into sensitive lands (including numerous ancestral burials) fed wariness among tribal members toward academic archaeology as well, which by its nature also disrupted human landscapes, albeit with more systematic protocols. In the latter twentieth century, critical shifts in the field of anthropology began to reshape investigatory practices and ethics, urging more respect for and consultation with Indigenous descendant communities. In the past several decades, Narragansetts’ relationships with anthropologists and archaeologists have taken shape through numerous projects, some constructive for cross-cultural interactions, others less so. A landmark project was the place sometimes referred to as RI-1000. In 1982 bulldozers exposed this Narragansett burial ground, located near Cocumscussoc. It was not the first time that Indigenous mortuary practices attracted attention.88 But in this case, state and professional archaeologists consulted closely with the Narragansetts in deciding how to proceed with excavation, interpretation, and caretaking. While it was a difficult undertaking—one strongly critiqued by some tribal members—it set a precedent for a new, authority-sharing type of relationship.89 National developments strengthened Narragansetts’ efforts to protect relevant sites in their historic homelands. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 provided for return of certain ancestral human remains, sacred items, and objects of cultural patrimony to descendant communities. Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) were established in 1992, with ability to formally interact with State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs).90 The current regulatory structure establishes “parallel roads” for the THPO and SHPO, as John Brown III (current Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and medicine man in training) has described it, separate routes toward a shared goal of protecting archaeological resources.91

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The THPO is not the only avenue through which the tribal community engages with heritage resources, of course. Individuals and groups maintain an evolving array of connections with places, materials, and memories that matter, some intensely private and not connected to formal governmental channels. Such structures nevertheless exercise influence over the course of specific projects and public presentations of Narragansett history. When archaeologists today investigate sites connected to King Philip’s War, the questions asked of those grounds, the parties involved in the discussions, and the methodologies employed demonstrate the complexity of knowledge transmission in the twenty-first century. Tribal sovereignty inflects not only interactions about land rights and economic development, but also about cultural preservation, caretaking, and the shapes of public remembrances.

Reframing “Nine Men’s Misery”: Hidden Wetlands Histories in Cumberland Contestations over Native-settler pasts and places in Rhode Island have been particularly intense in the southern and coastal reaches of the state, close to the historic and contemporary Narragansett reservation. Yet Native homelands spanned the entire area, and major episodes of King Philip’s War also took place in other locales. One of the most intriguing is the area in northern Rhode Island colloquially known as “Nine Men’s Misery.” A sizable cairn of cemented-together rocks stands deep in the woods in the town of Cumberland. The cairn memorializes nine colonial soldiers supposedly killed in 1676 by Native warriors. Euro-American traditions long held they were captured after an engagement near Providence known as “Pierce’s Fight,” taken north by their Indigenous captors, and tortured before being executed.92 The story of the cairn, its perceived meanings, and the surrounding grounds’ metamorphoses encapsulates the ongoing quality of modern discussions over optimal land use and the wider, but often overlooked, contexts of wartime remnants. After 1676, the place where the nine soldiers were believed to have died remained in private hands for several centuries as farmland. Their comrades or other colonists erected a cairn immediately after their deaths, arguably the first war memorial in America, and it endured in one form or another for years. In 1900, the Cistercian Brothers, an austere Catholic order from France, purchased the site from the bishop of Providence.93 They grew grapes for winemaking on their extensive holdings, constructed elaborate monastery buildings from granite quarried nearby, and installed drainage systems to dry

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out some wetlands areas.94 The brothers cemented together the cairn’s stones, which vandals or others periodically disturbed—a sign that even EuroAmerican memoryscapes might be venerated by some but negated by others—and the Rhode Island Historical Society dedicated a plaque at the site in 1928 commemorating the loss of the nine men.95 The site remained in Cistercian hands until the 1950s. A fire swept through monastery buildings, and faced with the daunting prospect of trying to reconstruct at prohibitive cost, the brothers relocated to Massachusetts.96 Their exodus left the property open to competitors. The town of Cumberland purchased it in 1972, and town offices, a senior center, and the public library eventually took up residence.97 Heavy demands fell upon the land in the late twentieth century as it became a multipurpose venue accommodating jogging paths, weddings and family reunions, an ice-skating rink, and scout camporees.98 Cumberland locals treasured the picturesque grounds of the monastery, especially gardens and nature trails for walking and recreation that wound in circuitous loops behind the municipal complex.99 A vocal contingent criticized projects that sought to develop the land in ways they considered undesirable, and proposals to resurface and widen these pathways met ambivalence or outright resistance.100 Improving access would increase the potential for vandalism and other unsavory activities in the hard-to-monitor woods, they feared. Two locals complained in summer 2004 about damage. The ground, they said, “has been scraped and scarred and is devastating to look at and heartbreaking.” Couching these complaints in broader concerns about the built environment, they elaborated: “We, the residents of Cumberland, must be strong and adamant about any development to our Monastery. The fields, farmland, woods, and open spaces are quickly disappearing around us giving way to mini-malls, gas stations, and convenience stores. If we open the door and allow this to continue, the few open spaces we have left in Cumberland will be gone; and forever is a very long time.”101 The irony of their own foreshortened time horizon—awareness of the place only as “our Monastery” rather than its longer-term ecological and human histories—seemed lost. “The Monastery seems to touch a lot of people’s nerves,” the town recreation director acknowledged, succinctly expressing the area’s special power to incite high emotions.102 “You want to keep it natural, but you want everyone to enjoy it, especially the monument,” he said of the balancing act he oversaw.103 His description strangely conflated the cairn and its violent history into the same vista as the recreational landscape, treating the monument as a source of leisurely pleasure. “Everyone ought to have the opportunity to see Nine Men’s

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Misery,” he added, commenting on plans to increase navigability of the pathways. “This will give people with disabilities a chance to get wheelchairs there.”104 The problem of the monastery, as town officials understood it, was that certain visitors lacked equal access to the cairn and environs.105 But there was never sustained discussion about more entrenched (and less readily solvable) problems regarding the colonial nature of remembrance being promulgated there, and the enduring magnetism of an antiquarian monument to historical violence. Local awareness of the area’s past has overwhelmingly fixated on the violence of 1676 and its memorialization, but this changed slightly when the state conducted archaeological surveys on the grounds in 2004. Federal funds attached to a trail development project mandated such investigation, but Cumberland initially neglected this requirement and went ahead with the trail work. Sixty percent of the work had been completed by the time archaeological crews arrived, and they found damage already done to most Native sites they later identified.106 Surveying nevertheless turned up numerous Native artifacts that indicated long-term Algonquian uses of the land. The ill-fated English soldiers were “probably brought there to be killed for a reason,” state archaeologist Paul Robinson told the local press. “This is an opportunity for us and the town to learn about the area rather than just that this is the place where they were tortured and killed. Indians were on the land for thousands of years. The torture of these men at this time and place was just a blip in the timeline of the place.”107 His remarks recalibrated the timescale typically used in discussing the landscape: so much commemorative weight had fallen on the trauma of a single day in 1676, and most especially on English casualties largely recalled as martyrs, while little had been granted to what the area meant to Native communities before or after. The survey team’s findings confirmed the area’s value for diverse human activities. The trails crossed upland meadows, wet meadows, mature oak forest, and wooded swamps, environments ideal for camping, quartz knapping, and other tasks. The team highlighted the rich resources of the wetlands area and adjacent interior sites for labor like harvesting starchy roots (cattails, water plantains, bulrushes, water lilies). Enough shelters existed nearby to accommodate hunting excursions and cold-weather encampments. A broad terrace adjacent to wetlands was artifact rich and could have supported numerous people. The “Misery” narrative has nothing to say about these swamps (now largely drained and invisible to the untrained eye), or this longue durée history of uplands habitation, because it reads the violence of 1676 as

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erupting quickly and randomly rather than situated in specific, well-known homelands. The unearthed artifacts did not come to light without controversy. More than one Native community staked cultural claims to the ground, complicating the frequently repeated narrative that the entirety of modern-day Rhode Island was Narragansett country. Pokanokets, a Wampanoag group (currently without federal recognition), took interest in the proceedings and publicized some locational data, leading the Narragansett THPO to critique their actions as not demonstrating sufficient concern for the site’s integrity.108 The claims of an unrecognized group previously stirred controversy in the vicinity when the Seaconke Wampanoags filed a claim in 2003 for a thirty-four-square-mile parcel in northern Rhode Island—all of Cumberland and half of Woonsocket. The court struck it down.109

“I Aways Wondered How My Ancestors Felt”: The Smoke-Shop Raid and Carcieri In 2004, Matthew Thomas, then the Narragansetts’ chief sachem, wrote a prominent editorial in The Providence Journal. He used King Philip’s War as a public touchstone for critiquing state wrongs against Narragansetts and specifically cited the Great Swamp massacre, “which resulted in the loss of thousands of Narragansetts.” He added, “In a sense we are still fighting King Philip’s War. The tribe is continually stripped of its rights and dignity in the executive, judicial and legislative branches as evidenced by the use of state force in the smoke-shop raid, and the loss in federal court.”110 Thomas was referring to a pair of developments in the 2000s that drew the tribe into highly publicized confrontations with the state and ratcheted up discursive contests over place, identity, and sovereignty. In midsummer 2003, Narragansetts began selling tobacco products imported from Mohawks at a smoke shop on Route 2, on the eastern edge of the reservation. They retailed them at cut-rate prices by omitting state taxes, claiming their sovereign status permitted the exception.111 On July 14, acting on the orders of Governor Donald Carcieri, Rhode Island state troopers staged a raid on the smoke shop that exploded into a melee. News crews on the scene filmed and aired the physical confrontation, which resulted in arrests of several tribal members. Uproar ensued within the tribal community and beyond. Bella Noka, who fell to the ground during the raid, said the troopers’ use of force reminded her of the seventeenth century: “I always wondered how my ancestors felt. . . . On that day I knew.”112

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As the case headed to trial, the tribe called for proceedings to be moved out of South County to Providence, where the jury pool would be more racially diverse. They also argued that the Great Swamp massacre and other events had left a bitter legacy of bias in South County that would prejudice juries there.113 “What is abundantly clear from this history is that there have been long, consistent and very public disputes between the Town of Charlestown and the Narragansett Indian Tribe over the past 30 years,” lawyers for the tribe submitted. “Virtually every legal dispute, including the smoke shop raid, has centered on the issue of Narragansett Indian sovereignty and the use of Narragansett reservation lands in Washington County.”114 The trial did relocate to Providence, and it took until 2008 to reach verdicts for charges of assault, disorderly conduct, and other counts. No jail time resulted for tribal members. The court sentenced Matthew Thomas to perform one hundred and fifty hours of community service, which he carried out by speaking about Narragansett history, culture, and political life to student groups across Rhode Island, using his punishment as a platform to engage and educate. (“Sachem’s penalty is a boon for students” read a Providence Journal headline.)115 Contemporary violence led the legal system to mandate a new articulation of history, a counterpoint to the court-martial at Newport in 1676, where Native warriors had to recount their pasts for very different reasons, ultimately ending in their silencing. Close on the heels of the smoke-shop settlement came another controversy that renewed debates about tribal place-claims. This time, consequences reverberated on a national stage. The Carcieri v. Salazar U.S. Supreme Court decision of 2009 curtailed Narragansetts’ and other tribes’ abilities to have land taken into trust.116 The decision came out of Narragansetts’ request to have a thirty-one-acre parcel of land in Charlestown taken into trust by the Interior Department for use in constructing housing for the elderly. This would have removed the parcel from Rhode Island regulatory requirements like building codes and state taxes. The state of Rhode Island, under the Republican governorship of Carcieri, challenged the move, and the case worked its way through the courts. (Son of an Italian American father and Swedish American mother, Carcieri demonstrated that the immigrant groups marginalized by Yankee nativists at the turn of the twentieth century had joined the state’s powerbrokers by the beginning of the twenty-first.) The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Carcieri v. Salazar decision was unfavorable to the Narragansetts and carried dire ramifications for other tribes in the United States that gained recognition after 1934, the year of the Indian Reorganization

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Act (IRA). Carcieri ruled that the phrase “now under Federal jurisdiction” referred only to tribes federally recognized at the time of the IRA’s passage, meaning that the federal government could not take land into trust for tribes recognized post-1934—like the Narragansetts, still illegally “detribalized” at that point. The decision’s full impact remains to be seen and may include adversely affecting tribes’ abilities to seek trust status for lands outside their reservations or to conduct gaming and other economic activities on such lands.117 The decision sparked outcry among legal scholars and tribal advocates— some lobbying for a “fix” to counteract it—and included a dissent from Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. He had read enough of the historical documentation to recognize King Philip’s War and detribalization as “Two blows, delivered centuries apart, [that] exacted a particularly high toll on the Tribe,” and found the Court’s stringent reading of the word “now” unconvincing.118 News of the decision ignited local protests. Narragansetts and a multicultural coalition of supporters marched on Providence in March 2009 to decry the ruling and other actions of the Carcieri administration. Beating drums and singing, they processed from Roger Williams Park to Burnside Park. “We have been damaged by the people in this state,” tribal member Paulla Dove Jennings told the crowd, listing the ruling as only the most recent in a succession of antitribal injustices, the Great Swamp massacre prominent among them.119 The Carcieri decision descended from the United States’ highest legal authority and was of a piece with recent national trends in American Indian law and policy. But it is important to remember that it originated in a local context. The particular history of unsettled relations between Rhode Island and Narragansetts influenced how the state viewed that tribe’s efforts to develop lands in South County. Moreover, there were deep historical reasons why the contested thirty-one-acre parcel had come to lie outside of the tribe’s formal land base and why moves to assert autonomy within that space were seen by critics (“neighbors”) as untenable, offensive, even illegal.

Circling Back to Great Swamp and Nipsachuck This complicated context of disputes over sovereignty and land use informs present-day considerations about cultural memory and its expressions in specific locales. Consider the divergent trajectories of Great Swamp and Nipsachuck. While some sites associated with King Philip’s War have been razed or dwarfed by modern construction, Great Swamp has remained apart. The

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swamp’s unique ecology has been a natural caretaker for the massacregrounds, keeping them relatively undisturbed. Its current protected status also staves off change. As part of the 3,349-acre Great Swamp Wildlife Management Area in South Kingstown and Richmond overseen by the state’s Department of Environmental Management (DEM), the island is protected from future development. Indeed, many Rhode Islanders today know the swamp best as an ecological reserve and recreational haven. Environmentalist adoration has continued into the twenty-first century, as enthusiasts pen uncomplicated descriptions eliding the swamp’s contested human past.120 Today the swamp remains an important place for Narragansetts and relations as they grieve the loss of ancestors, recall centuries-old and recent struggles for respect and recognition, and also look to the future. The grounds continue to evolve materially and conceptually. They are tricky, even dangerous, to access at certain times of year—hunting season in late autumn and early winter demands blaze-orange clothing, while mud season is inadvisable.121 The site is subject to transformation by environment and human hands, not always in desirable ways. “I see the grounds have been sadly put upon by our white brothers,” Medicine Man Lloyd Wilcox said at the 1990 memorial ceremony. The clearing stood in disarray: “The wooden fence that once separated the grassy clearing from the muddy road leading to it had been uprooted. Only two low posts remained sunk in the ground. The rest of the posts and the thick beam that connected them lay in a charred pile. Blackened chunks of wood mingled with smashed beer cans and bottles. Shards of glass lay half-hidden in the grass where children sat and played.” The site’s remoteness made it difficult for DEM workers to check and clean it frequently, making it a dumping ground for debris and tires.122 Nearly two decades later the problem persisted.123 Traces of illicit teenage drinking and trash disposal at the site are largely unwanted, yet some material alterations constitute more than simple graffiti: offerings of small items, holes dug in the ground, clear as well as subtle remarkings of the site. These can be read as decolonizing gestures of protest, impassioned counternarratives critiquing the “official” story set in stone—and convincing ripostes to Euro-American orators at Fort Ninigret in 1883 and Great Swamp in 1906, confident that colonial monumentalizing and textual inscriptions guaranteed their messages would stand for eternity. “Probably none of these activities were envisioned by the monument builders or caretakers,” anthropologist Patricia Rubertone has written of these practices. “Consequently, these signs of engagement may go unrecognized or may be dismissed as irrelevant or damaging rather than part

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of a monument’s social history.”124 Cleaning them up could constitute erasure and silencing of resistant inscriptions and of ritual engagement with the place as still-sacred land. Paradoxically, “preservation” may entail protection of all the extant marks, not only the original installation but also the myriad layers that have accrued on and around it, collectively forming the monument’s deep symbolic stratigraphy. For visitors who arrive at Great Swamp without knowledge of periodic decolonizing activities like the Memorial Pilgrimage / Ceremony—who do not hear the Indigenous drumming, singing, and testifying as they reverberate around the clearing—the principal signifiers available for interpretation are the markers bearing antiquated texts about Narragansett decimation. One problem created by this and other colonial monuments to King Philip’s War, in other words, is their reification in the modern landscape of historical interpretations that many people—though certainly not all—now consider obsolete. An outdated historiography valorizing Anglo-American military prowess at the expense of Native communities lies entrenched in the regional terrain. It is a kind of imperial hangover or inertia, since the built environment rarely transforms in sync with historical revisionism or community consciousness. Yet changes wrought by nature, in addition to deliberate actions of human hands, may enable alterations in meaning. Erosion has made indistinct the names of the four colonies as well as wording on the tablet. All are now fractured or pitted with holes.125 Once this language is illegible, the complex may become more of a tabula rasa. Material transformation may open up the possibilities for ascribing meaning, and performative reinterpretations would no longer need to compete as directly with contradictory signifiers. On the other hand, some of the energy of the decolonizing performances and rituals may derive from their concentrated opposition to the dominant text, which is a visible target for critique. And certainly participants remember what the words on the markers used to be. Narragansett historical preservationists are not presently working to put the site more fully on Rhode Islanders’ cultural radar. This is partly because the contextualizing groundwork that would make such actions meaningful does not yet exist, like substantive education among non-Natives about Narragansett history and culture. Ownership of the swamp site is still asserted by the Rhode Island Historical Society, and whether it might one day be transferred to the tribe remains an open question. Such a transfer would formally acknowledge that areas beyond reservation boundaries remain significant for Narragansetts and would signal the society’s willingness to break from its

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colonial foundations, in deed as well as rhetoric. Mentally and emotionally, tribal members care for the site and express their ongoing ties to it through embodied presence. Legally—or rather, within one society’s legal frameworks—other hands hold it. What has become of Nipsachuck, another swamp in these parts that became a two-time battleground in King Philip’s War and massacre site of Quaiapen’s people? Reexamination of the area has been underway as Nipsachuck now anchors a collaborative preservation project.126 Several tribes (Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Mohegan, Pequot), state offices, and the Blackstone Valley Historical Society have been reflecting upon and researching its past with support from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program (ABPP). Woods and swampland made the site a poor prospect for agricultural or other development in the postwar period, so it—and the sizable stone cairns arrayed across it, possibly memorial or ceremonial constructions—lay undisturbed for centuries until murmurings of development catalyzed tribes, landowners, academics, and the state to initiate conversations. This work has brought new communities into being as stakeholders gather around the planning table. Narragansetts as well as the other tribes come with renewed clout for shaping terms of historical interpretation. In the seventeenth century and well before, Nipsachuck appears to have been a fluid borderlands space, a multitribal zone where movement and interaction among several groups were common. It was an important environmental “cross-roads” between coastal and inland resources, and a sacred ceremonial landscape distinguished by high points at Nipsachuck, Cat, and Black Plains Hills, according to tribal oral traditions.127 These connective capacities demonstrate that far from being concretely bounded, firmly marked-out tribal territories, such places were kept mobile and flexible by processes of Native habitation and movement. Nipsachuck also demonstrates how powerful Yankee forgetting can be. The attack on Quaiapen’s people was catastrophic, yet the existence of a massacre site in the backyards of North Smithfield residents is not a common piece of local consciousness. Landowners in that area tend to know scant details about the deep history of their backyards, especially in littletraveled reaches of the swamp. For residents who arrived in recent years rather than inheriting lands from family with colonial-era ties, absence of multigenerational links to place further precludes such understandings. And while Nipsachuck registered on the radar of a few Rhode Island antiquarians, it does not appear in major histories of King Philip’s War. It is a nonplace in their

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geographies, not even meriting an entry in their indices.128 To put the two battles “back on the map,” and back in the context of the ancient human landscapes in which they took place, would be a profound transformation for scholars as well as communities. The ABPP is committed to placing violence, understanding where on the land certain approaches, attacks, and retreats unfolded. The program suggests military terrain models for assessing historical battlefields, specifically a system known as K.O.C.O.A. (Key terrain, Observation and fields of fire, Cover and concealment, Obstacles, and Avenues of approach).129 Investigators work to identify these components of a battlefield on the ground (fig. 24). In the abstract, this process of terrain assessment provides a guide. Yet as Kevin McBride, an archaeologist involved in the investigation with long-standing affiliation to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation’s museum and research programs, has pointed out, tendencies to think and see in presentist terms make it difficult to project these categories of analysis backward onto seventeenth-century battlefields. (Nipsachuck is one of the few ABPP projects examining a seventeenth-century site; most are Revolutionary or Civil War projects.) It is one thing to outline a work plan on paper, another to survey and dig. Preliminary archaeological work commenced in June 2011 after a local landowner gave permission to examine his property.130 The search focused initially on the second event, the massacre of Quaiapen’s people at the foot of a hill in July 1676. Colonial records gave several clues about the locale, but even with that information, the team struggled to know where to search. A few artifacts surfaced: horseshoes, a musket ball, an incised quahog shell. They were suggestive finds but too ambiguous to definitively link to the encampment. Subsequent investigations shed clearer light on the likely sites and sequence of actions that led to devastation of the tribal gathering. Did it matter if archaeologists, historians, and community members found anything at Nipsachuck? Does pinpointing of the material “signature” of violence—archaeologists’ term for an engagement’s distinctive traces, the physical inscription on the land of specific human activities—really mean that much? Yes, in one respect. Such a discovery can ground understandings of tactics and tribal refuges, and allow more nuanced considerations of how ancient ceremonial landscapes informed or intersected with sites of colonial-era crises. Knowing the precise locales can also permit crucial safeguards to ensure sites’ preservation in the future and can potentially lead to interpretive public history work aimed at constructively shifting community senses of the past.

Figure 24. Nipsachuck—swampy, hilly terrain in northern Rhode Island—has recently been the focus of a collaborative research and archaeology project, supported by the American Battlefield Protection Program. Native groups gathered at the site as the war unfolded, and twice colonial troops attacked it (1675, 1676). Contemporary investigators working in conjunction with tribal representatives and locals have been assessing likely locations for these campaigns, using maps to track potential routes into and out of the violent engagements. In addition to the battlefields focus, the work has raised the possibility of nearby ceremonial landscapes, suggesting complex relations between more ancient and seventeenth-century Indigenous geographies. (Image courtesy of Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center)

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In another sense, a “find” is almost incidental. A major value of Nipsachuck lies in the process, the relationships that have formed and continue to evolve, the “talking circle” conversations set in motion by this site of shared interest. The project has achieved a benchmark by that measure, setting a precedent for ethically attuned working relations among tribes, scholars, the state, and locals. It demonstrates the potential of archaeology and local history to be used in decolonizing ways, recuperating silenced pasts and incorporating diverse Native and non-Native understandings into their analyses in sustained ways. It shares and decenters interpretations of place, a process enacted in a handful of other sites in southern New England.131 Probing with metal detectors in the brush, sorting artifacts on old tarps, staking out test pits, and collectively puzzling through their queries in the mundane tasks of modern archaeology, participants are in the midst of renewing an old place. Nipsachuck is an imperfect social negotiation rather than a completed product. The ABPP model can certainly be critiqued, as privileging a male-oriented military focus, for instance, rather than a broader sociocultural perspective on Indigenous peoples, their taskscapes, colonial relations, and connections to place. The requisite terminology of “battlefields” establishes foundational expectations about the quality of encounters in these spaces. The very premises of archaeology continue to present difficulties for some tribal community members (“stakeholders”), even in its more collaborative forms. And it is debatable whether technical written reports, submitted to federal funders, are adequate vehicles for expressing the wide range of perspectives maintained by distinctive tribal and nontribal communities. Acknowledging and reckoning with cautions like these is important, especially if the ABPP model gains traction elsewhere in the region. Having said that, the process at Nipsachuck has conveyed the value of revising the canon of war sites to include locales that were not places in official historiography, but which bring to light connectivity, multiple uses, and palimpsestic senses of landscape—layers upon layers. Zachariah Allen and his peers in the Colonial Revival believed they had comprehensively delineated the memoryscape of King Philip’s War. But diverse descendants have revived other compelling geographies. More remains to be done at Nipsachuck and in northern Rhode Island, where awareness of Native pasts and presents remains even more attenuated than in southern parts of the state. Postwar Native presence in the north is only sparsely outlined in local accounts. In the Victorian period, for example, antiquarian Abigail Sprague was thoroughly convinced Natives there had been reduced to remnants. Sprague compiled voluminous notes

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for a history of Cumberland, drawing upon community anecdotes, local knowledge, and other nonelite sources to document the experiences of marginalized residents like the poor, disabled, and widowed.132 But she only cursorily considered Native peoples. “Burnt Swamp” drew her curiosity, an area in Cumberland said to have been set aflame by settlers circa 1680—on the heels of King Philip’s War—to excise remaining Native peoples from their dwelling places. Sprague also ruminated on a handful of individuals and families said to possess Native heritage, including Reuben Purchase, “a Narragansett who made his home in the wilds near Woonsocket [and] was still wandering about the town, stopping whenever night overtook him, as late as 1840.” Purchase, she reported, “wandered over the states, having friends in Ohio, up in Canada, and as far south as Florida. He could read sign boards, and make a scrawl purporting to be his name.”133 A literate, mobile, socially connected Native man who was visible well into the nineteenth century, Purchase surely had his own understandings of meaningful Indigenous geographies in the very region now canvassed by archaeologists.134 Yet his story remains in fragments.135

“I Will Be Here By and By Againe” Many swamps surround Narragansett Bay, and the ones communities choose to remember shape understandings of the past and present. Do we memorialize Great Swamp, a convenient metonym among Yankee antiquarians as the spot where Narragansetts were annihilated? Or do we understand Great Swamp as a dynamic venue for Indigenous mourning, gathering, and radical protest? Does the cedar swamp that was eloquently defended by Gideon Ammons and Daniel Sekater in the 1880s, in the face of political strongarming, bespeak a history of survival, resistance, and also forcible compromise? How do we conceptualize Nipsachuck, long shut away behind the cultural-legal fortress of privatized property, yet presently (re)emerging as grounds of ceremony as well as violence? How do we make sense of Camp Swamp in Cumberland, where the “Misery” cairn has been cemented into the ground in a bid to ensure its permanence? What messages ought we take away from Burnt Swamp, where colonists may have scorched the land to disperse the “last” of their Indigenous neighbors?136 And what meanings derive from the countless swamps that bear material evidence, still embedded in their layers, of prodigiously long-standing uses, or evoke traditions about uncanny, supernatural, powerful happenings?

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Colonial accounts of the area’s past—and academic studies—have tended to zero in on Great Swamp at the expense of much wider Indigenous landscapes, subscribing to tunnel vision that conveniently erases vast homelands.137 They have promulgated a conscribed geography that works in tandem with reservation vision, the view that only within the acreage of the contemporary tribal reservation can Narragansetts legitimately exercise cultural claims or political sovereignty. Wilfred Munro, grateful recipient of the swamp deed in 1906, summarized this outlook in a report to his membership at the Rhode Island Historical Society. Algonquian place-names fascinated him, and he wanted them preserved where possible, adding, “If a town has a past reaching back into the Indian times, by all means let us proclaim the fact.”138 “If.” He meant large swaths of land were historically devoid of Native presence, being empty parcels where colonial plantations took place innocently in an unpeopled wilderness, free from entanglement with or dispossession of Indigenous peoples. It was a remarkably long-lived mode of misperception. Coupled with distinctive characteristics of Rhode Island’s collective colonial imaginaries—ideals of multicultural and multifaith tolerance, stereotypes of “black Narragansetts,” aggressive monumentalizing by nativists who well remembered the final “Indian War” to directly sear their grounds—these ways of thinking and seeing have continued to delimit “authentic” Narragansett spaces to detrimental effect. Narragansetts’ memoryscapes today are in fact extensive. They encompass quarries west of Providence where half-formed steatite bowls can still be seen; Hipses Rock, a longtime gathering spot; the offshore maritime landscapes of Cape Cod Sound, Long Island Sound, and Narragansett Bay; the Salt Pond archaeological site, an extraordinary pre-European Narragansett coastal village; and traditional places not spoken about openly.139 The built environment is a memoryscape, too. Stone walls, fireplaces, and other masonry evoke memories of skilled ancestors who built them.140 The “citadel,” or tribal longhouse, is remembered as the place illuminated by a lone light bulb where tribal members hashed out plans for their land claim in 1975. The recent history of struggle is understood through spots like the smoke-shop trailer still standing on Route 2. July 14, day of the raid, has become Sovereignty Day for the community, an anniversary of resistance and reminder of work to be done. The reservation regularly draws members back to its grounds, most notably for the August Meeting held annually by the meetinghouse/church, where Narragansetts travel from far and near to reaffirm community ties.141 The meeting is said to date from the end of King Philip’s War, so the running count of consecutive meetings memorializes reconsolidation at the war’s conclusion.142

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It would be a mistake to confine Narragansett memoryscapes to the reservation’s immediate vicinity or even South County. Waves of Narragansetts relocated to Providence and other urban areas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, part of widespread urbanization among North American Native populations. More than half of Narragansetts presently live and work north of South County. Urbanism and indigeneity are routinely depicted as contradictory opposites, but—as in Boston—far from becoming exiles in these areas or culturally unmoored interlopers, Narragansetts and others from diverse tribal backgrounds have made homes in city neighborhoods.143 Providence functions as a gathering place at critical moments of protest and legal-political resistance, a high-density arena that enhances tribal visibility to the state’s media, legislators, and non-Native publics. Great Swamp’s comparative remoteness makes it a less visible site for activism, but Rhode Island’s capital and largest city often guarantees a spotlight. In March 2010, a diverse crowd, including participants from multiple tribal backgrounds, gathered downtown to protest a proposed board game on the theme of King Philip’s War, which would let players reenact that conflict. Standing in the shadow of the state house, they carried signs bearing sayings like “Genocide is not a game,” and drew attention to the endurance of colonial mentalities—an oftentimes unpopular narrative in a state that insists on the peacefulness of its colonial encounters.144 Beyond this spot and the city’s courthouses, Providence is an evolving grid of personal and community memories.145 Yet overall, cultural memories and knowledge among the Narragansetts do not broadcast to nonNative publics in the same way as they do among nearby tribal communities. Unlike the Mashantucket Pequots, who have built an elaborate museum and research center to interpret selected parts of their past for tribal members and scores of outside visitors, Narragansetts do not have a centralized facility of such a scale (though the Tomaquag Museum is presently engaged in widespread outreach). Historical preservation, interpretation, and even archiving occur at sites less openly accessible to the public.146 The extensive landscapes of survival and regathering utilized by Native communities during the war remain undervisible as well. As Chechaubabeto, a Native woman who “belonged to Providence” testified under duress in June 1676, her people were gathered twelve miles from town, cultivating corn, catching fish, setting traps for beaver.147 Such quotidian enclaves of endurance rarely register in colonial sightlines, still occupied as they are with discrete battles, heroic victories, and momentous losses. Finally, there are sites where astonishing material traces relevant to this topic are known to exist, but tribal

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members, officials, and academics conceal them out of well-founded fears of looting and desecration. They perpetuate silence for ethical reasons, demonstrating that regard for ancestral remains and sensitive grounds can trump desires for exhaustive, transparent knowledge and access. The memoryscapes of King Philip’s War in the Narragansett country are shifting constellations of the visible and invisible, the overt and the latent. None of their lieux de mémoire, “sites of memory,” are permanent fixtures, but changeable nodes reliant on social support for their continuance. Where does this leave Great Swamp and the once-palisaded island deep in its thickets? The swamp is a sensitive site crucial for certain uses, in certain moments. It cannot be inhabited perpetually, however, either physically or psychologically. Thought and action sometimes—even often—need to focus elsewhere, away from an epicenter of tremendous loss. Returning to the swamp can be selective and deliberate, a choice to engage with this past and place when needed. Invoking the worst of colonial violences like those at Great Swamp exerts moral pressure on the state and locals to act justly in the present, and there is immense social currency to retaining the swamp as a legible icon in Narragansetts’ symbolic toolkit. Yet a future not locked into the patterns of violence and colonialism that Great Swamp so succinctly represents is a compelling prospect. When Matthew Thomas wrote in 2004 that the tribe was “still fighting” King Philip’s War, he elaborated beyond that lament. Nodding to the “Dream” speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., he looked to a different future: “My people want a new chapter in history. We would like for state leaders—white, black, young, old, upper-class, middle-class—to play by the same rules when deciding whether the tribe should be allowed to engage in the same endeavors as the state. . . . We would like to realize our dream of one day living in a state where we are allowed to achieve economic self-sufficiency for our people.”148 Such a “new chapter” might require a changed symbolic complex, a revised way of thinking about the colonial past that contextualizes anew narratives of traumatic loss. More than three decades before King Philip’s War began, Narragansetts taught Roger Williams selected words and phrases in their language. Among those he recorded was this conception of return to valued places: “teâno wonck nippée am (I will be here by and by againe)”.149 For Native people around Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island settlers alike, maintaining ties to meaningful places through rituals, stories, and objects has been integral to senses of identity and collective purpose. For tribal communities, the ability to sustain these geographies has not been eradicated by colonial violence, restrictive social

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policies, or exclusionary systems of land tenure. By constraining mobility and rights of access, however, these developments reshaped the terms of engagement, so returning “by and by againe” to significant ground can be more aspiration than actuality. This sense of enduring embattlement over autonomy, rights, and land moved one tribal member to speak out in 1996, after the regaining of a reservation, while standing in the clearing at Great Swamp at the annual commemoration. “We will prevail in the seeking of our sovereignty. We will prevail in securing the economic rights and the political rights of our people,” he asserted in remarks published by The Providence Journal. “All of this land is ours. If not today, then once again tomorrow.”150 As young people, all children of tribal members, lit the third of three fires involved in the ceremony, this final set of flames—symbolizing the future—sent smoke spiraling skyward into the afternoon.

5 • The Gathering Place A Trafficked Waterway, Dawn Massacre, and Material Legacies of the “Falls Fight”

In the night hours of October 6, 1999, a stone on the banks of the Great, or Long, River received two new coats of paint: a bucket of blood red dumped over its top, and white letters stenciled on its face demanding FREE LEONARD PELTIER. Supporters of the Anishinaabe-Lakota activist, controversially imprisoned in 1977 on charges of murdering two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, went after the riverside stone in Gill, western Massachusetts, with abandon.1 The “vandals,” or political protesters, did not target just any site. They aimed their commentary at a monument memorializing William Turner’s role in the “Falls Fight” of May 19, 1676, a devastating massacre during the middle stages of King Philip’s War. Turner’s colonial troops had ventured six miles northeast of the ruined English settlement at Pocumtuck (later called Deerfield) to a large waterfall on the river. A “little before break of day,” they surprised over three hundred Natives sleeping in a multitribal encampment. As Puritan historian William Hubbard later graphically described the soldiers’ deeds, they “fired amain into their very wigwams, killing many upon the place, and frighting others with the sudden alarm of their Gunns, made them run into the River, where the swiftness of the stream carrying them down a steep Fall, they perished in the waters . . . . others of them creeping for shelter under the banks of the great river, were espyed by [the] men and killed with their swords.”2 The troops secured a major colonial victory at the falls before Turner himself died in the retreat. The massacre gave traumatic historic importance to that locality, renamed “Turners Falls” by EuroAmerican antiquarians in the nineteenth century. Yet the specters of the late seventeenth century that troubled the spot were comparatively recent. This same place, called by the Algonquian names Peskeomskut (sometimes spelled

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Peskeompskut) or Wissatinnewag, had been a vital fishing spot and Indigenous gathering place for thousands of years, a fertile hub of Native space in the middle of the Kwinitekw (Connecticut River) Valley (fig. 25). Scores of Yankees tried to dominate the area’s remembrance with monuments and public commemorations. But as the “vandals” demonstrated with their provocative overwriting, and as recent cross-cultural engagements—and even reconciliations—have shown, not even granite could hold meaning fast in such a contested place. Multiple violences have weighed on local memories along this stretch of the Kwinitekw: the Pocumtuck massacre of the 1660s, in which Mohawks devastated Indigenous residents during intertribal warfare; the Falls and “Bloody Brook” assaults of King Philip’s War, the former of which targeted Natives, the latter, colonial troops; and the Deerfield “raid” of 1704, which tended to overshadow the rest in Yankee popular consciousness. Communities

Figure 25. Rocks just below the falls at Peskeomskut along the Kwinitekw (Connecticut) River. This stretch of the four-hundred-mile-long “Great River” was a major Indigenous gathering and fishing place for thousands of years, which experienced a destructive attack by colonial troops in May 1676. Antiquarians attempted to introduce a new name, Turners Falls, for the area. In subsequent centuries industrial developers dammed the river and harnessed its energy for hydropower. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

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made sense of these violences relationally, and in the context of the valley’s particular social and environmental circumstances.3 Situated between Algonquian homelands within the valley and to the east, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) ones at some distance to the west, the river and surrounding lands acted as vital crossroads for multiple Native peoples: Pocumtucks, Sokokis, Agawams, Nonotucks, and other relations. They also proved attractive for Dutch, French, and English arrivals who sought to trade, settle, and conquer. The Pocumtucks Indigenous to the area later known as Deerfield experienced demographic turmoil a decade before King Philip’s War during the “beaver wars,” and by the time colonial presence took hold, many English envisioned the land as a conveniently emptied wilderness ripe for their habitation. King Philip’s War was the first major Native-settler conflict in the valley. It pushed back the nascent English presence at Pocumtuck in 1675 to reclaim the place as Indigenous cornfields, and not until the 1680s did the English regroup, renaming the place “Deerfield.” Those English who personally remembered the war’s effects on the area did not all return, breaking a great deal of community continuity. Compared to English towns along the New England coast established early in the seventeenth century, the inland frontier outpost of Deerfield was a late enterprise. Yet as transformative as King Philip’s War was for the valley, the 1704 attack on Deerfield by a complex alliance of Wabanaki, Mohawk, Wendat, and New France forces was comparatively more devastating for English colonists: more casualties, more captives. This later violence also achieved more prominence in print culture thanks to Reverend John Williams’s widely circulated narrative The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion (1707), and an avalanche of sermons, fiction, pageants, and academic studies. This intense focus on 1704 has had the effect of eclipsing earlier conflicts, or causing an echoing and refracting among them in an ongoing reverberation of generalized “Indian War.” While King Philip’s War was the defining colonial conflict in the Narragansett country, it was one of many in this western area, which long remained fraught with borderland tensions and Indigenous efforts to maintain ties to ancestral spaces, despite diaspora for purposes of survival. In the centuries after King Philip’s War, pronounced Yankee nativism and antiquarianism took root in the valley. The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association emerged as a regional engine for commemoration. Its members extensively marked the landscape to honor early English settlers and propounded public history narratives about Native erasure from the valley. The association’s memorial efforts furnished contentious, visible targets for later Indigenous critiques and perhaps inadvertently created asymmetries in public

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history. Old Deerfield has been exhaustively researched and interpreted. But surrounding historical landscapes, especially to the north, have received vastly less attention, despite their enduring significance for Native people who fished, planted, and traveled across extensive homelands reaching far beyond “The Street,” a mile-long main thoroughfare at Historic Deerfield that now anchors historical interpretation. An additional factor shaping memorial practices is the concentration of colleges and universities in the valley, which has caused academic methodologies to permeate and in turn be inflected by vernacular practices for more than a century. This milieu exists alongside the economically distressed conditions of western and rural Massachusetts— places like Franklin County, the state’s poorest, most rural county, where many priorities compete with historical preservation on local agendas. A striking quality of the river valley’s memoryscapes is the surfeit of text applied to the land, specifically poetry. From the tentative rhymes of Yankee amateur orators to high-modernist language experimentations by nationally recognized authors, poetic arts have infiltrated public spaces, aestheticizing nearly unspeakable violences like the massacre at the falls. Verses have also frequently acted as literary tools of Yankee territorialization by imaginatively claiming certain locales as Anglo-American “home” grounds. “A homeland for the wanderer / that came from over sea,” John Phelps wrote about the town of Northfield in a 1930 poem, referring to English settlers as the first noteworthy inhabitants.4 “The conquest of New England was a search for homes,” another commentator remarked in 1923 during Northfield’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of settlement by the English.5 Anglo-American homemaking in the valley has been predicated on pervasive misperceptions of Native peoples’ prior place-ties. It is also bound up in the cultural work of words upon the land, the content, form, and longevity of which demonstrate profound differences in what has counted as authoritative, authorized, legitimate inscriptions about the past. When the “vandals” painted a new layer onto the William Turner Monument in 1999, they wrote themselves into a multicentury struggle over how and where to tell histories of violence, resistance, and survival.

A Bend in the River: Gathering Spots, Wartime Refugees, and a Camizado When William Turner’s forces attacked at dawn in May 1676, they targeted a spot of long-standing human importance. The shore they chose overlooked the Great River, a storied passageway critical for sustenance, communication,

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and mobility. Arising from headwaters in the Great North Woods, beyond the White Mountains, the river flows four hundred miles south before emptying into saltwater.6 Along the way its powerful currents wind by high peaks and low hills, dense forests and open expanses of valley, all the while gaining water and energy from a web of tributaries. Four of those feed into the Great River roughly at its midpoint, where the river hitches northwest and drops forty to fifty feet at one of the largest waterfalls along the entire system.7 Wissatinnewag, or Peskeomskut, as the falls were known in Algonquian terms (perhaps connoting geographical features or human uses of the area), had been eminent fishing grounds for at least eight millennia.8 Over thousands of years, Native communities periodically gathered there to harvest massive runs of shad, salmon, and bass.9 These nutrient-rich anadromous fish emerge into the world in freshwater, live most of their lives in the ocean, and return to freshwater to spawn, following ancient cycles of movement within and out of the river. The rocks at the falls formed an ideal catch-spot when the earth warmed and ice and snowpack thawed in springtime, and through seasons beyond number people and fish converged on this place. Like other major fishing areas replete with herring and other species—Amoskeag to the northeast and Nemasket to the southeast, for example—Peskeomskut drew together Native people, other-than-human beings, and environment in complex circuits of dependence and responsibility.10 Importantly, the falls were a multitribal locale, attracting groups from across the region rather than being an exclusive possession of a single Native nation or entity. Throughout the Dawnland, fishing places were more than utilitarian sites for resource harvesting. “[A]t the spring, when fish comes in plentifully,” Thomas Morton wrote about such river sites, “they have meetinges from severall places, where they exercise themselves in gaminge and playing of juglinge trickes and all manner of Revelles, which they are delighted in.”11 These were intensely restorative, social locales, where Indigenous relations and neighbors could exchange news, trade, and collectively process their catch for present and future consumption. Plentiful fish were not the only attraction. The falls lay in the heart of a riverine landscape made rich for survival by alluvial deposits left by glacial retreat in deep time. These soils, some of the best in the entire Northeast, supported maize horticulture by Algonquian “mobile farmers.”12 Corn planting developed incrementally, constituting one part of a diverse system that fed and provided for the people. Within that system furred other-than-human beings, like deer, moose, and beaver, also played crucial roles. At Wequamps, a

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hill east of Pocumtuck that held the shape of a giant beaver’s body, the very landscape attested to the deep-time presence of animals with outsize power to shape the earth and water. As Indigenous travelers passed by the form of Ktsi Amiskw, as they called the enormous creature who had once hoarded the waters, they were reminded of their long-standing relations with beavers.13 So central were all of these activities to Indigenous lifeways that Pocumtuck and nearby river Natives, like many of their Algonquian relations, measured the passage of time through moons associated with particular activities: times for setting corn, weeding corn, hilling corn; times when squash and beans became edible; times for catching fish, for hunting furred animals.14 None of these undertakings were static or timeless, of course. River valley fishermen selectively adopted other groups’ fishing technologies, for instance, and adjusted their seasonal rounds in response to climate modulations, such as the more intense cold of the Little Ice Age.15 Euro-American arrivals did not obliterate Natives’ access to the falls and connected areas, but they did deeply transform Native lifeways and geographies. Entrepreneurial English immigrants like William Pynchon sought out trading relationships with river Natives, specifically in beaver pelts, which commanded high prices in European markets. By relocating from Dorchester and Roxbury in eastern Massachusetts Bay to Agawam on the Great River, called Springfield by English colonists, Pynchon moved closer to a rich source of pelts. Englishmen readily recognized their own inabilities to trap efficiently these “cunning,”16 sharp-toothed, territorial rodents, whose patterns of activity and rest shifted regularly.17 (Occasional colonial aspirations to domesticate beavers ran into predictable obstacles, much like their designs for taming moose.)18 Native trappers, who had long dwelled alongside beavers and familiarized themselves with the animals’ nocturnal, semiaquatic behaviors, possessed better traditional ecological knowledge for trapping (fig. 26). Some began working in collaborative subcontractor capacities with the Pynchons to funnel pelts down to English trading sites. Within this emerging fur-trading economy, beaver pelts accrued value as measured in currency units per pound of pelts. The system was intensely profitable for the Pynchons (who also cultivated wide-ranging investments and trading ties to the West Indies and Tantiusques lead mine in Nipmuc country).19 It also brought distinct forms of wealth, leverage, and material goods to the multitudes of Natives involved. But the beaver market was notoriously volatile. Other trapping and trading areas, including Wabanaki territories and the Maine coast, along with the Hudson River Valley, posed strong competition; and the Pynchons’ regional monopoly

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Figure 26. Northeastern Algonquian oral traditions relate accounts of how giant beaver land-shapers transformed the terrain and water in deep time. In the seventeenth century, beavers became critical factors in regional economic systems as Native trappers developed relationships with Euro-American trading partners, predicated on the ever-greater harvesting of these animals, prized for their pelts. Natives in the Kwinitekw River Valley interacted with colonial entrepreneurs like the Pynchon family, and over time they became embroiled in debts that resulted in the alleged sales or mortgages of land in recompense. Overhunting of beavers for commercial marketplaces transformed regional ecologies as the animals’ dams diminished. This modern-day beaver lives in the northern reaches of that river’s watershed. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

proved tenuous.20 In addition, overhunting of a key species of “tree-cutter” disturbed regional hydrology. Beaver dams fell into disrepair, releasing pent-up waters that had helped stabilize and hydrate entire ecosystems, on which many beings depended.21 Furthermore, not only beavers became targets for market-driven hunting and commodification. The Pynchons’ export lists teemed with skins of otter, raccoon, muskrat, mink, fox, and lynx. Each of those animals—when still breathing and walking—needed particular kinds of

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territory to feed, shelter, and nurture new generations. Yet these customary habitats were becoming increasingly stressful places. In late summer 1672, Mashalisk confronted a beaver problem. She owed John Pynchon “ten large Bevers,” plus other debts accrued by her son, Wuttawwluncksin, for which she assumed responsibility. Details of why she was unable to pay in beaver are not known: overhunting may have made the animals scarcer than usual, making it difficult for Native parties to accurately forecast their harvests of pelts. Ongoing effects of warfare and disease had likely also diminished the number of capable Native trappers. To settle these debts, she released a tract of land on the south side of the Pocumtuck River extending down to Wequamps, which the English colonial toponymy now deemed Sugarloaf Hill, or Mount Sugarloaf, plus islands in the Great River.22 Mashalisk’s case was not an anomaly. Trading entanglements created relations of mutual dependency among Natives and colonial newcomers and spiraled into troubling forms of indebtedness, particularly for Natives.23 To address these mounting obligations, some river valley Natives resorted to land transactions, including mortgages and sales, a series of which unfolded through the mid-1600s. The legality of Native-colonial land transactions has rightly been questioned, along with the variable motivations Native parties may have had for engaging in territorially based negotiations. These often fell in different places along a spectrum of “consent” to “coercion.”24 Many Native negotiators approached these interactions with strong senses of agency and community accountability, rather than naively being duped or having their hands forced, though the possibility of an individual using such negotiations for personal gain did exist. Importantly, these “deeds” frequently involved far more complicated terms than simple, outright cessions of Indigenous territories into colonial hands. Throughout the river valley, many expressly reserved a detailed series of Native use rights.25 As Chickwallop and other sachems communicated with John Pynchon in 1658 about lands on the east side of the river, they made sure to “reserve libertie to Hunt Deare, fowle &c And to take fish, Beaver or Otter &c,” in addition to reserving a specific area as their cornfield. Umpanchala made sure to codify rights in a 1660 written document pertaining to “Planteing Ground togeather with libertie to Hunt Deere or other Wild Creatures to take fish & to sett Wigwoms on ye Comons, & take wood & trees for use.”26 (The primary reason Umpanchala engaged in land negotiations was extensive debt he incurred over the previous year, as he acquired highly prized red cotton, clothing, a gun, and other goods furnished by Pynchon, who appeared to prod

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him to settle up with land.)27 Less than a decade before war broke out, Chauk, who identified as sachem of Pocumtuck, in 1666 transferred certain areas but reserved “Liberty of fishing for ye Indians in ye Rivers or waters, & free Liberty to hunt deere or other Wild creatures, & to gather Walnuts chestnuts & other nuts.”28 All told, such negotiations worked hard to maintain Native abilities for subsistence, dwelling, and mobility, while also formally making way for limited colonial presence. Yet the possibility of coexistence in shared spaces became difficult in practice. English colonists’ expectations tended to desire more exclusive land rights, while their roaming livestock and extensive agriculture tended to crowd out Indigenous uses over time. The colonial settlements that did take form were precarious. When English habitations commenced at Pocumtuck in the early 1670s, it and a scattering of colonial neighbors were very much frontier outposts. Quite literally, almost no other New England settlement stood west or north of Deerfield throughout the seventeenth century. The lands and waters beyond them strongly remained Native space. And those colonial presences that lay north and west were none too amenable to the English anyway: New York to the west and south, and Catholic New France to the north. English people came to settle at Pocumtuck due to Native-colonial disputes to the east. Settlers in Dedham, Massachusetts, became embroiled in land controversies with the Native mission community at Natick, and as recompense for lands “lost” during that dispute, Bay Colony officials authorized the Dedham men to acquire acreage in so-called “unallotted” parts of Massachusetts. The place they chose was Pocumtuck.29 The low-lying plain into which English settlers walked, edged on one side by a winding, sandy river and on the other by a low mountain, was a Native homeland deeply in flux. The resident Pocumtucks were reeling from a devastating series of conflicts and reprisals with the Mohawks in the 1660s. Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) lands had been depopulated of their own beavers, causing those peoples to range eastward toward Algonquian lands for replenishment of these vital trade items. In the beaver wars of the mid-1600s, struggles over access to territories ideal for harvesting these other-than-human resources drew multiple imperial and tribal players into conflict, fostering “cycles of dissolution and reconstruction.”30 Conveniently for the English newly arrived at Pocumtuck, a major human obstacle to settlement seemed to have diminished. Pocumtucks and other Native inhabitants of the valley had not been eradicated, however, contrary to later Yankee claims that the area was a pristinely barren corridor, or vacuum domicilium, freely open to habitation by the English. Indeed, the latter 1660s–1670s saw ongoing diplomacy, visitation,

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and communication between the river Natives and other regional Algonquians, including Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and “Praying Indians.”31 When King Philip’s War broke out east of Narragansett Bay in summer 1675, the vicinity of Pocumtuck initially stood far removed from direct conflict. But it did not remain apart for long. Word spread through Native and colonial communication networks of the uprising—initially uncertain rumors and “flying reports,” then more detailed intelligence. While John Pynchon was initially confident that river Natives would inform him about Philip’s insurgent movements, that assumption of alliance proved presumptuous.32 Given that Pocumtucks had in recent decades maintained alliances with the Narragansetts and Niantics (who were confronting burdensome wampum fines from the English levied in 1645, and at odds with Uncas), these preexisting networks came into play.33 As the corn grew higher in the heat of July, the gathering momentum of Native resistance became apparent. English settlements east of the river at Quaboag (Brookfield) came under Native attack, after which Natives moved to Ashquoach, “a place of food,” with good access to cornfields.34 These events distressed Pynchon. He reported the exposed English settlers at the river towns were “in fear of a sudden surprisal at home.”35 By August he was nearly pleading for aid from other colonies: “I am in straits on every side what to do.”36 When a Pokanoket captive came into Springfield—wearing an array of hybrid clothes that signaled deep entanglement with colonial material culture (hog skin shoes, linsey-woolsey stockings, breeches made from bed ticking, and an English coat)—Pynchon had him executed.37 A few weeks later, the northernmost English outpost at Squakheag (Northfield) fell under siege. Colonial troops led by Richard Beers of Watertown fell to an ambush on an exposed plain. Native parties removed their heads and posted them on stakes, using these graphic bodily warnings to dissuade further English military incursions—a kind of boundary marking, like other Natives had done around the Kickemuit River by Mount Hope at the height of summer. Colonists came to call this the “Beers massacre” of September 4, 1675. Soon after, colonial troops under the command of William Lathrop ventured to Pocumtuck to bring down the year’s harvest, trying to save it from total loss. They and their wagons were encircled on the journey south while pausing at a brook lined with wild grapes. The “Bloody Brook massacre” of September 18, as the encounter became known, resulted in a substantial Native victory and the loss of nearly all colonial troops. Their home communities on the Massachusetts North Shore reeled from the shock and attendant social

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pressures incurred when male heads of household died in the field, and long after, they commemorated the fallen “Flower of Essex.”38 From Native perspectives, both the Beers and Lathrop attacks allowed Native parties to seize firearms and replenish their own weapons stores, as they reported to James Quanopohit in early 1676.39 Native campaigns against the river towns, including Hadley, Northampton, and Springfield, caused extensive damage to colonists’ buildings and properties, including those of John Pynchon (who assumed oversight of the family’s properties in 1652 following the elder Pynchon’s return to England). The early autumn burning of colonists’ cornmills and gristmills posed a special danger: they still possessed some corn, but not the mechanical means they required to transform it into edible food.40 As these catastrophes mounted around him, Pynchon endeavored to maintain social order as well as to interpret events through the will of the Lord, evidence of His chastening of wayward colonists.41 By the time winter set in during late 1675, the valley was a scene of English hunger and depopulation that continued into springtime. As the ground warmed in May 1676, Thomas Reede, an English colonist previously taken captive by Native parties, came into Hatfield at daybreak bearing momentous news. He had just come from the falls. There, numerous Natives, including “old men and women,” were camped on both sides of the river, with a few English captives remaining in their midst. When Reede described this milieu to authorities downriver, he was perceiving the strategic withdrawal to this site of Native groups from all over the Northeast, weakened and threatened by months of warfare.42 The summer and autumn of 1675 brought considerable Native victories, but the onset of winter, and forcible scattering of communities from traditional resources in their homelands, made them vulnerable to starvation and disease. Scores retreated to western parts of the region to seek subsistence as well as safety from aggressive colonial actions in the southeastern theater of war. The falls, besides being an ideal place to assuage bodily needs through the reliable fish harvest, was relatively removed from colonial strongholds. That stretch of the river remained terra incognita for most English, minimally knowledgeable about the geography of colonial frontiers. The falls were vital for Narragansett and Wampanoag refugees from the massacre at Great Swamp. Some swamp survivors sought protection in the numerous swamps nearby in the Narragansett country, while others moved farther afield to places like Menemesit and Wachusett in Nipmuc country, and Peskeomskut, several days’ walk northwest from the environs of Narragansett Bay. Besides seeking fish, the regrouped Natives

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intended to plant around Pocumtuck and Squakheag, both recently restored to Native control after expulsion of the English. But when Canonchet/Nanuntanoo ventured back toward Narragansett country to retrieve seed corn, he was captured before he could return to the gathering on the river and was eventually executed. By the appropriate protocol, Owaneco, son of the Mohegan sachem Uncas, carried out the execution and had Canonchet’s head sent to Hartford. As the moment of death neared, these parties must have remembered a very similar sequence of events only three decades before, when Canonchet’s father Miantonomo likewise died at Mohegan hands. In recompense for “their good service,” Owaneco and associates received coats from Hartford.43 Namassack kesos, “time for fish catching,” transitioned into Squannikesos, “time for setting corn.”44 Reports of Natives’ planting at Pocumtuck, as well as appropriating milk- and meat-rich Côwsnuck from the lower colonial river settlements to redistribute north, trickled down to the English, alerting them to a considerable multitribal presence around the falls.45 John Russell, minister at Hadley, reported in March that the Natives were likely a “few miles” above Deerfield at “the great place of their fishing.”46 By late April that intelligence attained sharper contours. Russell, Turner, and other leaders explicitly endorsed a campaign targeting that site: “now is the time to distresse the enemy,” they asserted. If they could “drive them from their fishing . . . famine would subdue them.”47 None of these colonists possessed deep comprehension of Native seasonal mobility and resource use, or the highly nuanced ways in which communities interacted with resources in specific sites. But they understood the general outlines enough to formulate a potentially devastating plan of action. Altogether, conflict in the river valley had become a tense struggle over the very basic necessities for survival—corn and fish—and efforts by each side to undermine the other’s food security.48 In early May Connecticut authorities dispatched messengers upriver from Hartford to make overtures to Native leaders camped along the river by Squakheag. Appealing to Pessicus, Wequaquat, Wanchequit, and Sunggumachoe, they asked the sachems to bring English captives back to Hadley for release, potentially in exchange for Natives held by the English. As much as those sachems and families at Squakheag may have desired the return of their relations from captivity, colonists’ claims to be “men of peace” who would not seize the sachems rang hollow. Moreover, Hadley was much less safe space to enter than Squakheag. Like other colonial river towns, it had recently been fortified with a defensive fence and supported a garrison of locals anxious for

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action.49 (A place palisaded by the Natives in this vicinity had accidently caught fire in 1670, destroying wigwams and displacing families.)50 Furthermore, the terms dictated to Natives who would agree to surrender were onerous. They included giving up firearms and ammunition, which by this point were critical for hunting as well as warfare; subjecting themselves to English governance; dwelling only at places “where we will appoynt them land to plant on”; not engaging in alliances with other tribes without colonial consent; and being prepared to “allwayes assist the English against their enemies.”51 These highly disadvantageous terms envisioned a postwar future that gutted tribal sovereignties and spatially contained Native populations to English-authorized geographies. Unsurprisingly, such efforts to broker a treaty failed to gain traction. By mid-May, as prospects for diplomatic peacemaking waned, valley residents and troops grew restless. Colonial military leaders ardently desired to decisively shift the tide of war. While in some previous engagements colonial troops took Native prisoners, hoping to use them as domestic labor or sell them for profit, or attempted to confine populations they deemed threatening to supervised areas, here tactics took a devastating turn: annihilation of all targets at the falls—women, children, and elders as well as warriors. Colonial leaders referred to their strategy as a camizado, a military term for a surprise attack occurring at night or daybreak when enemies are asleep and highest casualties can be wrought.52 This was not the first planned massacre of Algonquian populations in colonial New England. The Pequot War’s Mistick massacre of May 1637, along with the more recent assault on Great Swamp, both revolved around strategies of surrounding and infiltrating protected encampments known to harbor noncombatants. Distinctive here was the direct goal of undermining Indigenous food supplies and using ensuing starvation to force Indigenous communities into final submission. William Turner was not a natural candidate to lead the expedition. Aging, lame with a bad hip, and weakened by sickness—disabilities he freely disclosed to colonial authorities in the spring of 1676, going so far as to suggest they find “some fitter person” for the campaign53—he nevertheless had desirable leadership qualities. Born in Dartmouth, England, he stowed away on a ship to Virginia, then moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, where his brother John lived. Turner moved to Boston and became one of the founding members of the town’s First Baptist Church in 1665. Trained as a tailor, he encountered trouble with Puritan authorities over his religious beliefs and twice found himself imprisoned, hardships that threatened “utter ruine of [his]

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headles family.”54 (Such hardships intensified during his wartime absence. Left alone without husband or the accustomed complement of servants, his wife, Mary, in Boston petitioned authorities for relief.)55 Despite his marginalized status in the antebellum period, during King Philip’s War Turner secured command of troops for a spring 1676 campaign in western Massachusetts, with defensive and offensive movements along the river corridor. The valley was not “home” for Turner, but a target geographically distant from his customary haunts in eastern Massachusetts. Yet many of the troops he raised for the assault on the falls came from river towns, and maintained different kinds of material and emotional investments in that regional landscape. After a flurry of planning and mobilization, Turner’s troops traveled north up the river valley. They marched past the ruined colonial remains—and resurgent Native planting grounds—by Pocumtuck, using cover of night to conceal their approach to the falls.56 At daybreak on May 19, 1676, they launched the camizado. Natives awoke to noise and confusion as Turner’s armed men descended on the encampment. The soldiers seized the advantage of surprise to slaughter many of those present, either by firearms or by forcing them over the thundering cataract. Turner may have initially felt victorious. But as he and his men withdrew west and south, Native warriors who had regrouped from the massacre tracked them. Turner perished in the retreat; comrades hurriedly buried his body. The falls massacre was a cataclysmic loss for multiple Native communities. Exact casualties are not known. John Russell, from his admittedly limited vantage at Hadley, estimated two hundred Native deaths in a report from May 22. The river’s currents swept many bodies away downstream, precluding traditional practices of burial and mourning. But it did not annihilate the entire encampment. Russell also reported that Natives had planted about three hundred acres in the vicinity, adding “that the enemy abides still in the places where they were on both sides up River and in the Ilands; and fires in the same place where or men had burnt the wigwams,” suggesting the falls area had not been totally abandoned in the immediate aftermath of the massacre.57 Indeed, English authorities in Connecticut retained high suspicions of the surviving Natives in the attack’s aftermath, dispatching troops northward, “for surely those Indians up the River are those that doe . . . most encourage the warr & continue the same, for other sachems are more inclinable to peace.”58 Pynchon dispatched troops to Squakheag and Paquoag, above Hadley, to cut down remaining Native cornfields.59 Given these increasingly impossible conditions for remaining in place, some survivors decided to seek refuge among sympa-

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thetic Native communities elsewhere.60 In June 1676 Major John Talcott, also leader of the attack on Nipsachuck, reported traveling “up at the Falls above Pacomtock, and scouts being send up the River on both sides and on the east side as high as Sucquackheag; and not discovering the enemie to be in those parts, but that rather they were retired back towards Watchosuck or into the Nipmug country,” indicating an overall Native retreat away from the river and into the Massachusetts interior, where the mountainous terrain around Wachusett was poorly navigated by the English.61 A handful of survivors sought amnesty in Hadley and nearby river towns. Others dispersed in a vast Algonquian diaspora to points north, east, and west, including Paquayag along the Hudson River, closer to Haudenosaunee country, where they were reportedly “encouraged to come.” Even in these new locales, they maintained connections to the valley through travel and kin networks.62 Yet Natives who remained in and connected to the valley tended to move under the radar of English neighbors, who did not accurately register these enduring Algonquian social landscapes of mobility, connection, and transnational identity formation.63 Few Native recountings of the massacre entered into written archives, though provocative glimpses came in court testimony from Newport, Rhode Island, in late summer 1676. Numerous Natives from across the region had been brought to Aquidneck Island to face charges of violence against the colonies. Officials coerced Wenanaquabin and John Wecopeak into attesting to the roles they played. Wenanaquabin was “of Pawtuxett,” on the western shore of Narragansett Bay, and he “confesseth that he was at the Fight with Capt. Turner, and there lost his Gun, and swam over a River to save his Life.” The court found him guilty and sentenced him to death. John Wecopeak testified “that he was at the Fight with Capt. Turner, and run away by Reason the Shott came thick as Raine.” He claimed to have remained “at a great Distance” from the action, but other deponents damningly placed him within eyeshot of Turner. The court also sentenced him to death.64 The condemned were evidently shot and interred in an unmarked location in Newport. Another Native named Menowniett (Mohegan-Narragansett, by his own description), captured in Tunxis lands by Farmington, reported under different interrogation in August 1676 that he had been involved in extensive fighting along the river. Regarding the falls, he related: “In ye Fall fight were slayn 40 Norwottog, Quapaug 10 Narogancets and [. . .].” Here the blank denoted a failure of colonial recording techniques to fully register his report of losses.65 Like survivors of Great Swamp, those Natives who eluded death at the falls found their communities demographically shaken and dispersed in several directions. Such social conditions would have made collective acts of tribal

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recall and remembrance difficult in the postwar period—but not impossible. Indeed, given the extent and speed of Native communication networks, it seems probable that word of the massacre rippled widely. Imagine the effects of that news at other fishing places, like Amoskeag Falls, less than eighty miles to the northeast. Hearing that English troops were capable of targeting these gatherings, would people have altered their relations with Amoskeag? Would they have become wary of assembling for the springtime river harvests, or slept restlessly in their dwellings at night knowing that dawn might bring an assault? It is challenging to point to specific documentary evidence of such chains of memory-transmission. And seeking answers through material traces can be equally elusive. (Archaeological signatures of Indigenous and colonial presences at Amoskeag suffered disruption in the 1960s, following construction of a bridge off-ramp through a bluff replete with artifacts.)66 But it is nevertheless important to recognize that Native experiences of traumatic violence at Peskeomskut likely were remembered and shared for a range of reasons, including protection from future devastations. Colonists had their own rationales for remembering the falls violence and attendant campaigns. Their recollections frequently attained written form, as well as print-culture presence that helped disseminate their versions of events over time and space. John Stebbins, likely the only Englishman to escape Bloody Brook unscathed, discovered the powerful effects of memory in 1678. When local officials tried to impress him into militia service, he composed a petition recalling in detail his earlier participation at Bloody Brook: “I was never forced or pressed into the service, but volentarily gave my selfe frely to the wars of the Lord, & my country.” Officials let him off the hook for future service.67 Others who survived the falls campaign left behind wildly divergent stories and variations on the captivity narrative genre. The young Jonathan Wells’s account seemed an almost fantastical narrative of survival, while Hope Atherton, reverend at Hatfield and chaplain for the expedition, related a tale of divine deliverance that may have signaled the beginnings of a mental breakdown. He verbally recapitulated his wanderings to his congregation after his sermon on May 28, 1676, less than two weeks after the falls assault. When he spoke of having “passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” Atherton, like many of his Puritan peers, engaged in a complex layering of biblical and personal accountings, interpreting his fresh-in-mind wartime suffering in the literal river valley through theological frameworks that gave a semblance of order and Christian meaning to chaos. Nervous exhaustion brought his premature death in 1677, possibly exacerbated by his distressing experiences.68

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For other valley colonists, the war did not end cleanly in 1676 with Philip’s death. Instead, a series of aftershocks disrupted their attempts to reestablish homesteads and farms, and underscored just how tenuous the English frontier remained. In autumn 1677 Native parties—likely comprising valley Natives now living in diaspora—traveled down to Deerfield, Hatfield, and surroundings, where they took numerous captives. Among them was Quentin Stockwell. His captors conveyed him safely north past grounds recently seared by violence (the falls, Squakheag meadows), and three hundred miles upriver and overland to northern Indigenous enclaves and Catholic New France. Stockwell returned in 1678. Back in New England he composed a narrative recounting his involuntary transit, which Increase Mather brought to a wider audience through a 1684 published compendium. Two other captives from this later date, Benjamin Waite and Stephen Jennings, also followed this northward route and eventual redemption. They named their children “Canada Waite” and “Captivity Jennings,” giving multigenerational testaments to their forced flight.69 For colonists like Stockwell, Waite, and Jennings, it was abundantly clear that the valley remained a contested borderlands and active route for Native movement, even though later commentators and critics tended to ignore these histories or downplay them. While some colonists shaped understandings of the war by deliberately speaking their memories or writing them down, others exercised influence through sheer presence. The colonial dead found ways to communicate mutely. In a period lacking uniform, state-sponsored mechanisms for dealing with war casualties, an ad hoc system of retrieval prevailed—or more accurately, failed. Ungathered remains of soldiers and noncombatants alike sometimes moldered away where they lay, materially merging with the landscape. Colonists who reestablished Northfield, for instance, reported bones protruding through the soil around the site of Richard Beers’s grave.70 For AngloAmerican communities that typically valued the permanence and sanctity of their own communities’ final resting places, this unpredictable resurfacing of the dead would have been unnerving. Cases of thwarted burial entered local lore as well. In the aftermath of Bloody Brook, men under Robert Treat and Samuel Mosely, alongside allied Mohegans and Pequots, arrived to inter the dead. Among the casualties was Robert Dutch of Ipswich, whose remarkable fate William Hubbard (also of Ipswich, on the Massachusetts North Shore) recalled in 1677: “having been sorely wounded by a bullet that rased to his skull, and then mauled by the Indian hatchets, left for dead by the Salvages, and stript by them of all but his skin, yet when Capt. Mosely came near, he

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almost miraculously as one raised from the dead came towards the English, to their no small amazement, by whom being received and cloathed, he was carryed off to the next garison, and is living & in perfect health at this day.”71 Embodying a Christlike resurrection, Dutch stood as a living monument to miraculous providence, poised to tell and retell the story of his close encounter with the grave. Neighbors could gesture at his scarred being as a corporeal encapsulation of “savage” violence, but also of divine reanimation. “May he be to the friends & relations of the rest of the slain, an emblem of their more perfect resurrection at the last day,” Hubbard implored.72 Dutch’s home community of Ipswich well remembered his fate for centuries.73 Along the middle Kwinitekw River, conditions remained dire for English settlers who had suffered far heavier losses than their compatriots safely ensconced in and near Boston, including commentators like William Hubbard and Increase Mather, whose soon-to-be “canonical” accounts of King Philip’s War expressed a certain assurance, even complacency, about colonial recovery from the war. Many western New England settlements remained decimated or scattered, and that frontier effectively reversed itself for years, causing long-term financial ruination as well as psychological turmoil. Colonists driven away from Pocumtuck petitioned the General Court in Boston for aid in 1678, bemoaning the lasting damage: “our estates are wasted . . . our housen have been Rifled & then burnt, our flocks and heards Consumed, the ablest of our Inhabitants killed; yt our Plantation has become a wildernesse, a dwelling for owls and a pasture for flocks, & we that are left are separated into several towns.”74 Absentee proprietors with little interest in venturing out to Pocumtuck to support resettlement did not improve the situation. The overgrowing of colonial habitations by the natural world—the reversion to owl habitat—did not inspire aesthetic rumination as the Romantics would later espouse, or environmentalist enthusiasm for nature’s triumph over development.75 Yet what did it mean for colonists to live amid ruination, or be displaced from war-torn landscapes? What was the psychological toll of seeing English worlds come undone, then remain unrestored for years? Or even more distressing from colonial vantages—to be forcefully reminded that they still dwelled within dynamic Native space?

Recolonization and the Memory-Tour of Samuel Sewall By the 1680s a few English settlers straggled back to Pocumtuck, newly christened “Deerfield” in an act of toponymic transformation that subsumed the long-standing Algonquian place-name. Over that decade and the next they

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and newcomers redoubled efforts to reestablish a durable colonial presence. Their land-management activities attempted to consolidate and intensify Anglo-American habitations: fences erected, blackbirds hunted, parcels allocated, a meetinghouse constructed. Few references in the sparse town record book suggest that the recolonizers dwelled on the war and its damages. A lone nod to the antebellum settler landscape was a reference to a highway that formerly ran near the mountain before the war.76 Yet surely memories of 1675– 1676, and 1677 in the case of captives like Stockwell, endured, even if not spoken or written publically. Peace proved elusive because the valley persisted as bitterly contested grounds. Colonists in the river towns harbored wariness about Natives after King Philip’s War, which had hardly vanquished Indigenous inhabitants; to the contrary, many survivors remained keen to keep footholds in their historic homelands. The valley remained in turmoil up to the mid-eighteenth century through a succession of other conflicts, and while colonists established a “line of forts” to guard the frontier, these outposts could hardly forestall violence.77 The most infamous violence in settler collective remembrance was the 1704 “raid” on Deerfield by allied Wabanaki, Mohawk, Wendat, and New France forces, each of which brought complex motivations to their participation in this risky wintertime campaign. This devastation, often termed a “massacre” as well, achieved tremendous public prominence thanks to John Williams’s widely circulated imprint The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion (1707), which rivaled Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity narrative about King Philip’s War as a regional best seller. Sometime in the 1700s colonists placed a commemorative marker at Bloody Brook, where Thomas Lathrop and his troops had fallen to a fatal ambush on September 18, 1675.78 It has been characterized as “the earliest monument in the Valley,” possibly “the first historical monument in America.”79 What it looked like, and precisely when it appeared, is not clear. Was it a “little wooden monument,”80 a structure so unweighty that “the different occupants of the soil removed it so many times, that it was a matter of uncertainty where [Lathrop] or his men were buried,”81 as later commentators characterized it? “A small monument had been erected near the spot, by the early settlers of Deerfield, which had nearly disappeared; but the spot was still known,” remarked a historical narrative published in 1835 on the occasion of the dedication of a cornerstone for a more substantial monument.82 Whatever the precise contours, such formal physical markings on the landscape—externalizations of collective memory, arguably early stirrings of detachment from “lived

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memory”83—were exceptional in this period. Puritan critiques of monumentalizing restrained elaborate monumentalizing. So did the depleted financial coffers of ruined towns. Puritan historians and communities identified Bloody Brook as a significant site with unusual casualties, perhaps lending it to a formal marker. But the majority of war sites stayed materially unmarked, especially places where (merely) a handful of colonial lives had been lost.84 In the early eighteenth century, colonial cognizance and interpretation of Bloody Brook and the falls massacre depended strongly on communal placevisiting and oral traditions rather than on external, permanent markers or memory-aids. Consider the ephemeral yet potent memory-tour of Samuel Sewall. In late summer 1716, Sewall rode out to the river towns of Springfield, Hatfield, and Deerfield. Sewall made his home in Boston but traveled throughout New England as a circuit judge and on personal business. His attunement to ritual was deep, and he reveled in commemorating anniversaries and significant happenings.85 In 1716 Sewall visited at Deerfield with John Williams, by then a regional celebrity following his 1704 “captivation” and return from Canada. While in the area, Sewall joined others in the community for a tour of sites made notorious by King Philip’s War: Bloody Brook, scene of Lathrop’s 1675 ambush; and the falls. At each place Sewall’s company evidently told him stories about the events that transpired. “My Pilot, Sam. Childs, shews me where Capt. Lothrop and his Essex Soldiers were slain,” Sewall noted in his diary on the first day, followed by dinner with Williams. Two days later, another outing, slightly north of Bloody Brook: “Mr. Williams, Capt. Wells, Mehuman Hinsdal, went with me to the Falls where Capt. Turner slew so many Indians. In return saw Green-River, where their Mills are, in which Capt. Turner was shot in his Retreat from the Falls.”86 Clearly, Sewall and his companions viewed this constellation of landscapes as historically and culturally resonant. Yet Sewall’s diary stayed silent about details of these encounters. Did Sewall suggest the outings? Did his guide and townspeople draw him along? What did the group do at these sites on a late summer day—talk, pray, trade varying accounts of what had unfolded four decades earlier? The habitual terseness of Sewall’s diary admitted little reflection of that sort. Yet outlines can be suggested. It was critical that Sewall pursue these outings in a group so that community members could share vernacular traditions. A modest monument existed at Bloody Brook by some point in the early 1700s, but there was nothing on the ground with detailed explanatory text, no way for the land to speak directly to a lone visitor. Specific knowledge had to be transmitted through

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oral conveyance and participation in informed social networks. Sewall presumably recalled basic details of these sites’ pasts from his ample readings in regional history texts, but this was more grounded knowledge. It was almost surely a Euro-American conversation, however, since Sewall’s account (and his larger biographical context) gives no indication that a Native informant was part of the mix. Whether Sewall heard these stories before is uncertain. He traveled in the valley years earlier, and conceivably local lore circulated by him then, but 1716 was the first occasion he directly noted the sites’ historical significances. These chorographic rituals, which comprehended the past through its places, are underrecognized phenomena of colonial America, and they challenge historiographical generalizations about Native cultures as essentially oral-performative and opposed to literate colonial ways. Here, AngloAmericans remembered and learned by walking and talking out on the land. John Williams’s participation in these outings was striking. A dozen years after Williams’s captivity and return, this episode demonstrated his own layered sense of the regional memoryscape. The 1704 Deerfield raid and its imprint on the area terrain may have been foremost in his mind: “the Houses of my Neighbours in Flames,” “the smoak of the Fires in the Town,” the “Stream very Swift” where wife Eunice “was plunged over Head and Ears,” “the Foot [of] this Mountain” where “the cruel and blood thirsty Salvage who took her, slew her with his Hatchet, at one stroak.”87 He experienced that traumatic milieu directly, whereas he would have heard about King Philip’s War secondhand since he arrived as minister at Deerfield in 1686, a decade after the violent transformation of Pocumtuck into owl habitat. But surely he would have registered these earlier destructions. Williams commented explicitly in his captivity memoir on the trailing chains of memory that unfolded during the region’s series of Indian Wars from the 1670s through the early 1700s. Almost inadvertently, he registered stories of Native wartime motivations and survivance that tended to elude most New England–based observers. In The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion, he related how Jesuits in St. Francis, Québec (a mission community incorporating Abenaki refugees from King Philip’s War and other upheavals88) intimated to him that Native parties were merited in their attack on Deerfield: “The Jesuit came to our Wigwam, and Prayed a short Prayer; and invited me to Sup with them; and justifyed the Indians in what they did against us: Rehearsing some things done by Major Walden, above Thirty years ago; and how justly God retaliated them in the last War.”89 “Thirty years ago,” “some things done by Major Walden”—the reference was to Cocheco (Dover), New Hampshire,

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in September 1676, where trader and colonial agent Richard Waldron duped an encampment of Pennacooks and other Algonquians, Native refugees seeking shelter from the southern ravages of King Philip’s War. Waldron had scores of “strange” Natives shipped to Boston for trial, where some were hanged or sold into slavery. The wronged Natives did not forget this crossing. In 1689 they achieved retaliation for this and larger grievances against English colonial conduct, attacking Dover and torturing Waldron to death. Moreover, while at St. Francis Williams spoke with an Indigenous survivor of King Philip’s War: “One day a certain Salvagess taken Prisoner in Philips War, who had lived at Mr. Buckleys at Wethersfield, called Ruth, who could speak English very well; who had been often at my House, but was now proselyted to the Romish Faith, came into the Wigwam, and with her an English Maid, who was taken the last War, who was dress’d up in Indian Apparel, could not speak one word of English.”90 The details of Ruth’s identity, life, and wide-ranging movements remained unspoken, but even this snippet by Williams signaled how Algonquians were adapting to new settings and shifting across imperial domains. A tricky but traceable chain of memory this was—1676, 1689, 1704, 1707—where remembrance acted as an agent in prompting new war, and each successive moment articulated the past in new forms and contexts. Attuned to Christian obligations to tell, hear, and pass on accounts of providential workings, Williams would have taken these recollections of earlier violences seriously.91 Perhaps he even wanted an “ebenezer” at each river site, the Puritan term for a tangible commemorative marker. As he stressed in his postredemption sermon, “The Holy God gave order, that his People should Erect Stones of remembrance, that his Wonderful Works of Mercy to his People might not be forgotten; yea, commanded Parents to tell their Children, from Generation to Generation, what great things he had done for them.” It is not unreasonable, then, that forty years after King Philip’s War the memory of 1675–1676 remained actively linked to the land, not effaced by the 1704 raid, and that John Williams might have been one of its most sensitive rehearsers—a champion of some “way of making known to others the wonders of mercy.”92 Then there was Sewall’s other companion, Mehuman Hinsdale, who would have had much to say on the topic of Native-colonial unrest. He had been taken captive from the area twice (1704, 1709), returning from Québec the first time and a long roundabout through Europe the second.93 These later captivities, momentous passages in the lives of these men and their communities, likely became rolled into the stories told to Samuel Sewall at the brook and falls on those September days of 1716. On grounds where multiple

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major events took place, a palimpsest emerged: layers written over layers, none quite erasing the previous, nor, as with layers of different inks bleeding into one another, remaining perfectly legible and distinct.94 Further possibilities about what unfolded on these outings: Bloody Brook was a hastily created colonial mass grave, and for Sewall, so respectful of proper mortuary protocol, the lack of customary interment might have been disquieting. Second, even as Sewall supported colonial expansionism, his ongoing concerns for New England’s Native communities (in his appointed capacity as a commissioner for Indian affairs) might have rendered the mass slaughter at the falls a vexing incident, a morally murky colonial “victory” predicated on wholesale killing of an encampment with its defenses down. Third, the juxtaposition of local mills and the massacre site at the falls might have been jarring. Sewall had interests in sawmills near Salmon Falls and elsewhere in Maine, where he and his wife, Hannah, held a massive landed inheritance, so he might have been ambivalent about the potential for commercial development near the rushing waters.95 Even a matter as seemingly simple as what the group called the cascades is uncertain. Were they referred to as the “Fighting Falls,” as they were labeled by Thomas Pownall on his Revolutionary-era map of the British colonies, which implied an evenly pitched battle rather than slaughter?96 Or did the group perhaps invoke one of the assortment of vernacular names later recorded: “The Fish Falls,” “The Fishing Falls,” “The Great Falls”?97 Finally, it is possible that Sewall’s companions knew and told their visitor about the area’s storied Native memoryscape and the giant beaver land-shape at Wequamps. A web of plausibilities, the particulars lay just out of range of Sewall’s laconic diary notations and their capacity to capture speech and motion across riverine terrain. Sewall’s diary contained only fragments of the story, however. A remarkable personal letter by Sewall to his brother survives that relates additional details of this 1716 visit. Sewall was so moved by the grounds that he wanted to raise funds for a proper memorial along the river. As he expressed his sentiments about the King Philip’s War sites, he was “minded to erect a Monument for Our Brethren, with a brief Inscription on a Slate. If you think it convenient, Enquire whether any will freely contribute towards it.” He reported that en route to the falls with his companions, “In yt way I saw a stone yt pleased me for ye purpose above mentioned.”98 These private remarks demonstrate Sewall’s desire to install a visible, tangible counterpart to the oral remembrances he heard from Williams, Childs, and Hinsdale. This letter is striking because early-eighteenth-century Anglo-American commemorative

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landscapes (apart from individual gravestones) tend to be elusive, rarely registering in the documentary archive, and therefore exceedingly difficult to retrieve through conventional methods of historical research. While filiopietism impelled Benjamin Wadsworth to memorialize his slain father with the stone at Sudbury in the 1730s, Sewall’s motivations arose not from family allegiances, but from a sense of collective colonial fraternity with the fallen troops—“Our Brethren.” Beyond commemorative aspirations, it is also possible that Sewall was pursuing an anxious kind of boundary making. He and his travel companions realized the tenuous quality of colonial presence along this “frontier” in Native space. By installing a stone monument, perhaps Sewall hoped to anchor a symbolic claim to English space, however contested that was in reality. Whatever the motivations may have been, Sewall’s fundraising and memorial project may or may not have come to fruition. Its fate he did not record. Nineteenth-century memorializers at Bloody Brook lightly discounted their predecessors’ relationships with the site: “Long have the residents of this soil travelled over this hallowed spot, unconscious that they were treading on the graves of the fallen heroes.”99 Sewall’s memory-tour and monumental inclinations suggest otherwise. Sewall and Williams trod on these historic grounds but did so deeply mindful of the past and their perceived debts to it. Nevertheless, the fragmentary quality of Sewall’s commentary was representative of the period’s output: laconic in its reflections on place and memory, rarely mounting sustained meditations on commemorative processes like those that would coalesce in the nineteenth century.

Consolidating Valley Identities: River Gods, Fall Town, and Antiquarianism By the early eighteenth century, many valley lands came under the control of an elite caste of Euro-American families known as the “River Gods,” or “Mansion People,” who substantially managed the area’s economic and political affairs.100 Their surnames figure heavily in the documentary record: Ashley, Dwight, Partridge, Porter, Pynchon, Stoddard, Williams. More than economic leaders, they were also instrumental players in the development of a regional culture markedly different from that of Boston, an urban center separated by mountains and miles from the western reaches of Massachusetts. Through their homes, domestic interiors, clothing, furniture, and rituals, these tastemakers set standards for what was fashionable and refined.101

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The new century brought dramatic changes to the landscape, manners, and mores of the valley, and in this increasingly post-Puritan, protocapitalist world, the violences of the seventeenth century might have seemed bygone terrors, scarcely worth preserving in local lore. Yet King Philip’s War continued to weigh on Anglo-American minds near the falls and brook, among those of modest means as well as the River Gods. In the mid-1700s, colonial veterans of the falls campaign pressured Massachusetts to reward them for their service at Peskeomskut. A number of these military participants petitioned for and ultimately won land grants as recompense for their exertions, located in an area initially called “Fall Town” or the “Falls Fight Township.”102 (These grants resembled the Narragansett Townships Numbers 1–7 granted to veterans of the Great Swamp massacre, in sites as far-flung as central New Hampshire and mid-coastal Maine.) Deeds confirming the falls grants routinely referenced the encounter of May 1676 in their terms, and did so well into the mid-1700s. As late as the 1760s, the granted township in question, which lay considerably north of the actual falls, went by the name of Fall Town. Only with its incorporation as Bernardston in 1762, and then as other towns, did that toponymic affiliation with the massacre diminish. These transfers of land involved multiple generations—decadeslong legal delays meant heirs as well as falls veterans themselves took part in petitioning—so the family became a key unit for transmission of memory. Consider how a father would have explained to his son how he acquired the plot of land in Fall Town on which their new timber house stood. Even when land in the township transferred to families unaffiliated with the massacre, deeds still referenced the violent moment of origin. Robert Blare of Deerfield sold his interest to John Burke of Hatfield for eighteen pounds in 1737, for example, conferring on Burke his “whole right and title to and Interest in a town ship Granted by ye General Court to ye officers and Soldiers that were in ye fall Fight,” along with other lands that might accrue to officers or soldiers.103 In the creation of Fall Town, remembrance of the massacre, though not necessarily its horrific details, led directly to acquisition of private property and expansion of settler colonialism into the Northeastern interior. Grantees cultivated shared perceptions of military heroism to legitimate their titles. In the midst of these colonial bids to expand landholdings in the river valley and surrounding hills—premised on selective invocations of service at Peskeomskut—Native communities navigated challenging political circumstances to maintain grounds of their own, critical pathways and river routes to and from them, and sovereignty within them. In the summer of 1735, land was on

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many people’s minds and tongues in Deerfield. As the corn grew higher up and down the valley, representatives from multiple Northeastern tribal communities gathered by the sandy tributary feeding into the Great River: Mohicans, Schagticokes, Abenakis, Mohawks.104 All of these communities had close ties to the upheavals and diasporas of King Philip’s War, including at the most familial level, for those who had incorporated refugees seeking security in other locales. Sixty years on, they conferred with the Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher, colonial legislators, and other Euro-American representatives, who noted frankly that they would have preferred to meet in Boston rather than in this western valley. But for tribal representatives the vicinity of Wequamps was a more amenable and geopolitically significant corridor. Even so, they pointedly countered to Belcher, the long journeys over mountains and rivers created stressful impositions for them. In this multilingual milieu Joseph Kellogg acted as interpreter. Kellogg had gained his fluency in Indigenous and French languages at Kahnawake and New France after being taken captive from Deerfield in 1704. He eventually returned to New England, while his sisters intermarried into the Kahnawake community. He was also a grandson of Joseph Kellogg of Hadley, operator of a ferry transporting people and livestock across the Great River starting in the 1660s. That Kellogg participated under Turner in the violence against Peskeomskut. In recognition of the elder Kellogg’s military service, his descendants acquired a land grant at Fall Town.105 Similar stories could be told about other participants in the 1735 conference (like Stephen Williams, son of the reverend John), which drew together individuals and groups with familial and community histories that had now been entangled for generations. Over that time identities, kinship ties, and political loyalties frequently transformed and intertwined, so much that the younger Kellogg was now positioned to act as a reputable broker at the truck house (trading site) recently established in upriver Native (Abenaki) space, at the place called Fort Dummer. Several matters were on the table in 1735 during carefully orchestrated diplomatic interactions and presentations of wampum belts. Foremost was the nature of these tribes’ alliances with the English, during a moment of relative calm amid ongoing warfare that engulfed local communities as well as BritishFrench imperial tensions. Participants also wished to clarify the nature of Native-colonial trading relationships and access to material goods at nearby truck houses, and to assess whether tribal communities would be receptive to colonial missionaries and teachers, a point Belcher wished to push. The numbers of tribal representatives speaking at these prolonged discussions, and the

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deliberate surety with which they made their positions known, demonstrated to the mass of colonial observers that the fertile, well-connected valley was very much still Indigenous space, albeit increasingly shared with expanding colonial settlements. A series of land deeds emerged from 1735 (continuing into the latter 1730s) pertinent to lands stretching east, west, and north of the Great River by Deerfield. Rather than simple Native cessions, these were carefully calibrated negotiations intended to ensure continuing peace in this multinational, “middle ground” space—peace contingent on good-faith interactions and access to critical resources.106 Unlike in early 1700s Narragansett country, what was not being created was an Indian reservation attempting to demarcate fully Native territory from colonized spaces. By avoiding a reservation system (a problematic legal construct, of course), this enabled a capacious sense of continuing Native place-worlds, use rights, unrestricted transit, and mutually beneficial exchanges with neighbors—but potentially made it easier for Euro-American speculators and settlers to lay further claims to ancestral homelands. The valley remained an active crossroads at mid-century for those with immediate stakes in its future. It also attracted visitors compelled by the region’s deeply layered histories. Among them was Ezra Stiles, who we previously met while he was digging up sensitive grounds at Great Swamp. Stiles spent most of his life in southern New England. Deerfield stood a fair distance from coastal Quinnipiac homelands (New Haven, Connecticut), his base in the 1750s as he tutored at Yale College and practiced law. But the distance was precisely what attracted him. In the summer of 1752 Stiles “declined into a consumption” and remained ill. Desperate to hasten his body’s recovery, Stiles took to the road. In 1754, he remarked, “I resolved to try Riding effectually and in May rode from College to Deerfield 100 Miles.” In five months he covered nearly one thousand miles across the Northeast. Vigorous travel on horseback and fresh air did its convalescent work, and he soon reported restored health. For Stiles, pursuit of New England’s places was literally tied to his bodily survival. Travel also broadened Stiles’s insights into the regional past and present, and encouraged him to converse with all manner of locals on topics “political, civil, religious, philosophical &c.”107 Stiles’s journeys often circled back to the same places, like his repeat visits to Great Swamp. Stiles rode to Deerfield in 1754 and returned in 1787 to preach an ordination sermon in town, retreading grounds that Samuel Sewall and John Williams crisscrossed in 1716.108 Yet Stiles’s tour diverged from theirs. He recorded nothing explicitly about Bloody Brook or the falls—though he

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was well aware of the Falls Fight, subsequent grants, and their “development” through home-lots, meetinghouse construction, and other durable colonial features.109 The spot that arrested his attention was “Pecumtic,” whose topographical features he plotted on a map. The day after his sermon Stiles had been probing the riverbank west of the Deerfield meetinghouse in September 1787 when he and his company “found broken pieces of Earthen Cups, or as they are called Indian Pots, about 2 1/2 feet below the surface—a Bone also. At this place Bones & a part of a Skeleton shewed themselves 4 or 5 y. ago by the wearing away of the Bank. These Indian pots are spoken of as familiarly at Deerfd as the Indian arrows.” These blackened, crumbling vessels intrigued him: “I have never found any before,” he scribbled in his private journals.110 Stiles’s remarks implied that colonists at Deerfield were well aware of Native artifacts and human remains, though likely not attuned to deeper significances of the items for their Algonquian creators and descendants, none of whom accompanied his search. And Stiles did more than muse on these evidences of long-standing Native habitation. The ceramics appear to have been disinterred from their riverbank, transported to New Haven, and deposited into an early museum at Yale that Stiles enthusiastically supported. There, they, along with other so-called “Indian Curiosities” disarticulated from numerous North American tribal contexts, became objects of visual consumption for collegiate visitors. Stiles distinguished these ceramics from “European or asiatic” earthenwares, using comparative global materialities to mark local Indigenous wares as visibly “Other.”111 Stiles’s collecting at Deerfield marked an early moment in appropriative regional antiquarianism. Rather than approaching Indigenous objects as active nodes in networks of relations, linking past and present—as were the wampum belts presented in 1735 to materially affirm renewed diplomatic agreements—Stiles considered them more as inert curios of a bygone time, suitable for removal to and scrutiny within decontextualized colonial venues. Owing to convoluted deaccessioning practices, the whereabouts of objects once housed in the early Yale College museum are today uncertain. Though Stiles could not have known it at the time, his smallscale artifact harvesting constituted an early piece of a long-term displacement and dispersal of Great River Indigenous material culture.112 The river valley that Stiles visited in 1787 was a tumultuous place. In the preceding dozen years the American Revolution gathered momentum, dividing towns like Deerfield along bitter political and familial lines and disrupting customary rhythms of life as men left home for military service. Native warriors took active roles in the conflict, such as a Stockbridge militia unit

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comprised of many western Massachusetts and New York Natives (Mahicans, Housatonics, Wappingers) who strategically chose to side with the colonies.113 Political strife continued following the war’s end, culminating in the 1786– 1787 “rebellion” led by Daniel Shays, which galvanized disaffected residents of western Massachusetts to take up arms and redress their socioeconomic marginalization.114 Shaysites were not alone in noticing that the Revolution had scarcely brought fuller liberty or equality of opportunities to everyone in the river valley and hills. It assuredly had not liberated the many captive Africans—enslaved and/or indentured individuals—who lived throughout the valley. They provided critical labor in homes, farms, and commercial enterprises of prominent leaders at Deerfield and surrounding towns, but also endured exclusionary racial politics.115 Nor did the Revolution bring widespread benefits to area Native communities, not even those who served in the Stockbridge militia or other units. In return for their wartime alliance, the new United States gave scant support in the aftermath. Indeed, the postwar period brought even more intense dissolution of tribal land bases and debt burdens (especially to widowed and orphaned members), and ultimately prodded Stockbridge members to relocate westward to Oneida lands, alongside the migratory Brothertown movement. In contrast to colonial falls veterans who mobilized memories of their war service to secure tangible compensation, however delayed, similar recollections in the revolutionary context produced little payoff for Native participants. In the postrevolutionary era, Peskeomskut attracted fresh scrutiny from developers aspiring to draw it more deeply into modernizing capitalist economies. To their minds, the falls posed a major obstacle to efforts designed to extend and streamline regional transportation networks. The same precipitous drop that Turner’s troops exploited to devastate Natives in 1676—turning their very environment into a weapon against them—also presented a treacherous impediment to commercial river traffic. In 1794 the Proprietors of the Upper Locks and Canals built a log-crib dam at the falls. It was the first erected on the main stem of the Kwinitekw River, and one in a series of dams constructed over time at Peskeomskut.116 Modifications to the surrounding terrain, like a canal and system of locks allowing freight and passenger traffic to bypass the falls, constituted a series of “improvements” that functioned smoothly until the mid-nineteenth century, when competition from railroads edged out commercial water passage. But damming at the falls and other segments of the Great River’s watershed had ecological downsides. It interrupted fish runs upstream, limiting certain species to the river’s lower reaches and

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reshaping long-standing migratory cycles. Pollution from a growing number of industries situated around the river exacerbated the problem. For the first time in millennia, a small subset of humans began to alter the availability of a critical, shared resource in far-reaching ways.117 Natives had managed aspects of the river for generations to improve their access to fish, certainly. But the stone and wooden weirs they installed did not extensively block off the river. Perhaps if the proprietors had heard the ancient stories cautioning inhabitants to protect the free movement of fish and to respect collective needs above individualized interests, they would have acted in alternative ways at the falls.118 Modernization projects like the dam recontoured human activities around the river valley, but they did not erase Native presence. Native people continued to make homes in the valley and to travel widely between there and other Indigenous communities. On January 31, 1798, William Apes, of multiracial white and Pequot descent, and his wife, Candace, welcomed their first child in the town of Colrain, or Colraine, Massachusetts, just north of Deerfield. Also named William, the newborn arrived “where [his father] pitched his tent in the woods.”119 Colrain was the second of the Boston Townships, lands granted by the Massachusetts General Court to colonists in the 1730s under similar terms as the Fall Town and Narragansett Townships in so-called unsettled areas. Why the Apes family selected the vicinity of Catamount Hill in Colrain for their dwelling place is not entirely known, though likely related to the area’s multiethnic population, emerging prospects for small-scale farming, and proximity to the Great River as a regional crossroads.120 The town (incorporated in 1761) certainly stood a distance from the main Pequot reservation lands in southeastern Connecticut. The family soon moved away from the area, establishing themselves in Colchester, Connecticut. Thirty-eight years later, that child, then grown into the adult William Apess (whose name’s spelling changed over the course of his life), achieved enduring fame by delivering his redemptive “Eulogy on King Philip” in Boston. Yet Colrain remained a formative part of his parents’ and particularly father’s lives, and the son traveled back to the area to visit, keeping alive an extensive network of kin in the Native Northeast.

Commemorative Spectacles: A Monument at Bloody Brook Townspeople around Bloody Brook decided in 1835 to erect a monument to the casualties of 1675, formalizing the area’s commemorative landscape.121 A flurry of organizing erupted behind the scenes to prepare for the event,

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which would lay the monument’s cornerstone. Organizers took as much pride in invitations declined by notables on their list, like Congressman Daniel Webster, as in acceptances. On September 30, 1835, the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the attack on Lathrop’s troops, enormous crowds turned out around the brook in South Deerfield, leaving the streets of Deerfield proper entirely deserted except for dogs.122 The event began with ceremonial laying of the cornerstone, accompanied by bands, a military escort, choirs, and hymns written specially for the occasion. Then Edward Everett delivered the day’s oration.123 Everett, a prominent Massachusetts politician, spoke aloud a blow-by-blow of the lead-up to Bloody Brook. This oration combined many strands of Everett’s thinking: a generalized moral sympathy for Indians, a sense of political outrage over recent U.S. policy-making (he publically opposed the 1830 Indian Removal Act that targeted Cherokees and other southeastern tribes), and strong convictions that Indians were gradually dissipating in the face of American modernity and racial “mixing.”124 It also tapped into listeners’ pathos by reckoning with the costs of settler colonialism along the river: “As the river chieftains—the lords of the waterfalls and the mountains— ranged this lovely valley, can it be wondered at if they beheld with bitterness the forest disappearing beneath the settler’s axe; the fishing place disturbed by his sawmills?”125 It was a coup for the small town to secure Everett’s presence, and his oration became a common touchstone for proud reminiscences.126 Locals remembered not only the original violence of 1675, but also the highly choreographed colonial remembrance of that violence. But the event’s importance depended on the viewpoint. The English commentator-sociologist Harriet Martineau chanced to be traveling through South Deerfield in the midst of her wider American tour and found herself caught up in the commemorative hubbub. A London intellectual and cosmopolitan outsider, Martineau disdained locals’ very decision to commemorate Bloody Brook: “no virtue was here to be had in remembrance; nothing but mere misery. The contemplation of mere misery is painful and hurtful. The only salutary influence that I could perceive to arise from this occasion was a far-fetched and dubious one,—thankfulness that the Indians are not now at hand to molest the white inhabitants.” King Philip’s story “is one of the most melancholy in the records of humanity,” Martineau added, “and sorrow for him must mingle with congratulations to the descendants of his foes, who, in his eyes, were robbers.” The festivities struck her as perversely parochial rites. She suspected that orators like Everett deigned to attend to drum up votes as they campaigned for political support in western Massachusetts. The

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principal address fell flat for her, sounding like condescending “shreds of tawdry sentiment.” After an exhilarating climb up neighboring Mount Sugarloaf, Martineau stopped in at the Bloody Brook Inn and viewed an amateur painting of the Lathrop slaughter: “Every man of the eighty exactly alike, and all looking scared at being about to be scalped.” Folk art and practice did not impress.127 Yet “Harriet Martineau was not born in Deerfield!” Mary E. Allen later exclaimed in an essay about Old Deerfield. Allen referenced a local girl— herself?—who found the commemoration galvanizing, making the seventeenth century “a living reality” and inspiring lifelong interests in history and teaching. Allen’s account highlighted the heterogeneity of American and New England views of local heritage. What was vital and emotionally resonant on homegrounds could be inscrutable and bizarre to others not conversant with those same traditions.128 In 1835 the cornerstone for a monument at Bloody Brook was laid, and an actual obelisk followed in 1838. Planning for it became a community-wide endeavor, drawing representatives for a monument committee from nearby towns. Costing roughly seven hundred dollars (about seventeen thousand dollars today), the obelisk was 25,050 pounds of Berkshire clouded marble, cut from a quarry at Lanesboro and hauled to South Deerfield, where the community dedicated it in 1838.129 The monument quickly became a recognized landmark. Scarcely a year after its dedication, the monument attained celebrity beyond its immediate context when John Warner Barber cut a wood engraving of it and published the image in his Massachusetts Historical Collections (1839), showing two pairs of genteel figures decorously approaching the monument (fig. 27).130 Born along the lower Kwinitekw River and professionally based as an engraver-printer in New Haven, Barber authored several volumes about New England histories. Illustrated with engravings derived from sketches made during his travels, they broadcast features like town monuments to large audiences. Through their circulation—they were mass-market hits that went through multiple editions—they enabled residents to nurture a sense of shared heritage, originating from a common constellation of sites identified as meriting attention. Like fellow New Havenite Ezra Stiles a generation earlier, Barber traveled extensively, talking with locals about their surroundings and jotting down notes. But unlike Stiles, he efficiently published his studies rather than keeping them as private records. His decision to visually record the new monument and share it with audiences across the region and country made him an influential memory-broker.

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Figure 27. The “Bloody Brook” monument located in the Kwinitekw River Valley features prominently in this wood engraving from John Warner Barber’s Massachusetts Historical Collections (1839). The obelisk memorialized English troops caught off guard by Native parties defending their stretch of the valley in 1675. This attack happened just west of the river and south of the falls at Peskeomskut. The Euro-American commemorative landscape made this monument a centerpiece of local identities, which Barber circulated to wider audiences through his guidebook to the state’s historical terrain. (Image courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College)

Not long after Barber published the engraving, a schoolchild fashioned a wooden box decorated with images of the Bloody Brook obelisk and other locales, scenes evidently derived directly from Barber’s published works.131 The Bloody Brook obelisk appeared in the left-hand corner of the box’s front panel, while Mount Sugarloaf loomed in the background, its peak squashed to fit the rectangular surface. The box indicated how widely read Barber’s Historical Collections was in New England and possibly beyond, and how schoolteachers used that condensed version of regional history to inculcate common geographical sensibilities among their pupils. In less than two centuries, Bloody Brook underwent an impressive range of transformations in Anglo-American collective remembrances. From the unmarked or lightly commemorated site visited by Samuel Sewall, it morphed into grounds for a weighty monumental

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obelisk, which became the source for a print culture illustration that achieved tangible impression on a schoolchild’s classroom project. Fixating on the durable obelisk as a locus for identity formation bypassed other modes of place-connection, ones that were not carved in stone but nevertheless were significant. The completed 1838 obelisk gave no record that just a year before, a contingent of Natives traveled through Greenfield, Deerfield, and nearby parts in memorial placemaking of a different kind.132 As part of a multimonth itinerary, they had come from St. Francis, the Abenaki diasporic and mission community along the St. Lawrence River, to reconnect with “Williamsecook”—their name for the area inhabited by the Williams family, who they identified as relations following the 1704 captivities. St. Francis had been absorbing new members from Algonquian communities throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including refugees from violences of the 1670s. This 1837 visit attracted attention from valley locals and challenged rhetoric presuming the near-disappearance of Northeastern Indigenous peoples. Yet this transnational Indigenous mobility and reconnection to ancestral terrain left no monumental trace, no visible signature for Barber to replicate in print—though he possessed at least rudimentary knowledge about St. Francis as an Indigenous locale.133 The visitation lived on in the minds of those who were present, and continued to denote the valley as Native space despite the presumptions of other borders.

Early Antiquarianism and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Amid resurgent mid-nineteenth century interest in the valley’s historic landscapes, the falls attracted renewed attention. Sandstone slabs harvested from the riverbank for use as flagstones bore curious markings, eventually identified as dinosaur prints. These extraordinary finds excited natural history experts and popular imaginations.134 Edward Hitchcock, a valley minister and geologist who attempted to link Christianity and science through “natural theology,” took an interest in the fossilized tracks and encouraged the public to appreciate them as bespeaking a truly deep past that long antedated human presence, even of Natives. The markings were “remoter records which make aborigines seem contemporaries,” as one commentator put it.135 Hitchcock trained academically in geology, but he coupled this rationalized approach to the earth with an intensely Romantic streak. He expressed it through a series of carefully orchestrated “christenings” whereby he and his Amherst College

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students ceremonially renamed valley features, often memorializing supposedly “vanished” Natives through the Indigenous-sounding toponyms they introduced.136 These names sprang largely from Hitchcock’s imagination and generalized understandings of river valley history. They did not come from intensive revisiting of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century archives, where land negotiation documents registered numerous Algonquian toponyms referring to specific locales. Nor did they arise from consultations with living Native descendant communities who had their own appellations for regional topography, as the 1837 “Williamsecook” description attested.137 At other times Hitchcock turned to colonial inspirations. At the falls, Hitchcock labored to “attach Captain Turner’s name to this cataract.” Previously the locale had no referent, he claimed, overlooking the “Fighting Falls” toponym and possibly other colonial names in vernacular circulation, never mind the actual Indigenous toponym of Peskeomskut. He rectified this perceived lacuna by coining “Turner’s Falls,” formally memorializing William Turner though not elaborating on the devastations wrought by the namesake’s 1676 campaign. Though the toponym was not an organic usage, by the mid-1830s Turner’s Falls entered into Yankee New England’s topographic lexicon.138 (Over time the apostrophe fell away.) Orra White Hitchcock visually complemented her husband’s efforts through sketches and lithographs of these landscapes, including an image of “Turner’s Falls,” depicting that point in the river surrounded by houses, roads, and fences (fig. 28).139 Not all of Hitchcock’s proposals gained traction. Some locals chafed against the designs of an academic who made no secret of how deficient he found their everyday names. Consequently the push by the Amherst College senior class of 1849 to rename Mount Toby in Sunderland as Mettawompe, out of a sense of “justice to a persecuted and extinct race,” failed. All told, Hitchcock and his supporters engaged in public processes of toponymic colonialism, deliberately manipulating language of land and water to recast regional cartography and lived place-experiences in ways that naturalized the claimed ascendancy of colonial society. Indigeneity was instrumental to these purposes—as a source of simplified, colorful inspiration, rather than complex historical reality or ongoing presence. By Hitchcock’s time the town of Gill had formed around much of the actual site of the 1676 assault, leading some residents to claim distinctive affinity for the historic grounds. Material traces, or so-called “relics,” found in the soil there, along with local lore, fascinated Josiah D. Canning since childhood. At the precocious age of fifteen he cobbled together a printing press and published

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Figure 28. The volume of water flowing over the falls on the Great River is apparent in this lithograph by Orra White Hitchcock, wife of Edward Hitchcock, who proposed renaming the site “Turner’s Falls” as part of his “christening” project aimed at adding color to local landscapes. This depiction represents the falls in the midst of small-scale agricultural developments, though prior to the establishment of a planned industrial community in the 1870s. The image appeared as plate 10 in Edward Hitchcock’s Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts (1841). (Image courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College)

a weekly newspaper that examined local history and other topics.140 Known as Gill’s “Peasant Bard,” Canning in later life composed scores of poems reflecting on that landscape. Some he delivered orally at public events or published in collections like The Harp and Plow.141 The volume meandered through the poet’s “native land” and mused on the scenery with a heavy dose of georgic reflections on agriculture and rural life. Rather than pay homage to a generic New England, the poems mounted a highly localized treatment of the area, offering addresses to natural features like the Connecticut and Ashuelot Rivers and Mount Monadnock, areas Canning imaginatively claimed as his “valley-home.”142 The poems invoked mythologies that had coalesced around various stretches of the river, including “Kidd’s Island” just upstream from the falls, where settler tradition held that the infamous pirate-captain stashed

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his treasure.143 Spectral Indians flitted in the shadows of several poems. “Lament of the Cherokee” meditated on the emotional longings of southeastern Natives forcibly removed from their homelands to Oklahoma. Culminating with “the last groan of the wild Cherokee!” the poem reportedly received widespread attention,144 making territorial dispossessions in a different part of America popular subjects for settler melancholia. Valley residents like Canning grew up immersed in a selective vantage on the area’s historical qualities. But such knowledge was less than accessible to outsiders. Henry E. Turner, a physician and antiquarian living in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to the postmaster at Deerfield in late April 1868 seeking information about the Falls Fight and his ancestor William Turner. That same day Turner penned a second letter, directed to the town clerk in Deerfield, in which Turner requested information on the captain’s role in the military campaign, and also on the grant of land made to the family in its aftermath.145 “I wish to make a history of my ancestor,” he explained, “whose agency I deem to have been very creditable, and whose more immediate progeny do not seem to have had a full appreciation of his character.” Turner all but pleaded to be put in touch with individuals who could aid his research. His epistolary shots in the dark exemplified the informal character of investigations into the past: Deerfield had no centralized body for historical interpretation, no formalized structure for information sharing. Luckily for the Newport physician, the postmaster and/or clerk forwarded his request to George Sheldon, a selfproclaimed font of historical information who promptly answered the queries.146 This ad hoc system began to change only a few years after Henry Turner reached out to Deerfield. In the spring of 1870 an antiquarian organization called the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association incorporated, with the goal of protecting and preserving the area’s colonial heritage.147 A primary impetus for its founding was to “place a memorial on the spot” in Deerfield where the attack of 1704 took place, a formal monument to settler casualties that had lain uncommemorated in public space for centuries.148 Beyond this specific project, the PVMA, as it became widely known, gained momentum as a regional engine for historic preservation by building a museum called Memorial Hall to house a proliferating collection of artifacts. It also orchestrated “Field Days” that attracted thousands of participants to spots all over the valley for commemorative exercises. The first of these occurred at the falls, a sign of that locale’s high importance. Members resolutely localized their focus on the heritage of the valley, a corridor they felt was overlooked by the

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older, Boston-based Massachusetts Historical Society (established 1791) and Worcester-based American Antiquarian Society (established 1812), which claimed more catholic or national interests. PVMA members readily acknowledged that their place-markings and -visits had esteemed precedent. They invoked Samuel Sewall’s itinerary in 1716 now and again, taking pride in that Boston luminary’s interest in their corner’s past, and they began to shore up the sites of memory in more permanent ways than Sewall’s generation desired or was able to do.149 More recent commemorative currents swayed them as well. Deerfield lost forty-two soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, and other valley towns suffered similar casualties. To honor the memory of its soldiers, the town, like countless others across the fragilely reunited nation, dedicated a Civil War monument on September 4, 1867. The towering column on Deerfield Common served as a publically visible reminder of recent wartime losses that perhaps spurred antiquarians to concretely redress the unmarked losses of older conflicts.150 In light of the fresh wounds of a modern total war, and the acrimonious sectional and racial politics of Reconstruction, the early colonial period could appear to these antiquarians to possess a certain stability or tranquility even when punctuated by frontier warfare, making it ripe for nostalgic revisitations. George Sheldon acted as the PVMA’s animating force. A Deerfield resident who traced his ancestry to multiple colonial actors, including soldiers in King Philip’s War, Sheldon avidly collected material artifacts pertinent to the regional past, including Native human remains and lithics. Most of them he exhibited in highly ideological formats that violated Algonquian expectations about mourning, and detached ancestral remains from enduring Native communities.151 Sheldon had no formal training in history or the emerging field of anthropology, nor connections with modern Algonquians. Yet many considered him a dominant regional authority on Native matters, the “man who knows more about the Indians of the Connecticut Valley than any man living.”152 His signature achievement was A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts: The Times When and the People by Whom It Was Settled, Unsettled and Resettled, a doorstopper two-volume study of the town and genealogies of its EuroAmerican families published in 1895–1896. Clocking in at 1,401 pages, this publication was only one outgrowth of decades of research and investigation, work aided by eccentricities of Sheldon, like wearing a sieve on his head while writing to keep off flies and facilitate ventilation.153 He composed an exhaustive (and exhausting) series of columns for the Greenfield newspaper on historical topics, and in late spring-summer of 1885 he rewaged King Philip’s

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War in the paper’s pages, using print-culture installments to push these historical episodes into wider circulation.154 His conclusions about the war tended to be sweeping, erasive, racialized generalizations: “This was the last attempt of the Indians of this region to reconquer and reoccupy the lands sold by their fathers. The result was their utter subjugation and almost utter extinction.”155 Leaning heavily on notions of postwar Indigenous vanishing, Sheldon’s remarks emphatically positioned King Philip’s War as a chronological watershed: the crucial moment in the valley’s Native history, the stark dividing line between an Indigenous past and a colonial future. Sheldon’s writings flooded the local print marketplace and weighed down residents’ bookshelves. But they were not necessarily read. Residents of Whately once invited him to deliver a historical address on the topic of valley Indians, and Sheldon tried to evade the task by replying that he had already treated the topic at length in his columns. The inviting party, he later recalled, “coolly informed me that nobody read it, and if they did it was all forgotten by this time.” He drily noted his oratory to a captive audience would be “revenge”: “They would be obliged to hear if they would not read.” The vaunted literacy of Anglo-Americans turned out to be a selective phenomenon. Despite his audience’s ambivalence, Sheldon reaffirmed the need to keep such stories about the past in ready circulation for present uses: “The stories of these bye-gone days should not be considered trite. We cannot hear too much of them. We cannot too closely study their lives and learn from them the secrets of their endurance and stability.”156 Sheldon’s enthusiasm for promoting settler traditions about area landscapes was intense, but he remained circumspect about matters of authenticity—as he defined it. Residents had long pointed out places where King Philip himself was said to have camped or ranged: from the top of Mount Sugarloaf, for example, Philip allegedly watched the grounds below burn, while a “King Philip tree” and ditch endured as popular sites near Northfield from which locals collected artifacts.157 Many of these so-called historic sites struck Sheldon as bogus. Pointing out that the tree said to have concealed Philip was already hollow and rotten in the 1670s, Sheldon noted that it would hardly be standing hundreds of years later. As for the ditch, said to have been used defensively during conflict, he interpreted it as a commonplace feature for containing livestock. “I may be called an iconoclast by those who prefer a romantic tradition to substantial fact; but this will not trouble me in the least,” Sheldon remarked in 1897, acknowledging that while invented landscape traditions could be colorful, it was best to hew to “facts”158—a notion of scholarly objectivity supported by the

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rising professionalization of history as a discipline in the United States. Yet for all of Sheldon’s meticulous attention to the veracity of certain spots’ traditions, he remained blinkered to the limitations or outright fallacies of the overarching narratives he and like-minded enthusiasts developed regarding Indigenous presence and “vanishing” in the valley. Nor did he critically reckon with the ways in which fascination with King Philip, as a charismatic, prominent leader, eclipsed histories of other Algonquians who played pivotal roles in the war and in more quotidian events before and after. Objects in the PVMA collections materially bolstered narratives about settler heritage and Native pasts. Sheldon’s proclivity for amassing family artifacts was so widely known—notorious, even—that “residents were afraid to leave home for fear that Sheldon would loot their attics.”159 A few objects pertained directly to King Philip’s War: the tiny, worn shoe of young Sarah Coleman, for instance, taken captive to Canada in 1677 and eventually returned to her family (fig. 29). The diminutive footwear served as an emotional focal point in the collections, a tender, intimate icon that signified domestic and feminine colonial losses but also hardiness on the long trails north and south. Poems, essays, and addresses coalesced around this shoe, making it a tangible anchor for discursive productions about Anglo-American captivity and survival. And text was necessary, in Sheldon’s eyes. Urging antiquarians to curate such artifacts, he called for narratives to work in tandem with mementos: “every one of those old stories should be put in writing. Memory is treacherous, and in this way only can they be secured to posterity.”160 The locus of Indigenous representations at Memorial Hall was the Indian Room. Over decades local residents donated hundreds of items, many acquired from the immediate river valley and others from wider Northeastern and continental contexts. A significant number were believed to pertain to Native violence against colonists (bullets, hatchets, and most centrally, a scarred door that attested to the 1704 raid). Even larger numbers came from everyday Algonquian lifeways: hoes, axes, gouges, chisels, grinding stones. The objects were not displayed in ways that conveyed complexities of Algonquian horticulture in specific landscapes, for instance, which transformed markedly over thousands of years and in connection with trade goods, but instead overwhelmingly gave generalized impressions of Indian antiquity and stasis. In some instances items were organized along aesthetic lines that had more to do with genteel decorative sensibilities than the artifacts’ original purposes, such as the six-hundred-arrowhead collection from James Smith of Whately, “tastefully arranged in cases of his own manufacture.”161 Whereas Memorial Hall

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Figure 29. This shoe purportedly belonged to Sarah Coleman, a young girl taken captive from an English town in the Kwinitekw River Valley (Hatfield, Massachusetts) in September 1677. She, along with captives like Quentin Stockwell—who later composed a narrative about his experience—were brought north by Native parties to the St. Lawrence River region and New France. Many were eventually “redeemed” and returned south to New England communities. These captivities demonstrated that King Philip’s War had not concluded in the river valley by 1676, as it largely did in other parts of the region. Instead, it remained contested borderlands for years. Coleman’s leather, wool, flax, and pasteboard shoe was exhibited in the Memorial Hall Museum of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. (Photograph courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts)

consistently related fine-grained biographical and familial information about colonial artifacts’ creators and users, these “Indian relics” received different treatment. PVMA members primarily used them as signifiers of an entire race or culture, perpetuating a foundational asymmetry in presentations of human pasts. Given PVMA’s fascination with King Philip’s War, items said to be connected to that conflict occupied prominent places. They included a dagger and bayonet linked to Bloody Brook; a firearm from the falls area; items from the so-called Beers Plain in Northfield.162 The veracity of certain attributions may

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be questioned, of course, since antiquarians across the Northeast were eager to claim wartime connections for a range of objects and to capitalize on popular resonances of 1675–1676. Yet it would be misguided to dismiss all local attributions as fabrications. Farmers and everyday residents did amass late seventeenth-century artifacts from grounds directly implicated in King Philip’s War, and accompanied them with settler oral traditions about their provenances.163 A Native container known as a mukak, fashioned from carefully stitched birch bark, was linked to Bloody Brook as well by a family that privately collected it, and later it was donated to the PVMA. As interpreted by antiquarians, its significance arose more from its supposed association with that violent site than from wider considerations of Algonquian mobility and goods-carrying164 (fig. 30). Human remains and funerary items associated with wartime sites also entered Memorial Hall. Most museum-goers of the time did not consider Native human remains to be problematic objects for collection—contrary to dominant sensitivities toward colonial ancestral remains, often venerated. Disinterred from burial sites, removed to Deerfield, and placed on public display, these Native remains were turned into items for visual scrutiny by nondescendants. Memorial Hall was not the only venue entangled in these massively disruptive processes. Relic collectors operated across the valley and regularly swapped artifacts within their network, which encompassed private as well as semipublic and collegiate collections. Prominent figures included Edward Hitchcock, Jr., of Amherst College—son of the mountain christener—and Harris Hawthorne Wilder of Smith College, who actively collected remains in the valley as well as from Narragansett homelands.165 Memorial Hall’s collections ranged beyond the immediate river valley. They encompassed “souvenirs” from the more recent Indian Wars in the U.S. West. Items connected to the Sioux and Custer’s Last Stand (1876) augmented the Algonquian and seventeenth-century English holdings.166 No explicit narrative linked them all in the museum space itself, and Sheldon only aired a simplified interpretation of the Custer items: “They are forceful reminders that civilization and savagery are still at deadly odds.”167 Yet the assemblage suggested complexities to the long sweep of Native-settler conflicts in North America. If 1676 brought the silencing and destruction of Algonquians in King Philip’s War, as it seemed to have done in valley popular imaginaries, then violence migrated west with the frontier, culminating in the epic confrontation of Custer and the Sioux. Custer died at the Battle of Little Bighorn or Greasy Grass. But that iconic defeat and Indigenous challenge to Manifest

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Figure 30. This mukak, a birch-bark container of the kind made by Algonquian communities, has been described by collectors as having been retrieved from the vicinity of “Bloody Brook” in the aftermath of the 1675 attack on colonial troops. It is presently in the holdings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, Massachusetts, an influential heritage organization that amassed significant object collections pertinent to local pasts, including the “Indian Wars.” Recently those collections and interpretations have been revisited from decolonizing perspectives to open up other stories of Algonquian presence and persistence in the river valley. Whether this particular object was actually connected to the river valley in the late seventeenth century, or whether its associated story conceals more complex histories, remains a topic of interest. (Photograph courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts)

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Destiny was followed in 1877 by the closure of the Great Sioux War and military surrender of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne.168 Both Bloody Brook and Custer’s Last Stand could be read as localized settler defeats occurring within larger settler military conquests, thus amenable to commemorative interpretations within the walls of the Indian Room. Given that contemporary Algonquian descendants’ views figured nowhere among the exhibitions, it is unsurprising that Sioux voices were also absent. 1875–1876 marked a critical year for heritage displays as both the bicentennial of the falls campaign and the centennial of U.S. independence. In January–February 1875, The Turners Falls Reporter ran a series of narrative sketches that elaborated meanings and legacies of the Falls Fight. The Gill side of the river was rich with Native artifacts: “For the past fifty years Indian relics have been literally carted away, and yet the relic hunter follows the plow and harrow, seeking for arrow heads, with the same fortune as favored the relic hunter of the last decade.”169 It listed precise locations of these sites, described within specific landowners’ private properties. In a kind of competitive trophy hunting, Timothy Stoughton once claimed the most artifacts, but “having parted with many to different colleges and museums, Dr. Field, possibly, has now the best collection in his cabinet,” along with Albert Smith.170 In his private repository Field held “mortars, pestles, pipes, tomahawks, knives, drills, gouges, chisels, pots, and dozens of other things used by the Indians in camp and on the battle field, all of which are made of stone, and no iron tool of any kind was used in their manufacture.” Smith claimed in his collection a pestle in the shape of a bear’s head. (But how much did he know about awasosak, the potent, shaggy four-legged beings whose paths crisscrossed the mountains? Or why this animal might have been carved onto a corn-grinding implement, many of which were incorporated into Native ancestors’ burials?)171 These private collectors sometimes added text to the objects they harvested, including poetic verses. The poet Josiah Canning engaged in these practices. In Field’s collection, amateur verses wrapped around the handle of a tomahawk-pipe— disinterred from a burial—read: A weapon from an Indian grave, Buried beside a warrior brave, With pipe of peace, his soul to save, His hopes do rest; While rivers flow and forests wave, In the far west.172

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These intensely sensitive Indigenous objects taken from the environs of the falls had been turned into tangible vehicles for vernacular poetry that celebrated an allegedly bygone people. This poetry was part and parcel of the process of symbolic domination within the “conquered” space of the valley, each carefully wrapped scrap of inked paper another shred in the project of appropriation. Beyond private holdings, some “relics” were deposited in the Carnegie Library in Turners Falls, a village within the town of Montague, on the opposite shore from Gill. Occupying a prominent spot on Avenue A, the library was a costly civic institution that townspeople treasured as a cultural cornerstone of their rapidly expanding community.173 Altogether, these myriad forms of private and public collecting felt to local Euro-Americans like gains: accumulations of objects that, to them, appeared exotic yet broadly illustrative of Indian pasts. But from Indigenous vantages, these same processes could be read as losses: disinterment, detachment, disruption. Given locals’ immense desire to possess tangible items from around the falls, it is easy to imagine a shiver of excitement running through George Parsons of Springfield in 1871. While hunting rabbits there with his dog, Parsons paused when the animal pawed up an unusual find: a child-size figurine that seemed to be perfectly preserved, from hardened facial features down to delicate hands. Perhaps it dated back thousands of years. A man from Shelburne Falls acquired it in exchange for one hundred barrels of whiskey, then displayed it in Boston for profit. But when a skeptical viewer ran his fingernail into the relic, he discovered the acclaimed “Indian” was a crumbling fraud— mere plaster of Paris, manufactured in Springfield and planted at the falls for unsuspecting parties to discover. It was the “New England version of the Cardiff Giant” uncovered in New York two years earlier and exposed as a hoax. Discrediting of the “Petrified Indian Boy” did not prevent a second tour of the figurine in Canada, before it came to rest in a Vermont museum.174 The “American public loves to be humbugged,” an area commentator wrote in 1904 while recalling the canard.175 The willing suspension of disbelief gained traction here because the falls were already widely known as a site for human remains, specifically Indigenous ones, not in small part owing to historical violences. The PVMA performed its commemorative spectacles at the falls and associated spots many times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during “Field Meetings.”176 These were convivial social events where attendees picnicked, in addition to hearing higher-minded lectures on historical subjects. The inaugural Field Meeting took place on September 16, 1870, at the

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falls, on the “old battle-ground of 1676.”177 As orators reflected that year and at subsequent gatherings on the events of May 1676, they examined pressing moral issues. A few orators acknowledged Turner’s assault constituted a deplorable massacre; most insisted on a straightforward colonial victory. “On the very spot where we are now gathered, acts were committed . . . that are and should be abhorrent to our ideas of right and humanity,” George Sheldon told listeners in May 1876 during the event’s bicentennial. But he tempered this regret by insisting King Philip’s War was a “war of self-defense” for valley colonists, thereby justifiable in their eyes.178 “We try to tone down the affair by calling it the fight at Turners Falls. But no fight of opposing forces occurred there,” Reverend John F. Moors countered at the 1884 Field Meeting (not held at the falls), clarifying English accountability and critiquing commonplace terminology. “It was simply a shooting by well armed English soldiers of men, women and children as they sprung from their sleep aroused by the murderous yell of their unexpected assailants. It was a massacre and not a fight.”179 During the bicentennial field meeting on May 31, 1876, Reverend Moors delivered a lengthy historical address, reprinted in its entirety on the front page of the Greenfield Gazette and Courier. It elaborated aspects of Turner’s campaign and highlighted recent unearthing of a Native grave near where the crowds gathered. The skeletons sparked “conjecture that these were the bones of persons slain in the massacre,” though the remains could not be identified with certainty.180 The grave-plundering unnerved a few commentators, including avid relic-collector Josiah Canning himself, who confronted the matter of “bones” at the falls in a commemorative poem delivered at the bicentennial. Canning’s verses envisioned King Philip materializing at the falls as a ghostly specter, bemoaning the fading of his “race” and censuring settler dispossessions and disturbances: Did we not love it too? This goodly scene Was our ancestral heritage; our right, Our title, from the Great Original. Here were our lares, our penates here! Our bones are mingled with the soil you till; Our implements of warfare and the chase Your ploughs uncover from their rest of years.181 Canning’s poem contributed to a genre of poetry that arose during these events, as amateur auteurs used rhymed verses to recount the history and ongoing moral significance of the massacre. Another, set to the cadences of “The

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Star-Spangled Banner,” declaimed on Turner’s heroics. Still others urged listeners to honor “gallant” Turner’s memory with wreaths and remember him as “savior to the land,”182 a notable shift in attitude since the seventeenth century, when Massachusetts Puritans remained wary of the Baptist captain despite his military prowess. PVMA members believed it imperative to concretely pinpoint historical grounds for posterity, transforming the land, as one commentator put it, into a massive book, a physical library to edify future generations. The PVMA thus commenced one of its most ambitious projects, a campaign of marking all manner of historic sites in the valley and surroundings. Forts, homesites, battlegrounds: many corners of the regional landscape attracted their attention, and their marking became part of “sacred duty” to transmit understandings of colonial heritage to young people.183 Yet the land did not get marked in uniform ways. The spot where Eunice Williams died in 1704 earned a stone not solely because Eunice was a singular figure, but because the location where her body had been found was well preserved in local traditions.184 When violence or other events happened in a diffuse way, spread over a wide terrain, or when their locations could only be approximated by antiquarians lacking reliable geographic traditions, monuments proved harder to install. The material form of these monuments was crucial. Overly formal structures would seem out of place in the still largely rural valley and incompatible with the subject matter, yet antiquarians wanted to solemnize and dignify their surroundings. The “erection of a white marble temple over the grave of the North American savage would be entirely unappropriate [sic] and absurd,” Daniel Denison Slade opined, “whereas a simple unhewn shaft of stone with an inscription, the building of a mound or the placing of a boulder with an inscription telling its object would be in excellent taste, and congenial with our feelings.”185 Like the rough-edged Great Swamp shaft installed in Narragansett country in 1906, these valley markers aimed for naturalistic contours, tacitly connoting colonial notions of Indigenous primitiveness and closeness to nature. Not everyone agreed monuments were an optimal memorial strategy. “I have erected a monument more lasting than brass,” Thaddeus Graves asserted at the Field Meeting in 1889 when he delivered an address at Hatfield to commemorate captives taken from there in 1677: “For the brazen monument or the marble pile, fretted with sculptures from the moment of its erection seeks disintegration and decay, and particle by particle, as century succeeds century, under the resistless influence of gravitation seeks the common level, to be scattered by the wind or trodden under the feet of the

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careless.”186 Speech and living memory had more resilience and longevity than externalized forms of remembrance that could be erected then neglected, he believed. Graves’s critique echoed the Puritan iconoclasm of two centuries earlier, which also disdained pretensions about the permanence of worldly monuments. George Sheldon partially conceded the point about monuments’ fallibility but ultimately rallied behind them. The PVMA would not foist a monument upon Hatfield if residents were unwilling, he assured them. “But, if the outcome of this day’s observance should be the erection of a bronze statue of Benjamin Waite leading little Sarah Coleman out of captivity, with a pedestal representing in bas-relief Ashpelon, the chief, emerging with her from the waters of Lake Champlain, it would be quite as much as we expect.”187 (Such an extravagance did not get created.) In 1894 Sheldon elaborated, with nearly evangelical zeal, on the PVMA’s role as an agitating force that could use monuments to remedy complacent sensibilities: “We consider Franklin County as a sort of huge dish in which is simmering a big stirabout. The great business of the Association after hoarding relics is to stir up the people in this pudding. . . . Has a town the almost forgotten site of a heroic deed or tragic sacrifice, we stir up that town until a fitting monument preserves its history for the generations to come, and makes a new object of interest to strangers. We go up to the Pocumtuck Valley to dedicate a monument, and the kettle fairly boils over with newly awakened enthusiasm.” In deploying this language of the region as a “huge dish” and “kettle,” Sheldon rhetorically crossed paths—likely unknowingly—with Indigenous diplomatic language that for generations had characterized the valley and Northeast as a “common pot” and “dish with one spoon.” In Indigenous views these phrases conveyed potent conceptions of building relationships, sharing resources, and collectively caretaking for land and people, especially in times of impending conflict and alongside settler colonialism. In Sheldon’s formulation, however, the metaphors were exclusionary, signaling a rationale for insisting upon Euro-colonial hegemony through place-marking.188 Given the PVMA’s predilection for monumentalizing, it likely surprised no one in 1900 when the group erected a monument by the falls commemorating William Turner. The mid-September day they chose for their dedicatory exercises was inauspicious. Gusts of wind blew dust into the eyes of the three hundred–plus attendees. The Great River no longer surged, its dry bed reduced to pools of water.189 But the environmental anticlimax failed to dampen commemorative spirits. Timothy Stoughton, the elderly landowner of the relevant slice of the Gill riverbank, expressed his pleasure at being able to gift

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this historic ground to the PVMA and ceremonially presented the property title, much like the Hazard family did at Great Swamp when gifting land to the Rhode Island Historical Society.190 George Sheldon flattered local listeners by assuring them, “You live on classic ground. Nowhere in New England was there a more vital question of the seventeenth century finally settled:—Should the Indian or the Englishman dominate the valley of the Connecticut?” The tangible commemoration of Turner’s deeds was long overdue, he added, fitting recompense for centuries of neglect of this “hero” by Puritan historians like Hubbard and Mather.191 The stocky monument, an unadorned rectangle of granite, had minimalist text chiseled into its face:192 CAPTAIN WILLIAM TURNER

142 MEN SURPRISED AND DESTROYED OVER 300 INDIANS WITH

ENCAMPED AT THIS PLACE MAY

19, 1676

Pleased with this installation, a coalition of antiquarian groups followed it with a monument at the presumed site of Turner’s death, in the Nash’s Mills section of Greenfield. They dedicated it in 1905 with an earsplitting twentyone-gun salute, and renamed the vicinity Turner Square.193 In a few short decades, Yankee memoryscapes around the falls and river valley changed from largely unmarked, partially industrialized vistas into commemorative milieus where colonial historical understandings were overt and legible to passersby. These new markers aroused great curiosity among visitors to Old Deerfield. The questioning was so persistent—or burdensome—that the PVMA issued a pamphlet in 1904 explaining the monuments’ origins and sold copies at Memorial Hall to raise a bit of cash.194 “100 years from now the question, What mean ye by these stones scattered here and there? will not be asked,” George Horr of Athol wrote to the PVMA in 1900, as planning for the Turner marker got underway. “Instead a new generation will arise and be glad that friends, by the erection of memorial halls, libraries and even simple boulders, have striven to preserve the history of loved and honored towns from oblivion.”195 Horr’s pro-monument remarks invoked the biblical passage “What mean ye by these stones?” (Joshua 4:6), an Old Testament account of the Israelites’ crossing of the river Jordan, which they commemorated with stone markers. Fortified by profound senses of filial piety and memorial righteousness, PVMA members believed they too undertook necessary sacralization of their own landscape.

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The myriad commemorative practices connected to the falls entertained a range of subtleties in their interpretations. Yet overall antiquarians and Yankee onlookers read the massacre as the definitive breaking point at which area Algonquians were irretrievably vanquished, their political sway undone. Ralph Stoughton, grandson of Timothy, encapsulated this conviction as he stood by the falls in 1900 to witness the new monument’s unveiling: “It was more than merely a bloody slaughter; here, about this very ground upon which we now stand, took place the final struggle between the Indian and the settler of this valley, and here the Indian lost forever his tribal powers over this region. Here beside the waters of the river below us, the men of Hatfield, the men of Hadley, the men of the Pocumtuck valley, wrote in bloody characters the concluding chapter in the history of the Pocumtucks as a nation. . . . From this time and place the Pocumtuck tribes pass into oblivion.”196 There was an inherent dissonance, of course, between such narratives of Indigenous finality in 1676, and the well-acknowledged continuance of Native-colonial encounters in the valley long afterward. But when pressed to square these seemingly contradictory visions of the past, commentators typically explained that later presence as other places’ Natives, most often originating from Canada and moving at the instigation of the French (and betraying little understanding of ethnogenesis, transnational mobility, and broadened conceptions of homelands). Such narratives only cursorily mourned the inevitable hour, as local poet Sadie Maxwell put it, When savage tribes, so crafty, treacherous, wild, Must flee, before the Anglo-Saxon child.197 This was a trenchantly articulated imaginary of settler colonialism, which removed Natives offstage to open up the valley for unfettered Anglo-American expansion. This rhetoric, so virulent in its disdain for non-Anglos, likely would have been received differently by the Native individuals and kinship groups who lived throughout the river valley and hilly parts of central-to-western Massachusetts. They had become strategically mobile in the face of colonialism to maximize employment prospects and maintain familial and community ties. John Milton Earle, appointed special commissioner to the Massachusetts Indians, completed a survey in 1861 that accounted for Native people in the state, documenting tribal affiliations, occupations, and places of residence. He registered Natives in Northampton, Greenfield, Springfield, Stockbridge, Brookfield, West Brookfield, and Barre.198 (Earle’s survey probably undercounted in

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substantial ways, being limited in its counting methods and definitions of “Indian” identity, as well as weighted toward coastal communities.)199 Did any of them ever attend the commemorative spectacles hosted up and down the valley? It is hard to judge from documentary records, and the PVMA evidently made few or no efforts to reach out to contemporary Natives. But their active continuance underscored a fundamental anxiety latent in Sheldon’s and his contemporaries’ activities. How could they fully celebrate narratives of colonial ascendancy if they deeply reckoned with these places’ Indigenous pasts and presences?

6 • Power and Persistence along a Changing River Industrial Transformations, Ceremonial Landscapes, and Contemporary Reconciliations

Despite the celebratory, self-justifying overtones of antiquarians’ commemorative efforts, these communities negotiated staggering uncertainties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many valley residents worried about immigration to Massachusetts and about an increasingly multiethnic, multiracial populace, which challenged Anglo-Saxon claims to hegemony. They fretted about the waning importance of rural areas, which were then in a tailspin from out-migration to urban areas and the West, as well as from industrial competition. And they bemoaned the allegedly amnesic tendencies of younger generations to rush headlong into the future, like an adolescent who “wants to forget the past, the early home that sheltered him, the rude country ways of his parents.”1 If certain valley residents, like the PVMA’s supporters, realized they could no longer claim socioeconomic clout within New England or the United States, they could at least pride themselves on careful tending of what they considered noble heritage. Catering to desires for cultural validation, Congressman George Lawrence of North Adams addressed the crowd gathered at the 1900 Turner Monument dedication by citing his recent trip to the Midwest and Great Lakes. Hundreds of miles west of the valley, he was impressed by “the reverence in which the people of the West hold New England and how proud they are to trace their ancestry or birth to her soil. The pilgrim from the West when he visits Massachusetts seeks out her historic places. . . . He loves to gaze upon the monuments which mark the spots where scenes in the early history of America were enacted.”2 The West ostensibly looked east for validation about its roots, and monuments could enable these pursuits. With similar pride, PVMA members trumpeted the cosmopolitan flavor of their visitors and their upward-trending admission

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numbers at Memorial Hall, positioning Deerfield as a cultural mecca rather than a marginal hinterland, as its economy might suggest.3 Even within the Massachusetts Commonwealth, fears of being surpassed by more populous and prosperous cities led Sheldon to explicitly contrast Deerfield with Boston, lamenting the razing of the capital’s Old South Church. Deerfield knew how to preserve the past, he insisted, and one day denizens of Boston might even look to the valley for guidance on how to restore the heritage they were so carelessly destroying. Even as they recognized their present-day socioeconomic limitations, valley antiquarians felt they could look backward to a colonial era of vigor and enterprise. The moniker of a “frontier town” pleased one speaker during Deerfield’s 1901 Old Home Week: “It tells of energy and push, and plenty of New England fortitude and perseverance. It speaks of that progressive manhood which knows how to turn forest trees into habitations and wildernesses into gardens.”4 The American frontier might have been deemed officially closed in 1890 by Frederick Jackson Turner, but the recollected frontier of the East could conjure up the proper spirit, countering notions of New England eclipse and enervation.5 These views encouraged economically based retrospections that validated Native dispossessions: “The Indian . . . occupied too much land. It was necessary to economy that he should go.”6 Anxieties about ecological degradation of river, soil, and forest also weighed on residents’ minds. When the monument arrived in Greenfield in 1905 to mark the spot of Turner’s death, the speaker of the day used Turner’s military conquest as a jumping-off point to argue for the need to more efficiently manage farming enterprises in the valley. It was the present’s obligation to the past to make the highest, most profitable use of the farmlands their ancestors sacrificed their lives to preserve, he contended, urging prudent use of ecological resources. He wished that their colonial forefathers of Turner’s day had been able to take “kodaks” of their landscapes, so such visual registers might be set alongside contemporary photographs and the contrast used to illuminate the “progress” made in cultivation and improvement.7 While the valley’s major crops—now encompassing asparagus, potatoes, and tobacco dried in distinctive low-slung barns—remained reliable staples, certain promoters pushed to streamline techniques for cultivation and marketing. The falls as a living, modern working environment figured directly into these selective expressions of memory. The spot resounded with noise and motion in the yearly log runs that drove timber down the river. Massive logjams kept observers in suspense for days. Loggers frequently stopped in town for entertainment, and some looked forward to setting up camps on the Gill

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riverbank, the same locale as the Native encampment, where they dug holes to cook beans. The haul was massive: Fred Gilmore reportedly brought down 120 million logs for the mills at Mount Tom, Holyoke, and Hartford in 1882.8 (Did Native people work as loggers here? Possibly. In Wabanaki territory claimed by the state of Maine, tribal members turned to logging and related river guiding for employment, even knowing how deeply the industry was transforming their homelands.)9 In 1866, the Turners Falls Company had acquired rights to the area and laid out a village incorporated as Turners Falls (1868), accompanied by a second dam and canal. Industrialists took advantage of proximity to the river to establish operations like the John Russell Cutlery Company, Griswold Cotton Mill, and Turners Falls, Keith, and Montague Paper Companies (fig. 31). Boosters viewed industrialization as an admirable transformation from what they considered poor land and water use by Native peoples. Julius Robinson mused in 1912 about the unlikelihood of this change, dwelling at length on Native and colonial pasts as contrasts to the modernizing present: “Nor could an Indian have scorned more resentfully a prediction that the water of the river, instead of extinguishing torches would kindle them all along its banks in some future age.” In the booms of ancient rocks’ being detonated for a new canal, Robinson heard the earth itself speaking a distinctive tongue, “such words as advancement, attainment, renewal, and inevitable progress impelled by irresistible power.”10 Other promoters put it more bluntly as they wooed manufacturers: “We’ve got cheap power, and lots of it; we’ve got finest possible factory sites, with power and railroads on the properties. We’d like to help you settle here and grow with Turners Falls. Do you realize what unlimited power means?” The answer: forty-seven thousand horsepower, delivered by wire to machines.11 There was nothing new about the Great River as an energy system.12 For generations the energy came from fish—their movement and calories—from masses of people gathered at the falls to harvest them, from beaver pelts swapped downstream, and from the redistribution of resources across an entire watershed. This modern energy derived from arresting and rerouting that river, and harnessing its current to turn the gears of mass production.

Marketing “Heritage”: Visualizing Bloody Brook and Ononko’s Vow Against this backdrop of rapid transformations to the built environment in the name of capitalist accumulation, antiquarians continued their revivals of the colonial past. They used the idea of “heritage” to attract visitors who might

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spend tourist dollars and possibly be inspired to relocate to—and invest in— the region. Old Home Week of 1901 brought elaborate, colorful marking of the Deerfield landscape: “Houses in which a soldier or soldiers of the colonial wars lived, are marked also by flags. Black flags indicate houses burned by Indians; white flags, soldiers in King Philip’s war; orange flags, soldiers in King William’s War; red flags, soldiers in Queen Anne’s war; yellow flags, soldiers in Father Rasle’s war; blue flags, soldiers in the French and Indian war; United States flags, soldiers in the Revolutionary war.”13 Imagine the scene: a whole neighborhood aflutter with multicolored emblems coded to signify distinct epochs, and specifically a multicentury history of military service and intercultural violence. More ephemeral than memorial boulders (but cheaper!), the flags added both interpretive guidance and aesthetic pleasure for visitors receptive to these vistas. Old Home Day organizers also designed a historical excursion to surrounding venues. Seventy wagons and bicycles replicated the route followed by Lathrop’s troops; stopped by the monument at Bloody Brook, where participants heard a recitation of details about the encounter; and processed to other areas of the valley. Their collective motion reinscribed a colonial web of sites, and perceived heroic martyrdom, into local memoryscapes.14 Bloody Brook formed an integral piece of local memoryscapes at the turn of the twentieth century, and its monument still constituted a popular subject for aesthetic treatment. The renowned American wood engraver Elbridge Kingsley (born near Hadley) crafted and published several engravings depicting the Bloody Brook encounter of 1675, one showing four Native warriors crouched or hiding behind trees and firing upon a wagon party in the distance, visually conveying a narrative of colonial victimhood.15 Postcards showing scenes at Bloody Brook and noting its historical resonances gained popularity as well. The brook was but a tiny gurgle of water winding through tall grass in one postcard, a bearded man looking on nearby (fig. 32). In another, a handlettered wooden sign fastened to a telephone pole announced SCENE OF BLOODY BROOK MASSACRE SEPT.

18TH 1675

while the surrounding land remained lightly built up behind a few houses.16 Photographers and card makers attempted to fix the rustic scene in print, perhaps as a critique of development that seemed to move ever closer. These picture postcards allowed purchasers to disseminate the scene widely, giving

Figure 31. In the terrain around Peskeomskut, Euro-American promoters planned and developed an industrial community centered on a complex of mills powered by the Great River. The village of Turners Falls, shown here circa 1877, took shape around a

grid of streets placed atop long-standing Algonquian homelands. The falls appear at left, along with a canal diverting part of the current. (Image reproduced from an original in the collections of the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress)

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Figure 32. The landscape at “Bloody Brook” in South Deerfield appeared in the midst of development in the early twentieth century. While large portions of the river valley remained rural and agricultural, selected industrial enterprises also took root, contributing to anxieties among local antiquarians that the past was being destroyed or built over. In the background the Arms Manufacturing Company appears, which produced leather goods. (Photograph courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts)

potentially limitless visual reach to Bloody Brook—you no longer had to be there in person to “see” it. The spot had become an icon in local and American landscape representations, repeatedly framed, aestheticized, circulated, and marketed for modest profit. Bloody Brook even featured in a motion picture when Thomas Edison’s studio produced a silent film dramatizing the events of 1675 and 1704. Ononko’s Vow (1910) was equal parts camp and weighty historical drama, making heavy use of period costumes and colonial interiors.17 The proprietor of the Bijou motion-picture house wrote the script, and local extras as well as actors from afar converged in the area. Filming took place partly on the very landscapes of the valley, lending verisimilitude and “realism” (as a critic approvingly commented), but also forcing cameras to work around anachronisms of the modern built environment. Crowds gathered to witness actors reenacting aspects of the colonial wars, including an assault by costumed “Indians” on

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Lathrop’s wagon train. The remainder of filming happened on New York sound stages. The local and the metropolitan intermingled in ways that tapped into valley sentiments yet relied on nonlocal technologies and dissemination networks to spread the story beyond the region. The storyline of Ononko’s Vow bordered on incomprehensible, not clarified by actors’ enthusiastic pantomiming. In the most general sense, it involved a man and woman who visited South Deerfield and attentively read the inscription on the Bloody Brook Monument. They had questions about it, and turned for answers to an old-timer sitting outside, a bearded sage played by George Sheldon, then age ninety-two. The old-timer recalled the events of 1675, and live-action filming represented his tale, including a supposed incident of Native mercy toward colonists. A Native chief mortally wounded in the Bloody Brook attack made his son vow to protect a colonial family, which came to pass years later in the 1704 assault on Deerfield. It “makes of the two massacres a continuous story,” a Springfield critic remarked after a screening.18 The film closed within the frame-device of the old man finishing his story, and the duo of satisfied visitors continued on their way. All told, Ononko’s Vow represented 1675 and 1704 as causally linked violences and as grounds for a redemptive vision of “friendly” Natives and their benevolence toward colonial migrants. It also considered these disastrous episodes to be riveting spectacles deserving the attentions of American audiences who were more accustomed to consuming popular depictions of Native-settler conflict in the genre of Westerns.19 The film inspired product tie-ins too. Hiram Wood of South Deerfield capitalized on the Bloody Brook fervor in 1910 by fashioning “Tomahawks” from an old tree that supposedly once grew on the site. He circulated an advertisement for his kitschy wares, underscoring that “This big elm grew on the very edge of Bloody Brook, and was cut down to make way for the cement bridge now on the spot.” For ten cents paid at the Bijou Theatre, locals could own one of these “souvenirs.” (“The real thing. All the rage.”) Modernization killed off the tree at Bloody Brook, but that same modernization granted token recompense by commodifying its remains into mementos.20 As exciting as certain residents found the motion picture’s newfangled technology and capacity to simulate historical environments, they did not abandon older modes of performance and commemoration that relied on collective community gatherings on valley lands. Deerfield staged elaborate historical pageants in 1910, 1913, and 1916. While a distinct production emerged every three years, reassuringly predictable common grounds recurred: a reenactment of the wheat carts’ being loaded in Deerfield and taken out by Lathrop, the

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1704 raid, and so on. Only the 1916 iteration gestured toward Native postwar continuance by including an episode about the 1735 treaty conference that brought together tribal representatives and governor Belcher. Yet its scripting scarcely touched upon the complexities of that diplomacy or ongoing Native bids to maintain Indigenous spaces.21 Although Bloody Brook and Deerfield captured the preponderance of colonial commemorative energies, active memorial sensibilities emerged in other stretches of the valley. In historical Squakheag homelands (called Northfield by colonists, whose town lay close to the New Hampshire and Vermont borders), popular remembrances tended to fixate on the area’s English frontier status. As one commentator affirmed in 1923 with hyperbolic fervor, “No American outpost has been more daringly placed,” adding that Northfield’s vulnerability outstripped even that of Deerfield, comparatively protected sixteen miles to the south.22 The Northfield Village Improvement Society installed memorial stones in 1897 honoring Richard Beers and his troops during a PVMA Field Meeting. The stones contributed to beautification projects as the society planted flowers and strived to increase the aesthetic appeal of Northfield’s wide, straight, tree-lined Main Street. Calling the monuments “pages in a great stone library,” the dedicatory speakers expressed hope that the markers would exercise a salutary influence on the moral character of the town and fight that deadly trio of “ignorance, rum, hoodlumism.”23 They were also designed to be easily accessible to automobile tourists seeking picturesque stopping places.24 As justification for their labors, Northfield antiquarians invoked a popular essay of 1833 by Rufus Choate, an Ipswich-born lawyer and orator. It called for New England to develop mythologies comparable to the romances of Scotsman Walter Scott in his Waverley novels. Choate singled out King Philip’s War as ideal fodder for myth-making: “commit this subject,—King Philip’s War,—to Walter Scott, the poet, or the novelist, and you would see it wrought up and expanded into a series of pictures of the New England of that era,—so full, so vivid, so true, so instructive, so moving, that they would grave themselves upon the memory, and dwell in the hearts of our whole people forever.”25 Historical romance could correct the “deficiencies of history,” its tendency toward arid accounts disconnected from the present-day lives of New Englanders and Americans. The Northfield crowd seemed pleased to give tangible form to Choate’s proposals. The place of Beers’s demise had accrued striking pathos in local tradition, as he was said to have fallen “at almost the very spot on which he stood in 1669, the first white man to behold the site of

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Northfield,” his initial colonial sighting leading all too quickly to his fatal execution. (Beers lay buried in the vicinity, and until about 1820 head- and footstones marked the grave.) Other locales remained thickly storied around a geography of colonial loss and survival, like Soldier’s Hole near Horseshoe Bend, where one of Beers’s men reputedly hid in a hole filled with dead leaves for six days as Native parties searched for him.26 What made the Northfield context so unstable was the concerted presence of Indigenous students in the immediate vicinity. Protestant evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody founded the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies (1879) and Mount Hermon School for Boys (1881), two schools catering not to elites but to children of the so-termed “less privileged,” like international students, African Americans and former enslaved people, and Native Americans. They mirrored the Indian schools established elsewhere in the United States, like Richard Henry Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, problematic and often repressive institutions that aimed to assimilate, “civilize,” and Christianize their charges. In 1880–1881 sixteen Native students— Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and others—joined the first class at the Northfield / Mount Hermon boarding schools. These places drew together young people from multiple tribes, who retained traditional ways but also forged new intertribal solidarities and nontribal friendships in the course of their studies.27 In the early 1900s Wonah’ilayhunka (also known as Henry Roe Cloud) gained admittance to Mount Hermon and moved east to attend. A Ho-Chunk Native enrolled in the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Roe Cloud participated in school life for several years before matriculating at Yale College, then graduating in its class of 1910. He went on to a prominent career as an American Indian educator, reformer, and Presbyterian minister.28 What a perplexing affront it must have seemed to these diverse students to have monuments trumpeting Indigenous savagery on their doorsteps, like the roadside obelisk noting where colonist Nathaniel Dickinson was “killed and scalped by the Indians” in 1747. Moody once inadvertently led some Native students in the direction of that monument while accompanying them on a walk. Realizing his error, he reportedly urged them on a footrace to the bottom of the hill, hoping they would not notice the condemnatory inscription.29 But little likely escaped the attentions of these intensely perceptive students, most of them literate in multiple languages. If Roe Cloud ever walked farther across the flat plains and nearby hills, he must have viewed the King Philip’s War stones as well. Though Roe Cloud does not seem to have commented on these monuments, one wonders what alternative interpretations he would have

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brought to these installations and to the wider Great River landscape. His and other students’ presences are vital reminders that colonial monuments were subject to scrutiny by multiple gazes—not only those of viewers who generally approved of their anti-Indian messaging.

The Pioneer Valley and Frontier of Freedom The Great Depression placed tremendous stress on inhabitants of western Massachusetts. Joblessness, lowered standards of living, out-migration, and other social upheavals affected communities at all levels. Struggles to subsist sapped support for the more elaborate commemorative spectacles staged only years before, but did not kill off historical attentions entirely. If anything, the economic downturn reinvigorated some locals’ commitments to affirming their heritage and cultural capital. Tourism received a boost when regional organizations sensed that feeding visitor interests might be a means of reinvigorating flagging economies. A newspaper ran a contest to devise a marketing moniker for the region. While the frontrunner was King Philip’s Realm, a nod to an extensive history of warfare and powerful Native presence, it lost out to the Pioneer Valley, which endures today.30 That simple toponymic emendation demonstrated how Native presence and history (even the radically stereotyped versions) were overrun by optimistic narratives of hardy Anglo-American settlement, “pioneering” carrying the connotation of hardily subduing the wilderness and becoming the first true settlers of a place. During the Depression years, writers employed by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts produced historic guides to the area’s notable geographies, culminating in a publication that aggregated automobile itineraries and formalized these memoryscapes—still with strongly colonial contours.31 To the probable dismay of regional boosters, its descriptions of Deerfield repeatedly characterized the town as admirably historical but also ghostly, haunted, sleeping, and lacking nearly any kind of connection to modernity. Among the sights it highlighted was the Old Bloody Brook Tavern, a frame building moved to the town from South Deerfield in 1932 and used as work space by crafts enthusiasts.32 This deliberate rearranging of the built environment to support heritage-oriented activities and to create an entrancing aura of colonial authenticity continued in ensuing years. In the mid-twentieth century, under the direction of a New York lawyer and Cincinnati heiress named Henry and Helen Flynt, an organization eventually called Historic Deerfield positioned itself in the valley in contradistinction to

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intensely localized interests. While the PVMA prided itself on carefully tending ultralocal artifacts and ancestral histories, the Heritage Foundation, as the Flynts’ enterprise called itself early on, aimed to cultivate a broader audience and more sophisticated tastes. It collected antiques for their aesthetic qualities, developed an ethos of connoisseurship, and forged connections with major historical and museum organizations like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the Flynts’ behest, it bought up and renovated historic houses on “The Street” in collaboration with Deerfield Academy and its charismatic headmaster Frank Boyden, who attempted to resuscitate a struggling school by transforming it from a small institution (serving many students from newly arrived Polish families) into a nationally acclaimed one catering to the elite (especially WASP) set, the Flynts’ son among them. These house purchases, conducted under the aegis of historical preservation, removed significant swaths of Deerfield real estate from local hands, a rapidly accomplished and not uncontested shift in property holdings.33 The foundation launched a summer fellowship program in material culture and American Studies that drew young men from top American colleges and became a respected pipeline to a growing national museum industry, arguably the professionalization of memory. Deerfield’s grounds and artifacts operated as jumping-off points for intellectual and aesthetic inquiries that aspired to distinctly nonprovincial importance. The Heritage Foundation shared space and some programming with the PVMA, and Henry Flynt even governed as PVMA president for a period, but otherwise the two organizations defined themselves as following distinctive streams. The older one trafficked in the memorial, the parochial, the mythic; the newer cultivated the national, the historical, the critical. Yet Flynt remained susceptible to certain forms of mythmaking. Cold War specters of communism rankled him, and he marshaled narratives—intensely ideological ones—of colonial valor during the Indian Wars to inspire new generations of American youth facing down a different set of “red” menaces: Soviets and Koreans. Henry Flynt hoped to bestow a new name upon the valley: the “Frontier of Freedom,” where colonists pushed back against Native and then British Crown foes.34 In these conservatively politicized (and rather convoluted) links between past and present, Flynt did not pause to consider whether the story of “freedom” could be related in the other direction, as Indigenous bids to resist colonial incursions and restore sovereign Native spaces. Leyden—west of the Great River, formerly part of the Fall Town tract granted to colonial veterans—celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1959. William and Marsha Arms used the occasion to publish an article and hand-drawn

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map in the newspaper tracing the route taken by Turner’s forces, demonstrating renewed fascination with the event’s historical geography. Noting that two monuments commemorated Turner’s exploits, the piece hoped both would be long-lived: “Were one old-time historic shrine to be obliterated, such a precedent might easily lead to the razing of others.” Their account characterized the “Falls Fight” as “a Leyden birthday,” locating the town’s origin in that moment of violence. It concluded with commonplaces about vanishing Indigenes that suggested how powerfully entrenched older mentalities still were in the midtwentieth century: “legend has it that Leyden’s last Indian climbed our highest hill one May evening years ago and uttered a long, blood-curdling war whoop which was heard for miles around. That night the Indian vanished . . . and was never seen again.”35 When the Armses, Henry Flynt, and like-minded commentators circulated these vanquished-Indian views in the 1950s, they were more than idiosyncratic voices in a northeastern corner of the continent. Between the 1940s and 1960s, a series of laws and policies across the United States aimed to punctuate, with finality, the end of Indian tribes, this time through legal channels rather than military violence. The official policy of “termination” took shape in 1953, with the goal of dissolving tribes’ distinctive political statuses and federal protections, and comprehensively assimilating members into an American mainstream.36 This marked a notable turn away from the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (for which Henry Roe Cloud advocated, well after moving on from Mount Hermon); as it went into effect it undermined tribal sovereignties, land bases, and the cohesiveness of communities. New England antiquarians were not, by and large, authoring Indian policy at this point. But to gain traction and the appearance of legitimacy, policy-making required at least a measure of cultural support. Several centuries of persistent anti-Indian rhetoric and memorializing, presented under the aegis of factual history, contributed to frameworks that shaped mainstream views of Indigenous viability.

Decolonizing the Kwinitekw Yet changes were on the horizon that generated reassessments and outright critiques of long-standing narratives and generated new forms of representing Native-colonial pasts and ongoing relations. At a very modest scale, in the 1960s and 1970s Hatfield resident Robert “Bob” Eaton produced a detailed graphic novel about King Philip’s War.37 Eaton, an art instructor at the

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Bement School in Deerfield, created a text highly sympathetic to Native motivations and losses, while also portraying Native leaders like Metacom, Canonchet, and Weetamoo as vibrant, charismatic individuals. While its graphic novel visual format might have suggested an irreverent approach, the illustrations and text proved anything but lighthearted. One panel showed silhouettes of Native corpses hanged from trees. Others did not flinch from depicting scenes of violence, albeit stylized.38 The book ended on an expansive note: acknowledging that colonial authorities shipped numerous Natives out of the country into slavery, Eaton concluded that Philip’s wife and son had gone not south to the West Indies, but north to Odanak-St. Francis, the refugee village along the St. Lawrence River. Eaton traced their descendants to a present-day Abenaki man who carved flutes. Eaton possessed one of these flutes, supposedly modeled after King Philip’s own, and this material artifact and its compelling (if uncertainly accurate) story influenced his decision to narrate this era in print.39 Eaton’s pen-and-ink projects began in 1969, and underneath them lay a mass of research, oral as well as archival.40 Eaton also made his own house in Hatfield into a unique domestic exhibition space, painting an elaborate mural inside his living room that showed a Native encampment around the base of Mount Sugarloaf as it might have looked three hundred years earlier. He continually added to it, incorporating portraits of living Native individuals he met and placing beneath it a small shelf filled with wampum, beads, masks, and other artifacts. The domestic interior became a site of historical contemplation, a personal museum that was dynamic and responsive to contemporary Native contacts. Yet it was still thoroughly entangled with challenging politics of museumizing, representation, and possession. While monumentalizing fervor struck Deerfield most strongly during the Colonial Revival, markers continued to be added to the landscape late in the twentieth century. The northern end of The Street received a boulder in 1973 bearing a metal plaque, with these verses underneath an image of cultivated fields and low-slung buildings: WHERE MOHAWK STRUCK POCUMTUCK PRIDE, SENTINEL STALKS OF INDIAN CORN STILL GUARD THE MEADOW OF OUR WORLD: THE SAD SILENCE OF GRASS-GROWN GRAVES, A FRONTIER HOME ON THE FALLING RIDGE AND A COLD GRAY FEBRUARY DAWN. ALL OF AMERICA HAS LIVED HERE.

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Not a tribute to a specific ancestor, but a generalized expression of pride in heritage—the multicultural gesture of “All of America”—the boulder was of more recent vintage than most area monuments. Yet its modernized typeface (softer edges, less severe angles than the inscriptions of antiquarians who strived for neoclassical dignity) conveyed Old Testament pieties about the Lord’s preserving powers: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.”41 Placed in the middle of the road, the boulder forces walkers and automobiles to veer around it as they round the curve into town. In 1973, in the middle of the Vietnam War, a peace monument was also installed in South Deerfield. It commemorated not violence but “the cessation of historic antagonisms, mutual fears and prejudicial misunderstandings which have distorted our interpretations of history and kept us from really knowing each other.” This language optimistically expressed a bid for reconciliations, which nevertheless may have been presumptuous given the persistence of racial and social inequality in the valley and globally, not to mention fully entrenched settler colonialism.42 A decade later, descendants of the Stockwells installed a marker honoring “Quinton” (Quentin) and his wife Abigail, lauding the “courageous couple” and Quentin especially as “one of the stalwart few who tried in 1677 to rebuild the town.”43 This array of 1970s–1980s monuments illustrated tensions between antiquarian modes of memorializing Native-settler violence, and more liberal-pluralistic perspectives aiming to adjust the tenor of local memoryscapes to reflect shifting contemporary sensibilities. The 1973 peace memorial occupied ground on North Main Street, not far from an old marker at Bloody Brook. Distinct from the prominent obelisk, this horizontal sandstone slab lay flush with the earth. It suffered from its obscure location on private land, where fallen leaves and snow half-concealed it in autumn and winter.44 It languished on the lawn of a South Deerfield resident, who cared for the slab, tried to hasten the town’s commitment to repairing it, and every two years repainted the lettering to keep the inscription legible: GRAVE

of Capt LATHROP and Men Slain by the Indians 1675

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But the slab was gradually being absorbed into his yard. The sheer happenstance of a homeowner becoming the de facto custodian of this marker was odd yet not unthinkable, given the nature of colonial land tenure that rapidly parceled up land into individual holdings. “It wouldn’t take much of an effort to get [repairs] done, and get it done right,” the resident pointed out, noting that in the summertime people often came to look at the marker.45 The actual location of the buried human remains from 1675 was a matter of uncertainty by the late twentieth century, following the installation of trolley tracks that evidently caused the marker to be shifted from its original location. Some thought it was for the best. “Where [the men] are actually buried, I don’t think anybody should try to find out,” local historian George Melnik told the Daily Hampshire Gazette in 1987.46 The deteriorating condition of the Bloody Brook obelisk attracted public concern.47 The Village Improvement Society wanted to gift its grounds to South Deerfield, stipulating that “the town care for the property in perpetuity and maintain same as a public park for the use and benefit of the people of the town.”48 It was “evident that time and weather have taken their toll,” papers reported, “obliterating the lettering and causing chunks of the marble to disintegrate like salt.” Stanley Steliga, a stonecutter, worried enough about the twenty-three-foot structure to air his fears to a selectmen’s meeting, suggesting that in a century’s time the whole monument would be gone. Its components were not actually mortared together but simply rested on one another, relying on their massive weight to keep the structure intact. Steliga offered his services to repair the monument, but the price tag was high. When he tried to find out what the full inscription said, he failed to locate the text in his library researches. “Well, that’s no problem,” said two of those present. “We played around that monument for hours when we were kids and we have the wording all memorized.” (A prankster once carved his initials into the top of the monument, they also recalled, but was required to sandpaper off the offending marks.)49 Steliga even sketched alternative monuments to replace the aging obelisk, yet municipal representatives felt reluctant to build anew. In addition to the difficulties of reckoning with these old memorials’ problematic messages, their very materiality—their tendency to return gradually to earth— presented vexing problems to residents who felt inclined to maintain them, sometimes at visceral levels. In the late-twentieth-century gatherings reprised the noted 1835 Bloody Brook commemoration but also departed from it ideologically. Attendance had dwindled sharply by 1975, when a religious leader read aloud the

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oft-quoted, pro-Native speech of Chief Seattle. Sensibilities had shifted in response to circumstances, the Amherst Record commented: “a country which today (after Vietnam, Korea, etc.) should know that battles between our side and their side are not simple affairs of 100 percent right and 100 percent wrong. In fact there are a few sympathizers around who might be tempted to shout, ‘Let’s hear it for the Indians’ at the Bloody Brook celebration.”50 Revisionist expressions of public memory were more subdued up the road in Northfield for the 1973 tercentenary of that town’s founding.51 Ethnohistorian Gordon Day delivered a critically informed opening address on “Squakheag Indians,” while a woman from Waterbury, Connecticut, identifying as a Squakheag descendant participated in the rededication of the Tri-State Marker on the banks of the river denoting the boundaries of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.52 (Did those present sense the irony of aiding in the re-affirmation of colonial boundaries?) By 1973 locals still noticed the historic markers installed by their predecessors. They admitted the sites had fallen into disrepair, however. Brush strangled the Council Fires area where Philip supposedly met, reducing it to a “graveyard for junk cars.”53 This neglect occurred despite a grassroots proposal to create a Beers Historical Park off Route 63 encompassing six hundred to one thousand acres. It would have protected sites in the vicinity such as the Beers massacre site and a Native burial place. But the plan foundered.54 Ononko’s Vow received new life when Historic Deerfield tracked down a version of the film and screened it at the Tilton Public Library in 1986. Curators made sure to contextualize Ononko’s Vow as an artifact of the Colonial Revival, situating its racial stereotypes within the circumstances of their production. Schoolteachers used the film in curricular units designed to teach students skills for discriminating between realistic and fictional representations of the past. “[I]t was one of the last attempts by American Indians to take over their land,” Historic Deerfield librarian David Proper reflected on the events it dramatically represented. “It was a tragic end to what might have been a cooperative effort.”55 These many revisions in understandings of the Bloody Brook memoryscape were predominantly variations on a theme, rather than major overhauls. They all took as their focal point the brook as a site of sudden violence, and did little more to unpack its connections to more extensive Native homelands or colonization processes. As memories and traditions of placemaking receive renewed attention in the valley, one of the greatest challenges has involved material objects and legacies of “collecting.” Antiquarian relic gatherers, like Ezra Stiles; George

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Sheldon; Edward Hitchcock, Jr.; Harris Hawthorne Wilder; and numerous associates, set in motion major difficulties when they disinterred Indigenous artifacts and ancestral remains from riverbanks, hillsides, and other landscapes across the region. Dominant Euro-American practices for storing, handling, studying, displaying, and interpreting these items gave little consideration to tribal descendant communities’ own desires. Indeed, these collectors had little awareness that their methods were problematic from other perspectives, nor understood that Indigenous descendants with vested interests still existed, given the pervasive “vanishing” rhetoric of the times. By the mid- to late twentieth century large numbers of objects remained at museums like PVMA’s Memorial Hall. They also remained in academic institutions belonging to Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Across the Northeast, Algonquian communities had long been pushing for more respectful treatment of collections and/or return of ancestral remains and sensitive objects. The Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs became involved as well to advocate for movement forward. With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, many institutions had a federal mandate to move into compliance by creating inventories of Indigenous holdings, consulting with relevant tribes, and arranging for repatriation of those items that fell within the frameworks established by NAGPRA.56 Overall, these processes have been uneven, long-running, time- and laborintensive, emotionally fraught, and frustrating at many turns for communities as well as institutional representatives. Some of their details are considered confidential. (Locations of reburied ancestral remains, for example, would be inadvisable to publicize because of the risk of site disruption; nor would it be appropriate to share details of communities’ repatriation ceremonies, which involve sacred and intensely private dimensions.) In the very local cases of “CRV” (Connecticut River Valley) Indigenous ancestors, determining accurate affiliations to present-day descendant communities can be complex owing to centuries-long histories of mobility, diaspora, and ethnogenesis in and beyond the river valley—strategic responses to colonialism and bids for survival, deeply connected to violences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On a positive side, one potential outcome of engaging in repatriation is the creation of new, or stronger, relationships between tribal communities and collecting institutions, as well as opportunities for conversation and learning between groups that have frequently been disconnected. At the same time, repatriation also involves foundational challenges to the conventional authority assumed

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by repositories, regarding who makes ultimate determinations about best practices regarding Indigenous materials and their caretaking. Given the pervasive involvement of amateur collectors in disruptive “digging,” and the complicity of certain valley-based scholars in these very acts at various moments, professional archaeologists today navigate difficult terrain when they seek to pursue grounded investigations of specific historical landscapes.57 Several parts of the valley have been examined in recent years, including homesites and other places within and nearby Deerfield. Some archaeologists, including practitioners associated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have worked to engage contemporary Native descendant communities in their investigations. By employing a collaborative, authoritysharing approach, rather than a top-down one whereby a small circle of elites determines official interpretations, a wider range of perspectives and ethics can be brought to bear on a site and its meanings.58 At Deerfield, opening up to the public the very methods through which knowledge about the past is formed—through a visible archaeology dig, for example—has been an important intervention and also a check on local tendencies toward mythologizing. “Archaeology is especially relevant to a community where the sepia tones of the romantic past daily renew the favored status of history-you-can-stand-tolove in America,” Philip Zea, president of Historic Deerfield, remarked. “The UMass link is our reality check with history and critically important to our claims on authenticity—warts and all.”59 Revisiting museums’ exhibitionary and public history practices became a major focus in the 1990s–2000s, and conversations among new generations of directors, curators, staff, academics, and Native community members led to concrete changes.60 At Historic Deerfield, one outcome was an innovative guide to historical Native places. Using critically informed walking tours centered on sites of Native significance, both pre- and post-European contacts, Pocumtuck, A Native Homeland bodily oriented visitors to another cultural geography that existed on the same grounds as the explicitly marked AngloAmerican terrain, a form of decolonizing cartography.61 The publication also responded to recent shifts in museum-going norms, like visitors’ preferences for flexible, self-directed experiences.62 PVMA and Historic Deerfield share space today and have worked together on multiple projects, yet their collections, programming, and missions remain distinct. PVMA holds a wealth of material objects from Native cultures and pertaining to the seventeenth century; Historic Deerfield, with its strengths in fine and decorative colonial arts, has comparatively fewer, leading it to develop other methods of teaching and

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interpreting in the absence of physical artifacts. Training the site guides to speak about Native subjects and to use culturally sensitive modes of interpretation is an ongoing project. Lectures from academically trained experts have verbally guided docents through new ways of thinking and presenting about Native pasts, such as incorporating Native homelands models to analyze longterm processes of human settlement.63 Curators installed an exhibition of Native basketry in the cutting-edge visible storage area of the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, using these handcrafted artifacts to convey narratives of Indigenous adaptation and continuance.64 Deerfield underwent major self-examination in 2004 as the town and heritage institutions mobilized to commemorate the tercentenary of 1704. The anniversary generated publications, websites, and public programming, all of which made Native history and presence more central—and also enabled organizations to capitalize on an opportunity for increased tourism.65 1704 had already been raised into renewed prominence with publication of John Demos’s The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994).66 The Yale historian’s study garnered a National Book Award nomination, drawing praise as well as critique for its speculative narrative as it traced the interethnic maneuverings of captive Eunice Williams at Kahnawake, and what her loss would have meant to the Anglo-American community she left behind in Massachusetts. In 2004, the commemoration became a powerful lens for a multiperspectival, multicentered approach to history making, in which experiences and traditions of many parties all received consideration. Revisiting colonial remembrances at Deerfield in the wake of this anniversary attracted some controversy.67 In an installation titled Covering Up History, Memorial Hall curators overlaid tablets in the museum’s entryway commemorating colonial dead with liftable tabs that gave alternative narratives and Indigenous perspectives, a seemingly elegant addition of layers of meaning rather than effacement of existing ones. “We’re hoping to engage visitors in a dialogue about this history written in stone, and have them think about who wrote the words, whose history is being told and ultimately whose story is left out,” commented curator Suzanne Flynt.68 Yet this palimpsestic intervention upset certain descendants of colonial individuals memorialized in the hall, who saw it as a violation of that sanctum and unwarranted questioning of ancestral losses. Revisionism has had to reckon with Euro-American descendants who sustain emotional ties to their relations and active links with the Deerfield area through reunions, genealogical research at the libraries, and other forms of engagement. Their financial support enables the organizations’

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continuance, especially in economic downturns, so staff members can feel obliged to carefully weigh decisions to overhaul programming and spaces in ways that reinterpret without alienating (easier said than done). Altogether, these revisionary efforts, still in process, have invigorated heritage organizations and the visitors who seek to form connections—and have unsettled them. Decolonizing critiques have deconstructed cherished narratives and practices, begging the question: What comes after deconstruction? Can critical dismantling be followed up with constructive work, with the assembling of a different whole?69 Moreover, what is the future of a historically oriented place like Deerfield in the face of ever-approaching modern development angling for the same desirable lands—“condos in the cornfields,” as one Historic Deerfield member characterized neighboring areas?70

“The River Will Not Testify”: Contemporary Poetics at the Falls The falls inflected regional imaginations for centuries, but they also resonated with more globalized and self-consciously aestheticized projects. The experimental poet Susan Howe crafted a lengthy meditation in the late 1980s on the figure of Hope Atherton, the chaplain involved in the falls assault.71 Atherton—possibly rendered mentally unwell after his travails there— became the focal point of a sixteen-poem sequence called “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings,” in which the historical truth about what transpired at the falls became muddled through his unmoored psyche. It was pure happenstance, Howe later remarked, that this material came back into public circulation. Howe resided in traditional Quinnipiac homelands (Guilford, Connecticut) and frequented the libraries at Yale University in nearby New Haven. In the dim stacks of Sterling Memorial Library she stumbled across Atherton’s story while reading George Sheldon’s History of Deerfield. “In Sterling’s sleeping wilderness I felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable phantoms,” she wrote of this enigmatic literary trace squirreled away in academic recesses. “The future seemed to lie in this forest of letters, theories, and forgotten actualities . . . something chemical almost mystical.”72 Shards of the past recirculated and resignified in the present in ways dependent on serendipity. Howe also prefaced the poem with a letter recalling the falls events, penned from Stephen Williams to Ezra Stiles, once again drawing those two figures back into the thicket of memory-making.73 “Wanderings” was an important postmodernist poem. It attracted critical attention from literary scholars intrigued by its meandering perspectives, its

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slippages between male and female personas, and its dense accumulations of Algonquian words alongside English and Latin ones. The poem culminated in resounding failures to communicate and obscurities of meaning. Most critics were less interested in the particular historical context of the river valley and more so in the psychological problems at play and deliberate collapse of directional storyline, a “substitution of a sort of molecular opacity for the integrative movements of narration.”74 Howe sensed that memories of the falls violence were profoundly confused even in its immediate wake, and that the psychological trauma of witnessing and participating in a colonial massacre irretrievably undid Hope Atherton and his capacity for language, his ability to signify in meaningful ways. Howe was not the only contemporary poet circling back to the late seventeenth century’s violences as subjects for creative reworking. In “The River Will Not Testify” (2000), poet Martín Espada—a Brooklyn-born Latino professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an American Book Award winner—examined how the landscape around the falls seemingly erased all physical traces of the 1676 encounter: The river’s belly swirls shards of bone gnawed by water. The river is deaf after centuries of pummeling the rocks. The river thrashes all night with the lightning of lunatic visions. The river strangles on the dam, hissing at the stone eagles that watch with stone eyes from the bridge. Concrete stops the river’s tongue at Turners Falls.75 Literally dammed up, the river remained tongue-tied. It became the duty of the poet to speak where the land must be silent, to create the language that the falls’ industrial erasures could never communicate. The poet inherited an obligation to bear witness not only to human devastations at the falls, but also to the silencing of their memory. Espada’s exploration of the falls also questioned the significance of the area’s colonial monuments. Whereas antiquarians confidently assumed their monuments would perpetually convey meaning through text, the poem looked ahead to a dystopian future that reduced those structures to illegible wreckage in an apocalyptic landscape. Envisioning a vista of fallen chimneys and destroyed spires, it meditated on what would happen when the monuments of war have cracked into hieroglyphics no one can read.76

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What mean ye by these stones scattered here and there? Asked innocently by an antiquarian in 1900, with faith in monuments’ capacity to signify through centuries unnumbered, this question elicited a very different answer in Espada’s poem. In 2000 the stones no longer meant, at least not in the intended ways. Howe and Espada radically questioned the authority and singular voice of colonial narratives, insisting instead on aspects of a contested past that had been marginalized, silenced, forgotten, physically effaced, or hopelessly tangled up in the psyche’s manipulations, in ways that foreclosed ready apprehension of “truth.” Neither writer claimed long-standing ancestral ties to the place, nor did they derive knowledge from prolonged immersion in settler traditions. But both poets demonstrated how outsiders could recast the falls’ significance by situating them within critiques of narrative coherence and authority (Howe), or globalized senses of anticolonialism (Espada). Other creative writers have recently revisited the valley to explore pluralistic, deep-time perspectives, and their work indicates that far from being closed down by the antiquarians, meanings of these geographies continue to be imagined anew.77 In October 1999 FREE LEONARD PELTIER emerged overnight on the face of the William Turner Monument. For those who considered themselves stewards of the stone—itself a historical artifact of the early 1900s—the freshly stenciled words seemed problematic. Some townspeople deplored the painted marks as wanton destruction of an historic structure: a resident of Millers Falls, for example, wrote to the local paper expressing sympathy for Peltier’s case, but also dismay that the monument had been targeted by “misguided hotheads.” Given the stone’s minimalistic original inscription, he added, “We the present inheritors of this piece of granite, are . . . free to treat it as a simple memorial to the dead of both sides, the massacred Pocumtuck” as well as Turner’s men.78 The carefully stenciled white letters could be read as more than “hothead” gestures. They were arguably complex reappropriations of the colonial memoryscape for politicized Indigenous purposes, articulations of American Indian presence (or support from allies) and calls for rethinking and resistance in otherwise staid colonial space.79 Whether graffiti appears as deviant or legitimate commentary, geographer Tim Cresswell has written, depends on “implicit normative geographies in the ordering of ‘appropriate’ behavior.” The place of the markings matters in determining whether they are transgressive. “Beliefs about dirt and pollution relate to power relations in society as they delineate, in an ideological fashion, what is out of place. Those who can define what is out of place are those with the most power in society.”

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Critiques of markings like those on the monument are more than direct condemnations of the stenciled text: “Just as dirt is supposed to represent not just a spoiling of the surface, but a problem that lies much deeper (in terms of hygiene, for instance), graffiti as dirt is seen as a permanent despoiling of a whole set of meanings—neighborliness, order, property, and so on. Graffiti is linked to the dirty, animalistic, uncivilized, and profane.”80 The Peltier markings disrupted “normal” space on the riverbank and reanimated it through an illegal textual imprint. Ultimately authorities cleaned off the markings. Similar to what has transpired at Great Swamp, where “vandalism” of the colonial monument raised concerns, such corrective responses demonstrated stringent views of the appropriate treatment of public memory-sites: counternarratives must be removed. The silencing took some negotiation, however. Neither the town of Gill nor the Historical Commission nor Massachusetts Highway Department could remember who had responsibility for the monument, and they had to revisit specific histories of ownership before commencing the erasures.81

Reconciliations and Reconsiderations at the Falls Today Turners Falls is a quiet postindustrial village (population around forty-four hundred) within the town of Montague. Most of its activity ranges along Avenue A and a grid of lettered and numbered streets. Sections of the riverfront have been redeveloped as park space, and the educational Great Falls Discovery Center interprets ecological, social, and industrial dynamics of the watershed. Montague is known for being hospitable to people of liberal and countercultural inclinations, partly a legacy of collectivist living experiments that thrived in the area for years.82 The memoryscapes of the falls, long visibly dominated by antiquarians, shifted dramatically in the 2000s as new forms of cross-cultural work unfolded. Amid concerns that development was threatening sensitive Native historic terrain, some locals mobilized in the mid-1990s, forming the volunteer nonprofit called Friends of Wissatinnewag, Inc. The group’s assumption of the name Wissatinnewag reflected growing interest in recuperating Indigenous toponyms and moving away from the overtly colonial cartography promoted by antiquarians like Edward Hitchcock.83 Monique Fordham, one of the founders who also identifies as being of Western Abenaki descent, strongly shaped these early efforts.84 The group connected with the Narragansett Indian Tribe—one of a handful of federally recognized tribes in southern New

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England—and gathered support from diverse quarters.85 In an expression of transnational outreach and solidarity, the Abenaki Nation of Odanak called for “the preservation of our ancient and sacred village of Wissatinnewag.” Citing the role of Odanak (or St. Francis, in Québec) as a refuge for Algonquians dispersed by the falls massacre and King Philip’s War more broadly, they reported being “appalled to hear of the lack of concern on the part of those within the State of Massachusetts, whose job it is to see that such sacred places are protected.”86 An additional motivation for protecting this land was the presence of human remains, some of which had been found nearby and thought to be associated with the falls massacre. The existence of remains had come to public attention decades earlier, and others found in Greenfield in 1999 raised similar concerns.87 Anthropologists who examined them contended the site should be considered a Native burial place, and thereby sacred terrain.88 Given these circumstances, passive recreation like hiking in the area might be acceptable, Fordham argued. But disruption of remains in the name of development was not: “To me, the very definition of racism is when my ancestors’ bones aren’t as important as a landfill cap.”89 In 2001 the Friends of Wissatinnewag mobilized to purchase relevant land, keeping it apart from encroachment such as a proposed Walmart and industrial-park expansion.90 Their main purchase, as they characterized it, was of “the last undeveloped quadrant of the ancient Native American village and burial grounds that originally surrounded the great falls on the Connecticut River.” They subsequently sold twenty-one acres to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure animal habitat and bald eagle protection. The group hosted cultural activities showcasing contemporary Algonquian cultures and argued that “the rich history of this ancient Native village should not be eclipsed by this one, horrible event”—the massacre of May 1676. As they interpreted the site’s multigenerational existence as a “village of peace,”91 their view of history and geography pushed away from the massacre as the principal locus of meaning, declining to allow cataclysmic violence to occlude wider human landscapes of continuance. These internal dialogues and public consciousness-raising about the area’s Native heritage laid groundwork for an unprecedented “reconciliation” ceremony held in May 2004, organized in conjunction with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the town of Montague’s founding. Townspeople reached out to the Narragansett Tribe in hopes of conducting a ceremony that would lift a perceived “curse” that had lingered in the area following the 1676 massacre, which some locals saw as preventing success and well-being in the

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town. “It’s been something that’s long overdue,” the town administrator told the press about the reconciliation. Narragansett medicine man Lloyd “Running Wolf” Wilcox oversaw lighting of a ceremonial fire and passed a peace pipe as he spoke “ancient words of healing,” followed by an exchange of gifts. In recognition of Wilcox’s affinity for fly-fishing, the town gave him a fishing rod, a gesture enabling renewed relations with modern riverscapes. All told, the reconciliation drew together multiple Native representatives, town residents, as well as non-Native peace groups active in the valley’s pluralistic social landscape. Narragansetts approached the ceremony “in the spirit of Canonchet,” referring to the Narragansett sachem believed to have helped establish the refugee village at the falls during wartime. The ceremony allowed groups to “enter into a period of growing peace, healing and reconciliation.” Or as Doug Harris, deputy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) for the Narragansett Tribe, said, “The town of Turners Falls has acknowledged that it may well be time to turn that page and seek to find peace with that past.”92 The town’s commitment to a more respectful chapter in its relations with Native people and polities faced a test only a few years after this reconciliation. Around 2007 plans developed for a runway extension at the Turners Falls Municipal Airport. Located slightly southeast of the falls, it serves regional air traffic. The extension proposal underwent review since it involved federal funds, and wound up triggering a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) request to the National Park Service to determine a nearby hill’s eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places. The eligibility question arose because the hill bears features that are potentially of ancient ceremonial significance. Three federally recognized tribes (Aquinnah Wampanoag, Mashpee Wampanoag, Narragansett) along with locals raised concerns that the development would imperil an important Native landscape, and a coalition organized to address the situation.93 The hill eventually acquired National Register status, formally designated as the Turners Falls Sacred Ceremonial Hill Site.94 Ceremonial landscapes comprising stone and other markings have attracted an upswell of interest in recent years, among tribal communities (particularly preservationists), academics (particularly archaeologists), and the public. Discussion sometimes focuses on archaeoastronomy, or the alignment of natural features and constructed landmarkings with cosmic formations, for ritual or symbolic purposes.95 Identification and protection of growing numbers of these formations has been a notable shift in the Northeast, where many such formations have been known within tribal communities

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yet misread by outsiders: viewed as naturally occurring rock deposits, colonial stone walls, or simply debris, they have frequently been written off as insignificant for preservation. Ceremonial landscapes have been said to be present at Nipsachuck in northern Rhode Island. But local circumstances have made a difference in these locales’ statuses. At Nipsachuck, the terrain is swampy, hilly, and generally not under immediate threat for extensive redevelopment. At Turners Falls, the push to expand a piece of regional infrastructure placed more direct pressure on the area and prompted tribal cultural authorities to take action in ways they deemed necessary. Not everyone agrees about these findings. Formations at these two sites may be Euro-American rather than Indigenous, according to some historical authorities—yet the very questioning of ceremonial landscape claims can be seen as retrenchment of antitribal ways of thinking and seeing.96 The airport project stopped and resumed several times in response to this complex array of considerations, and delays generated tensions. “I think some of these claims are extremely questionable,” one selectman remarked about objections keeping work from moving ahead. FAA authorities “always had the legal right to [move the expansion forward],” he commented, “but for reasons unknown to anyone, they’re letting the tribes run the project.”97 Conflicting narratives arose from these debates. One stressed the need to look back over the longue durée to protect long-standing Indigenous landscapes, and to reckon with the area’s importance before, during, and after King Philip’s War— including places’ ongoing importance to contemporary tribal members. Another viewed tribal interventions on the basis of cultural, historical, and spiritual significance as impeding a modernization project critical to regional stability and growth. These disagreements were not unique to the Turners Falls Airport, of course. Across the Northeast, not to mention North America, proposals for wastewater treatment plants (like at Deer Island), offshore windenergy turbines, shopping complexes, housing units, highways, parking lots, and other elements of the built environment have repeatedly generated difficulties as they spread farther across tribal communities’ homelands. But while the general contours may be familiar, the dynamics and outcomes of each case vary in important ways as a result of specific place-ties, histories, politics, and claims to authority. In the context of these discussions, Doug Harris addressed tribal parties’ needs to build widespread support: “What we need is friends and partners in the Franklin County who value and care for the sites as much as we do and make sure they are protected and preserved.”98 The airport issue demon-

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strated how thoroughly multistranded preservation can be, crossing not only tribal and state lines but also racial/ethnic and cultural ones—not a simplistic matter of Natives versus Yankees or locals, but instead a process of coalition building. The reconciliation ceremony was not an end in itself, Harris emphasized, but a beginning, a formal way of opening doors for future connections.99 Like the ongoing conversations and investigations at Nipsachuck, it is a work in progress rather than a fait accompli. Ultimately the airport work proceeded in a controlled way, avoiding sensitive areas singled out by tribal consultants as especially worthy of protection.100 While a great deal of collective thinking and action resulted from the airport dilemma, it would be misleading to characterize tribal involvements as uncontested or entirely in mutual accord. To highlight just a few complexities: Which contemporary tribe(s) can speak on behalf of Pocumtucks and other Algonquians with ancestral homelands in the river valley? Their multicentury histories of migration, forced diaspora, refugee absorption, alliance, and identity re-formation can make tracing those lines of descent complex. Additionally, the frameworks of U.S. federal recognition—problematic in a range of contexts—can shape these projects. Nipmucs have traditionally inhabited many stretches of central and western Massachusetts, but they are not a federally recognized tribe at present, whereas Narragansetts are; this sometimes accords them differential statuses in consultations. (Nor do Abenakis presently have federal recognition.) The Narragansett representatives warmly welcomed at the Turners Falls reconciliation were not immediate neighbors to the town, in the sense that their tribal reservation lies to the southeast by Narragansett Bay; yet their presence recalled, and reanimated, extensive Narragansett historical geographies that encompassed long-distance mobility at key moments. All told, multiple Native people from a range of backgrounds continue to speak to or on behalf of ancestors about the importance of these landscapes. In addition, new relationships may coalesce through a “battlefields” investigation of Wissatinnewag-Peskeomskut. Supported through the American Battlefield Protection Program and slated to incorporate a range of archival, oral, community-based, and archaeological investigations, as at Nipsachuck, this project is currently in initial stages.101 The recently organized Nolumbeka Project has also taken up various strands of the Friends of Wissatinnaweg’s commitments, endeavoring to preserve heritage landscapes and build public awareness of these entangled histories.102 “The war didn’t just float through here and move on somewhere else,” Marge Bruchac remarked about the falls, a site that continues to disturb her. “Some

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part of it got stuck here.”103 New Hampshire essayist Howard Mansfield interviewed Bruchac about her understandings of the falls and wove the final chapter of his recent book Turn and Jump around those perspectives, which drew upon her own Abenaki identity as well as professional commitments as an anthropologist. Mansfield himself found the 1676 violence a prelude to an era of unending imperial and global war: “Close to four hundred years have passed since King Philip’s War. Other wars have followed, wars against the Abenaki, Tuscarora, Yamasee, Ottawa, Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, Ojibwa, Wyandot, Potawtomi, Miami, British, Barbary Coast pirates, Creek, Seminole, Black Hawk, Navajo, Mexicans, Sioux, Ute, Apache, Nez Perce, Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Nicaraguans, Spanish, Filipinos, Yaqui, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Afghanistanis, Iraqis . . .”104 And his list went on. For those intimately involved with everyday stewardship of grounds around the falls, understanding the devastating backstory is paramount. Yet individuals and organizations also pursue forward-looking work that aims to restore. The Friends of Wissatinnewag consulted with environmental specialists about grass varieties to plant in sensitive areas threatened by erosion, and spent days out in the sand and soil sowing seeds, hoping to begin a process of regrowth. The land, it turns out, may rebound even there.105

“What Mean Ye by These Stones?” The 1999 “Free Leonard Peltier” marking was one entry in centuries of contestation over the geography of war, how it should be memorialized, and what messages traces of the past ought to bear for the future. In early 2011 locals awoke again to a re-marked William Turner Monument, its sides emblazoned with a symbol that resembled a huge question mark with a strikethrough. The painted scrawls of bored teens, perhaps, granting little respect to the stone so venerated by the PVMA a century earlier. Or a more pointed though still cryptic message (fig. 33).106 When the brilliant red graffiti appeared in the middle of an unusually snowy winter, it raised the monument into public visibility at a high-traffic intersection. Yet again an unauthorized narrative: unauthorized in the sense of being anonymous and out of line with prevailing norms for the establishment of public history text. The powerful social codes that regulate many New England cultural landscapes demanded it be cleaned away—and yet this time, the marks have remained. Whatever the reason, by virtue of its open-air location the monument will remain perpetually susceptible to editorial retouching.107

Figure 33. In 1900 the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association supported installation of a monument at the falls, commemorating the 1676 actions of William Turner against the Native encampment. It was part of a widespread project of landmarking with colonial-themed stones that gathered momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On several occasions the monument has been “vandalized,” or overwritten with alternative messages and signifiers. So-called “graffiti” once invoked the “Free Leonard Peltier” campaign to inscribe an American Indian activist message over the original text. The overpainting depicted here occurred in 2011, with precise authorship or meanings unclear. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

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Monumentalizing is not a finished process. Names of two colonists killed in King Philip’s War surfaced as candidates for inclusion in a Springfield-area monument.108 The PVMA memorial boulders that lie all over Deerfield and surrounding towns continue to vex historical preservationists. They debate whether the stones—extremely heavy ones, it must be said—should be moved, overwritten, added onto with other signage, uprooted and corralled into a “graveyard of political incorrectness,” or otherwise recontextualized.109 “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” Karl Marx wrote in 1852, referring to the symbolic and ideological inheritances that revolutionaries must navigate in their quests for new social orders.110 In the case of the Deerfield memorials, the inheritance is weighty in both ideological and physical terms. What mean ye by these stones scattered here and there? Today the question is not simply rhetorical. It demands practical attention to the maintenance or revision of memoryscapes’ man-made features, which have been inherited by present generations and made their responsibilities. And while certain communities have been intensively reflecting on the very natures of memorializing and placemaking, the wider public effects are debatable. Pan-Indian kitsch and commodified caricatures along Route 2, colloquially known as the Mohawk Trail, remain the more immediately visible “trace” of Native presence in western Massachusetts. When the Gill-Montague Regional School Committee voted in 2017 to change the Turners Falls High School mascot from the “Indians,” in light of discussions about stereotypical representations and the area’s violent history of colonialism, many applauded the decision as a positive step toward reconciling difficult pasts with ongoing legacies of marginalization—but dozens of students staged a walkout to protest the change, expressing desires to keep the mascot in place.111 The “Pioneer Valley” has remarkable staying power as a regional moniker despite persistent efforts from certain constituencies to encourage a different descriptor, and despite its increasingly tenuous relevance to growing communities of Puerto Ricans and Latinos, African Americans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and others in Holyoke, Springfield, and adjacent parts of the valley. In Squakheag/Northfield, the roadside markers recognizing Richard Beers, who died after being “surprised by Indians,” have not been substantively revisited, though at least one’s surroundings have been attractively remulched. Squo chee kesos. . . . Wapicummilcom, John Pynchon scribbled into an account book around 1645, trying to bend his ear to river valley languages. Between when “ye sun hath strength to thaw” and when “ye ice in ye river is all

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gone” was a liminal time, to be followed by Namassack kesos for fish catching.112 Always entrepreneurially minded toward potential trading partners, the Pynchons had vested interests in understanding Algonquians’ seasonal patterns. So did colonial military leaders. I was at Peskeomskut at this point in 2015. Most of the Great River remained frozen at the waning end of a relentlessly snowy winter. But just below the falls were a few stretches of open water, alongside old mill buildings in various states of decline and rehabilitation. Well overhead a bald eagle flew steady circles while keeping watch on

Figure 34. Today the riverscape around Peskeomskut differs physically in stark ways from its earlier formations. Successive damming projects have curtailed the free flow of the river and created a wide cove behind the dam. Access to the area is controlled in places, though visitors can walk by a modern fish ladder that attempts to support continuing migrations along the waterway. In the surrounding landscape, contestations have unfolded in recent years regarding possible ceremonial stone features, in areas also selected for expansion of the Turners Falls Airport. In 2004 the town of Montague (which encompasses Turners Falls) held a “reconciliation” ceremony with selected tribal representatives, including some from the Narragansett Tribe. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

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movements below. Eagles have taken to nesting in the wide cove created by damming, aided by recent reintroduction efforts for the species.113 What remains to be fished along the entirety of the river is uncertain, given that fish ladders have mixed results and programs to restore Atlantic salmon populations have recently lapsed.114 Yet fish are tenacious and adaptable, so their numbers may still rebound, especially if the river one day undergoes dam removals like those taking place in other parts of the Northeast. To take an aerial perspective on this riverine corridor would envelop tremendously diverse terrain speckled with numberless stones. Some are ancient, with long-standing significance for Indigenous peoples past and present. Some are constructions of more recent vintage, conveying the incised sentiments of colonial descendants about their predecessors’ actions up and down the valley. The tensions between these can be destructive. But they can also generate intensive reflections, rethinkings, and resistances in a dialectical form of placemaking replete with energy. These cycles undoubtedly will continue as eagles, and also aircraft, carve flight paths around the Great River (fig. 34).

7 • Algonquian Diasporas Indigenous Bondages, Fugitive Geographies, and the Edges of Atlantic Memories

In a secluded clearing called Dark Bottom, a blossoming, wooded spot on the island of St. David’s in Bermuda, two groups of people linked hands in concentric circles in June 2002. The inner circle contained Native American tribal members who had journeyed there from the New England mainland, while the outer circle comprised St. David’s Islanders. Around a fire lit from cedar, amid smudging of sweetgrass and sage, the two rings joined into one. This “Circle of Life” formed part of an unprecedented gathering of Natives and islanders, peoples said to have been torn asunder many centuries ago by colonial violence and only recently reunited. Their commemoration opened a new chapter in a traumatic history in which Algonquians were seized during the colonial “Indian Wars,” particularly the Pequot War and King Philip’s War, then forced aboard ships and sold as slaves to Atlantic World ports, plantations, and related locales distant from their Northeastern homelands. “We have been looking for you for 300 years,” remarked Ramona Peters from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribal community, based on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. “We missed you.”1 This coming-together—an astonishing, emotionally wrenching transoceanic union that seemed to span rifts of space and time—offers a narrative that trenchantly challenges dominant understandings of two of North America’s foundational sites of meaning: Indigenous peoples and slavery. As this narrative goes, Algonquians were not extinguished or erased by colonial contacts and warfare; they survived and transformed. Instead of being pushed west or north, they went east and south. Instead of assimilating with peoples of European descent, they comingled with peoples of African descent. Instead of a transatlantic slave trade that strictly brought Africans to the Americas, this

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phenomenon pushed Indigenous Americans off their ancestral lands and out to sea. These striking stories of devastation and regeneration have not yet been adequately incorporated into contemporary assessments of circum-Atlantic slavery and violence, nor into ethnohistorical accountings of Native communities’ evolutions, shared conceptions of heritage, and geographical understandings in the long postwar period. It is a peculiarly forgotten form of forced labor: “captivity without the narrative,” as Joyce Chaplin characterized the scholarly marginalization of Indigenous enslavement.2 Communities themselves have maintained compelling accountings, and it is vital to recognize that what certain scholars are now “discovering” has long permeated the fabric of descendants’ lives and conceptions of history. “As a child I was always told that we have relatives in Bermuda, as a result of the enslavement of our people by the colonizers,” Dawn Dove (Narragansett) has remarked. “This historical trauma lives in the hearts and minds of the Narragansett today.”3 What can be termed an “Algonquian diaspora” is a vital case study because it recasts static views of Natives and identity, illustrating how complex these become in multiracial, multinational circumstances like those at St. David’s. Moreover, the events at St. David’s demonstrate that displacements of the early modern Atlantic World have reverberated through more than three centuries and continue to resonate with contemporary communities’ senses of past, place, kinship, and collective purpose. The Red Atlantic, in Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver’s phrase, or Indigenous Atlantic, has recently attracted the attention of critics who have begun exploring the conceptual and experiential contours of a world that painfully wove together Native and African dispossessions and enslavements.4 This analytic shift counters conventional views of Indigenous peoples as essentially landbound and terrestrial rather than maritime, mobile, or cosmopolitan. It also sheds light on crucial roles played by Natives and their African and EuroAmerican counterparts in the early modern Atlantic slave trade, as well as across networks of Indigenous bondage extending deep into the North American continent and interior.5 Bermuda stands at the heart of these currents, active for more than four centuries as a central node in empire, trade, slavery, and human passage. Yet the semitropical “Somers Isles” have languished in the scholarly eye, neglected by most historians of the Americas and Europe, and all but omitted from accounts of slavery stemming from the seventeenthcentury Indian Wars.6 The islands’ idyllic popular image as a pink-sanded beach resort has deflected the scrutiny of serious historicization; and while their history shares many features with the amply studied plantation econo-

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mies of the West Indies, a unique trajectory of development shaped Bermuda. The archipelago lies due east of the Carolinas, closer to Virginia and New York than the Caribbean, and has long been connected to those coasts (fig. 35). This distinctiveness continues today in characteristics like Bermuda’s political status as a British overseas territory rather than a fully independent island nation. This chapter examines one piece of Bermuda’s entanglements with bondage and indigeneity: the purported enslavement of relations of King Philip on the islands, and the transformation of that incident within collective understandings, both in Bermuda and among tribal and Euro-American communities on the American and specifically Northeastern mainland. The distinctive qualities of memorial placemaking in Bermuda appear more clearly when situated within wider Atlantic World currents, which carried Algonquians in many directions, some well identified, some more speculative. Altogether, these episodes highlight epistemological challenges about researching collective memories, and about the integration of the discipline of history with other approaches to knowledge. What happens when oral traditions hold strongly to one version of events, while documentary archives—still largely the gold standard of academic history yet highly fragmentary in these instances—appear to relate a somewhat distinct account? What are the stakes of tracing human bondage’s legacies through to the present day, rather than attempting to contain their repercussions to a now-finished historical moment? “I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead,” Saidiya Hartman cogently asserted in her memoiristic history tracing the Middle Passage back to Africa. Her insistence that “the past is not yet over” resonates with Indigenous slave passages as well.7 In focusing on Indigenous bondages, it is imperative to recognize the real damages inflicted upon individuals, kinship groups, and tribal nations, as well as the shaping powers exercised by rapidly evolving colonial and imperial legal structures. The willful formation and maintenance of “carceral landscapes,” to invoke Walter Johnson’s characterization of the U.S. antebellum South, proceeded through an array of physical, statutory, technological, and psychological manipulations, all designed to curtail pushbacks and solidarities among unfree people that seemed threatening to Euro-American authorities.8 Turning a critical spotlight on these regimes of repression, terror, and torture is an important step toward reckoning with these painful histories. But it is equally vital to acknowledge captive Natives’ recurrent efforts to escape, undermine, and resist these strictures; to create meaningful new lives and homes amid the

Figure 35. The “Sommer Islands,” or Bermuda Islands, were mapped in 1678 by Thomas Clarke. The cartouche at the top describes their location in relation to London and Virginia, important Atlantic World nodes with which colonial Bermuda developed connections. By the late seventeenth century, enslaved people of Indigenous and African descents lived and labored throughout the archipelago. St. David’s Island, at the far eastern end, has served in recent years as a locus for Indian “reconnection” events and community memorializing of Atlantic diasporas. (Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

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most dehumanizing circumstances; and to remember what they were trying to restore.9 The Mohegan word nayawiyuwôk indicates the opposite of bondage, tribal historian and medicine woman Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel has remarked, drawing on Mohegan linguist Stephanie Fielding’s work. It is an active word, and it connotes being in a “state of self-governance, safety, and care.”10 Mohegans participated in complex wartime processes of bondage and emancipation, and their own interpretations of these processes, partially grounded in long-standing ties with other Algonquians, differed from settler colonial mentalities and goals in signal ways. Stories of Native enslavement during King Philip’s War begin nominally in the mid-1670s but had important antecedents in prior eras. Taking other humans into custody was not a phenomenon set in motion by European arrivals, of course. Across the Americas, a number of Indigenous societies had longstanding protocols for adopting outsiders to replace lost community members, for example, or for maintaining a laboring class held in tribute or service to elites, all of which entailed forms of reciprocal obligations. European colonization projects altered some of these dynamics, and what began to emerge following Columbus’s disastrous interactions with Caribbean Taínos was a spectrum of conditions for bondage. At one end lay temporary captivity—like detaining an individual or group to use as an expedient bargaining chip—with ready prospects for release and return home. At another lay chattel slavery, premised on permanent bondage and the inheritability of unfree status across generations, within systems that attempted to transform sentient individuals into dehumanized commodities. In between arose a substantial range of negotiated indentures, tributary contracts, and limited-term confinements. Over the course of his or her life, a single Native person caught up in these systems might experience several forms of unfreedom, undergirded by colonial regulations that frequently left one’s status nebulously defined. By the late 1500s, as the first wave of English entrepreneurs looked west across the Atlantic with colonizing designs, they certainly were aware of precedents established by the Spanish, who endeavored to harness vast populations of indios through exhausting, deadly enterprises like silver mining. While English colonial projects never developed such intensive subterranean pursuits, or the formalized mita and encomienda systems entailing compulsory service or labor that wrought such damage among Indigenous populations under Spanish colonization, they did rapidly explore potential benefits of taking and exchanging Indigenous people. In the course of futilely searching for a Northwest

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Passage and mineral wealth in the high semifrozen latitudes—environments skillfully navigated by Indigenous inhabitants but termed Meta Incognita by disoriented Englishmen—Martin Frobisher’s crew seized Inuits named Arnaq, Kalicho, and Nutaaq and brought them to Elizabethan England. Their captivity arguably had not been intended to be permanent. Yet in effect it was, since unfamiliar European diseases and stresses soon killed them. Proponents of the short-lived English colonial venture at Roanoke (in the North Carolina area) likewise transported two Native men—Manteo and Wanchese—to England, hoping to learn Indigenous language skills from them and thereby abet colonization.11 In the Dawnland, Wabanakis, Wampanoags, and other Indigenous populations have long recalled that English voyagers like Thomas Hunt forcibly seized a number of their members. Kidnapped and brought aboard ships bound for sale at other Atlantic points, including Málaga in Spain, they experienced rapid dislocations from traditional contexts. (Multitudes of indios had been brought to Iberian locations from across Spanish colonial territories, and some managed to petition for their liberty through the court system.)12 Tisquantum, also called Squanto, managed to return from a seething world of multiethnic Mediterranean captivity, eventually wending his way back to Patuxet. For him the forced circum-Atlantic transit brought exposure to other languages, spiritual systems, and forms of negotiation. These could prove instrumental in navigating subsequent encounter situations, where multilingual capabilities conferred a distinct edge. Such far-ranging circuits compel us to recognize the degrees of agency that Native individuals and groups exercised overseas in shaping their own routes and perceptions of new milieus, despite oppressive limitations. But other captives never returned. Their losses sowed enduring seeds of distrust toward Euro-American “strangers” among their remaining kin.13 Moreover, while Algonquians observed complex ceremonies to mourn deceased relations, it is less apparent how they reckoned with relations who simply disappeared, leaving behind critical gaps in community demography. What was the appropriate way to memorialize absence and season after season of protracted uncertainty? As inhabitants of the Native Northeast were learning, becoming more deeply entangled in the Atlantic World was not necessarily an enriching or broadening process. It could open unhappy horizons that undermined and dispersed tribal communities. In addition to these sporadic coastal captivities—unfolding sometimes at the behest of Englishmen operating in renegadelike capacities without official sanction—southern Algonquians experienced captivity and enslavement in

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the context of warfare. The Pequot War of the mid-1630s was the first to embroil Algonquian and New England settler communities in large-scale violences. It concluded with the impressment of some militarily defeated Pequots into bound labor for English and Native masters in southern New England, and with the deportation of others overseas. As colonial authorities learned in the late 1630s–1640s, attempting to indenture or enslave Pequots domestically, close to their homelands and nearby tribes receptive to their coming in, did not align well with colonial ends. Numerous Pequots ran away from or refused to labor effectively for their mainland masters. It was a pattern that continued for decades as Algonquians struggled to defy colonial attempts at containment and community fragmentation.14 The trajectory unfolded differently for those dispatched overseas to southern latitudes. William Pierce carried seventeen Pequots on his ship Desire to the short-lived English colony of Providence Island, offshore from Nicaragua and the Spanish Mosquito Coast, exchanging them for a cargo of African individuals believed to be the first enslaved “Negroes” imported to New England. From there prospects for Indigenous returns home became more difficult, with geographic distance itself and the powerful swells of the Atlantic Ocean being used as weapons of continued alienation.15 New England authorities drew upon these mixed experiences in the decades following the Pequot War to inform their actions in the 1670s, while modifying their initially ad hoc systems for disposal and dispersal to address circumstances unique to a fully regional conflict. As King Philip’s War gathered momentum, taking Native captives and selling them as slaves (or indentured servants, as bonds of a limited time frame sometimes were characterized) constituted an important undertaking for colonists and their tribal allies.16 It supported several goals that crystallized over the course of the conflict. Removed from customary kin networks and homeland resources, bound Natives—especially men—seemed to pose lesser threats to colonists, who remained fearful of their neighbors’ military clout and resistance capabilities well into the eighteenth century. Their sales also provided a desperately needed source of income to New England communities pushed to the brink of financial ruin and needing to compensate their soldiers for services rendered. In Providence, Rhode Island, longtime Narragansett ally Roger Williams deliberated in August 1676 with the committee that arranged for the export of Natives into bondage at the termination of fighting in the war’s southeastern theater. He and Rhode Island colleagues intended to use the proceeds to rebuild that town, partially razed by Algonquian parties earlier in 1676. They devised a sliding scale for the terms of

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forced service, dependent on each captive’s age, and stood to personally profit from portions of the proceeds.17 For individual New England households, Native captives could furnish domestic labors to meet specific needs. In colonial homes and farmsteads, an extra pair of hands to assist with drawing water, splitting firewood, husking corn, stirring porridge, washing linens, herding livestock, tending to sick infants, and myriad other tasks was a valuable asset. While large numbers of Native captives circulated through often hastily organized marketplaces, they were not strictly an anonymous mass nor treated as undifferentiated chattel. Prospective masters and mistresses—colonial and Native—sometimes issued requests to obtain particular Native captives, who had become familiarized to them via prior encounters or labor arrangements. George Denison of Stonington, Connecticut, petitioned for three Natives to be given to him as recompense for his war service: “one anchant Squa with hir Hosband and hir child of about five years oulde.” James Noyes repeatedly met, examined, and declined female and male captives of varying ages as he sought recompense for his wartime service. The Pequot Daniel expressed desire “that he might have libertie to keepe one woman & childe who are now with him to be helpfull to him & his wife in theire old age.”18 Such personalized requests may have kept intact captives’ kinship groups and eased their absorption into a new Indigenous household. Yet when Daniel brought in two Narragansett captives to New London, he could not protect them from vigilante reprisals. Before they could be dealt with officially, “two wounded soldyers” shot them dead in prison.19 For tribal communities like the Mohegans and Pequots, incorporation of captives into their villages and political spheres could be valuable strategies for bolstering numbers and stature in the region’s volatile power structures. One group known as “the surrenderers” wound up by the Shetucket and Quinebaug Rivers, where a subset remained under the oversight of Mohegan sachem Uncas. This community appears to have experienced tributary or comparable relations with the Mohegans that were distinct from master-slave hierarchies.20 From the perspective of the “surrenderers” resettled in unaccustomed territory, this not-freely-chosen relocation created fresh difficulties as they soon faced pressure to affirm quitclaims to former homelands by Wabaquasset.21 All told, New England in the 1670s–1680s had not yet developed an entrenched system of race-based slavery, especially not one that uniformly relegated the region’s Indigenous inhabitants to bound statuses. Indeed, the distinctive political status of Algonquians—as members of sovereign tribal nations or, in

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the view of growing numbers of colonists, as equal subjects under the English Crown—forestalled wholesale enslavement projects within New England. But developments of this era began to harden certain statutes and quotidian realities that made it more challenging for Algonquians to live autonomously. Bondage as a punitive consequence imposed by courts, or implemented to settle debts, or mutually though asymmetrically agreed upon when Native parents indentured their children to colonial masters—all of these practices continued in the ensuing decades, feeding multigenerational legacies of unfreedom.22 During wartime colonial troops and authorities acquired Native captives through many avenues. Most obvious was outright seizure in the course of combat, as in Pocasset and Narragansett countries. One notorious incident of captive-taking suggests the lengths to which colonial leaders would go to ensure submission and dispersal of Natives whom they regarded, perhaps erroneously, as threats. Because it unfolded in the northern Piscataqua River region—by Pennacook and Wabanaki countries, areas today claimed by New Hampshire and Maine—it has received comparatively little attention. The Piscataqua and nearby Great Bay were vital Native habitations, fed by a web of fresh waterways flowing by a hugely fertile estuary that attracted waves of birds as a stopover on migratory flyways. Its geography afforded ready river access to the interior uplands, while coastwise travel linked it to Wabanaki, Massachusett, and Wampanoag homelands. Even as war desolated Native and English settlements in southern parts of the region, the Piscataqua area remained comparatively quiet at first. Sporadic ambushes and skirmishes caused smaller-scale casualties and material damages, like a lone colonist’s death at Exeter, burnt barns and a house at Cocheco, the beheading of an Oyster River colonist, and a series of settler casualties by the garrisons at Newichawannock. A small battery at Portsmouth fired warning shots toward the far side of the Piscataqua.23 But no major confrontations materialized. In summer 1676 colonist Richard Waldron, exercising civic and military authority from his base in Cocheco (later Dover, New Hampshire), angled for a peace treaty with Wonalancet and other Native leaders “of the Eastern parts.” Wonalancet had reason to negotiate cautiously. Waldron’s dubious reputation as an entrepreneurial fur trader entangled in scandals around his truck houses likely preceded him through Indigenous information networks.24 Wonalancet assumed Pennacook leadership around 1660, following his father Passaconaway, who had strongly counseled maintaining stable relations with Bastoniak to avoid a destructive spiral.25 Yet by 1675 Piscataqua-area Algonquians faced a

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thicket of tensions. Earlier conflicts with the Haudenosaunee spilled into the 1660s, and the certainty of peace with those Natives to the west of New England was hardly assured.26 South and west of the Piscataqua, many Nipmucs, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and others had taken up arms and begun forging complex alliances across large distances. North and east of the Piscataqua, colonial efforts to subdue or regulate Wabanakis by restricting trade and taking away their firearms wrought disastrous consequences. Accustomed by this point to firearms, they were unable to pursue hunting in the necessary ways and faced starvation, fostering anti-English pushback.27 All of these factors likely entered into the calculus of Wonalancet and his advisors. In the early days of the war, Wonalancet responded to these circumstances with nonconfrontational action. He withdrew a number of his people to the interior for protection, to the vicinity of the upper Merrimack River, likely beyond the large fishing grounds at Amoskeag Falls. This retreat antagonized the English, however, who harbored suspicions about the motivations for relocation. In early September 1675, the feared militia leader Samuel Mosely— notoriously brutal after an earlier career as a “Privateer at Jamaica”—led troops upriver and overland to scout out Natives.28 Mosely’s men did not find people. But they burnt the wigwams they encountered and destroyed food caches. It was an unauthorized scorched-earth tactic that chagrined Massachusetts colonial authorities who realized they could ill afford to open up a new, northern front to the conflict. They immediately tried to smooth over relations with Wonalancet—but first they had to locate him. The council ordered Thomas Henchman to procure “two prudent & sutable Indians” from Wamseit to search for Wonalancet and speak with him (or “any other Principal persons of th Indians” along the Merrimack). The scouts carried a “writteng from the Councill,” or a pass ostensibly guaranteeing Wonalancet safe passage to Henchman’s house, where he could meet with Daniel Gookin and John Eliot to negotiate an agreement of “Amity & peace.” The council’s remarks specifically recollected his father Passaconaway’s good relations with the English, using ancestral memory to pressure Wonalancet into continuing his father’s noncombatant legacy. But the reconnaissance met little success. The scouts dispatched to find him traveled to several interior sites, including the large freshwater body at Wannipposokick (Winnipesaukee). By querying other Natives en route about the sachem’s whereabouts, they eventually learned he had gone “toward the french.”29 The northern interior proved effective concealment. This was a region so scarcely known to New England colonists, after all, that the woodcut map by John Foster appended to William

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Hubbard’s war narrative struggled to represent Wannipposokick and its islands with any geographic fidelity, never mind the “White Hills” (mountains) beyond, or the resource-rich headwaters of the Kwinitekw River.30 Wonalancet and his relations may have relocated deep within this terrain, where the Pemigewasset, Saco, Ammonoosuc, and Androscoggin Rivers flow. Yet by midsummer 1676, Wonalancet had returned from the relative security of the interior uplands and faced new pressures to reckon directly with Englishmen. In a treaty signed at Cocheco on July 3, English stipulations aimed to keep the peace but also to constrain Native actions. If any Native “shall offer any violence to ye persons of any English” or “doe any Damage to theyre Estates,” he would be tried in English courts. If an Englishman wronged a Native, he would likewise be tried by the English. Natives were also enjoined to not “entertain at any time any of our enemies,” and instead notify colonial officials of such interlopers, with the promise of a three-pound reward/bounty for any they brought in. Details of the negotiation process have not survived, though deliberations must have been carefully conducted, especially by tribal representatives thoroughly aware of the dire situations faced by Indigenous prisoners and combatants to their south. In the end, the noticeably asymmetric document gained the signatures of Waldron, Nicholas Shapleigh, and Thomas Daniels on behalf of the English, while Native signatories included Wonalancet, Sampson Aboquecemoka, William Sagamore, Squando Sagamore, Dony, Serogumba, Samuel Numphow, and Warockomec.31 The prohibition on harboring Indigenous “enemies” proved the problematic clause. Northern Algonquians periodically received refugees from the rest of New England, providing safe havens for those pushed into diaspora. Kinship connections and alliances enabled these movements. So many Massachusetts-area Natives fled to New Hampshire, a later historian reported, that they were known as “Patsuikets,” or “the people who lived by deception,” referring to pressure to conceal their original tribal affiliations.32 The refugee crisis came to a head along the Piscataqua in 1676 as Nipmucs and others traveled north to seek shelter among Pennacooks. They “did cunningly endeavour to hide themselves amongst those Indians about Pascataqua,” William Hubbard remarked, displeased by these stratagems.33 These migrations unnerved and displeased colonial authorities to the south, who were in the midst of arresting and sending to trial other Natives. Under pressure from Massachusetts officials, Waldron implemented a ploy to snare the migrants. In early September he “drew up” the Natives in the area “upon ye open ground & before my house under ye Motion of takeing som out into ye service, such of

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them as I saw meet,” presenting this gathering under the guise of an opportunity for allied military service. He also provided food and drink, indicating that the colonial faction deliberately gave the appearance of hospitality (also raising questions about the potential influence of liquor on these proceedings).34 By rounding up so many Natives in one place, Waldron and his backers were then able to seize them by surprise and attempt to separate out “hostile” Algonquians from more neutral ones, including Wonalancet’s group. This “Contrivement”35 resulted in the seizure, by Waldron’s estimate, of about three hundred and fifty Natives: eighty warriors plus twenty older men, along with two hundred and fifty women and children. These he had sent to Boston for trial, where some faced execution or deportation into slavery.36 Unlike the massacre at Great Swamp in Narragansett country, which left behind a burned palisade, bushels of corn, and mortuary sites, the rapidly mounted “sham fight” likely left fewer landscape traces. Waldron corresponded with Boston about the incident. He acknowledged that the English had little reason to justly prosecute those Natives who were party to the July 1676 peace treaty: “wee not being able to charge those yt made ye Pease with any breach of Articles, save only that of entertaining our Southern Enemies.” He notified authorities that the rest had been “all sent down to determine their Case at Boston . . ., keeping here about 10 young men of ym to serve in the Army wth their families & some old men & theirs with Wonolansets Relations.”37 The Massachusetts court moved swiftly to dispatch with the prisoners. It referred disposal of these “many of our Indian ennemyes” to the council, “declaring it to be their sence, that such of them as shall appeare to haue imbrued their hands in English blood should suffer death here, and not be transported into forreigne parts”38—that is, be executed rather than sold into slavery in the West Indies or other parts of the English Atlantic. Waldron concerned himself with the fate of certain individual prisoners. One Native woman had been erroneously grouped with the condemned. This “Squaw . . . belonging to one of Capt. Hunting’s souldiers” proved a vexing case. Waldron had “consented” to let her remain at Cocheco, and “how sh came among yt Compa I know not,” blaming her for her predicament (“Soe yt twas her own fault”). But in a gesture of mercy or conciliatory deference to the remaining Pennacooks, he added, “if said Squaw be not Sent off I shall be freely willing to re-imburse those Gent wt they Gave mee for her that she may be set at liberty, being wholy Inocent.”39 Overall, Waldron’s involvement in the sham fight and its fallout was not a simplistic instance of anti-Native force. He recognized at least minimally the need to carefully negotiate obligations toward Piscataqua-area Algonquians

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who remained formidable neighbors, and with whom he had brokered diplomatic agreements. The captives sent to Boston formed one branch of diaspora radiating across the Piscataqua region. Another involved waves of refugees proactively trying to relocate to northern zones, particularly among Wabanaki relations. Narragansett leader Pessicus, the younger brother of Miantonomo, traveled north to the Piscataqua with his family and followers in May 1676. His motivations were not entirely apparent. “Perhaps he hoped to establish a new Narragansett homeland far removed from the selfish incursions of land-hungry whites,” one twentieth-century historian speculated, and thus “fled north to the relative tranquility of the upper woodlands.” Or perhaps he hoped to retreat temporarily to regather strength before returning to the Narragansett country in a bid to reinhabit ancestral territory. Whatever the reason, the flight proved to be in vain. A party of Mohawks ambushed the group along a path twenty miles north of the Piscataqua and killed Pessicus.40 The “Squaw and Sonne” of Narragansett leader Canonchet also fled to the Piscataqua. They were captured at Salmon Falls in October 1676 while trying to flee over a “boom,” a piece of timber spanning that river (fig. 36). News of this capture traveled quickly and reached Samuel Sewall in Boston, who registered the incident in his diary. Sewall had property interests by Salmon Falls and other parts of Maine and likely took special interest in these events for that reason.41 Traditions later related that some Narragansetts were captured at Cocheco, betrayed by their distinctive hairstyles.42 All of these incidents demonstrated the extensive mobility of Algonquians during wartime, propelled from customary core locations to fartherflung corners to survive, regroup, and evade emerging systems of bondage. Colonial observers glimpsed only fragments of these movements, however. Their records gave no systematic picture of the Indigenous networks enabling these routes and relocations. Nor did they clearly perceive that refugees were hardly fleeing randomly across the Northeast, but instead moving along longstanding pathways and watercourses toward places where they could expect to be received: gathered in, protected militarily, given access to greater food and resource security. Nor did colonial commentators necessarily follow up with details on the latter trajectories of those captured. For the woman and child seized at Salmon Falls, it is probable given other known developments that the pair found themselves among the masses of captives facing adjudication in quasi-legal colonial arenas to the south. While the Piscataqua and northerly areas served critical functions for Indigenous endurance as conditions deteriorated elsewhere, these locales frequently became marginalized

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Figure 36. The Salmon Falls River as it appeared in autumn 2010, likely near the place where a Narragansett woman and child were captured in autumn 1676 while attempting to seek refuge in northern areas (Pennacook and Wabanaki homelands). Boston-based colonist Samuel Sewall recorded the incident in his diary, but otherwise this and other instances of Indigenous refuge-seeking tended to go unrecalled and uncommemorated in visible ways. West of this point is Cocheco (presently Dover, New Hampshire), where Richard Waldron orchestrated a mass capture of “strange” Natives in September 1676. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

from mainstream historical recountings. “I am not willing to tire my Reader with another long Walk into the Woods after these Ravening Salvages,” Cotton Mather wrote in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). The Boston-based minister coolly dismissed the war’s northeasterly campaign that lasted through 1678, setting a foreshortened precedent for which places were deemed memorable.43 These “fugitive” geographies—both the original routes of evasion and the passageways that have become difficult to track through archives and published histories—conveyed narratives strikingly different from those about Indigenous conquest, containment, and finality.44 In reckoning with Indigenous captives, English authorities faced vexing moral, political, and economic dilemmas. Some, like Daniel Gookin and John Eliot, advocated for humane treatment, citing Christian proscriptions against

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punishing children or parents for others’ transgressions (“every man shall be put to death for his own sin,” as Deuteronomy 24:16 put it), and finding it necessary to determine individuals’ wartime actions when ascribing punishments. Certain commentators questioned whether Natives who were colonial “subjects” might merit protection from enslavement through that status. Or they weighed in a comparative interimperial manner whether notoriously brutal Indigenous enslavements in Spanish contexts ought to prod English colonies in alternate directions. Others pushed for executions.45 On balance, many New Englanders understood the export of captive Natives into slavery as a defensible compromise that spared their lives, though exposing them to harsh labor conditions in faraway Atlantic points. King Philip’s wife and nine-yearold son were captured on August 2, 1676, and brought with others to Plymouth, where the boy’s fate received special scrutiny due to his place in his father’s high-status lineage. “Philips boy goes now to be sold,” John Cotton wrote to Increase Mather in March 1676/77, laconically updating him on the boy’s fate.46 The fate of Wootonekanuske, the boy’s mother (and Weetamoo’s sister), does not appear to have been recorded in these documents. Word traveled quickly through tribal communication channels about these unfolding developments. Special fears arose as it became clear that colonial authorities were sending some captives not solely into nearby New England households but also overseas. When James Quanopohit conducted his itinerary into Massachusett-Nipmuc country in early 1676, he reported that the Natives he encountered “feard they should bee sent away to Barbados, or other place[s].”47 As late as August 1676 colonial authorities were using the prospect of deportation to “foreign slavery” as a weapon to coerce remaining at-large Natives into submitting, asking Gookin to dispatch two messengers into the countryside to retrieve English captives as well as transmit this clear threat.48 It was more than idle rhetoric: shiploads had already gone out earlier in the war, then recurred in late summer 1676 when Thomas Smith received authorization from Plymouth and Massachusetts to take the “heathen Malefactors men women and children” aboard the Sea-Flower and sell them into “Perpetuall servitude & slavery.” The destination(s) were left largely to his discretion, with the caveat of operating within “any of his said Majesties Dominions or the Dominions of any other Christian Prince or State.”49 Documentation about this and other slave transports beyond New England “into forreigne parts” is uneven, so following individuals through avenues of capture, sale, export, and relocation is challenging. Smith attained considerable latitude in ports of call, as did other captains of the time. Bermuda, which

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conceivably could have been one of the destinations, seems to lack definitive documentation of such cargo’s arrival.50 Bermudan colonial archives contain numerous documents registering “Indian” and slave presences: shipping returns, records of slave sales, probate lists and estate inventories, civil and criminal proceedings. Yet the documents from the relevant period (circa 1675–1680s) do not appear to specifically mention New England Natives.51 An argument based on negative evidence—the apparent absence of written confirmation—is precarious, of course. The very nature of documentary “silence” deserves critical interrogation as to what kinds of information colonial record keepers were invested in maintaining—or leaving out. Yet the wider context of Bermudan society in the 1670s raises questions about how New England Natives arriving en masse would have passed unremarked. Overpopulation taxed the islands’ fragile environment and limited resources several decades after initial colonization. Officials struggled to curtail importation of new slaves in this period—John Heydon, for example, did so circa 1675–1676, and may have taken even more direct action against Native imports in the early 1680s. Such actions admittedly had little effect on population increase, since enslaved people already living on the islands continued to bear children.52 Yet the possibility remains that such shipments could have occurred within the immediate postwar years or well into the aftermath through a series of interisland trades, legal or illicit, in ways that are not readily legible in documentary traces.53 A good deal of “Indian” slave-trading was unquestionably happening in Bermuda. Indigenous people from points like the Carolinas and Venezuela had been arriving since earlier in the seventeenth century, alongside African slaves. The islands had no Indigenous population of their own, being one of the few truly unpeopled sites in the hemisphere where European colonization took place. Following Spanish navigator Juan de Bermúdez’s 1505 encounter with the islands, they remained unpopulated by humans until the seventeenth century. In 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of the London Company, suffered debilitating leaks after a storm and was driven upon the Bermuda reefs en route from England to Jamestown. Survivors including Admiral George Somers spent months on Bermuda before escaping on the newly built pinnaces Deliverance and Patience, and English colonization proceeded soon after, with slavery in tow. Bermuda claimed the dubious distinction of being the first English colony in the Americas to import Native and African laborers, beginning in August 1616 with two arrivals from the West Indies.54 In seeking cheap human labor for a growing economy centered on tobacco plantations and eventually robust maritime endeavors, English colonists chose to utilize

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white indentured servitude and slave imports, most often from Spanish plantations or the American coasts rather than Africa directly. By the 1660s island bondage had transformed from a somewhat malleable form of indentured servitude into the harder, race-based institution of chattel slavery.55 During the years of King Philip’s War and afterward, Indigenous people continued to be sold within Bermuda. Yet “Indian” had become an umbrella identifier for multiple Indigenous peoples from the Americas, North and South. The fine-grained tribal distinctions that made crucial differences in places like the Dawnland, in terms of alliances and cultural allegiances, partially evaporated in Bermudan paper trails, where only the barest identifying information about enslaved individuals tended to be recorded. The colonial archive was structured in such a way, in other words, that it habitually erased or subsumed these identifiers. Complicating the prospect of archival tracking is the fact that Indigenous identities gradually morphed into “Negro” (African) ones on paper by the late eighteenth century, until few or no “Indians” seemed to remain in the records. This comingling happened in lived experiences as well. Most colonial households contained not only Indigenous bondspeople but rather combinations of Natives and “Negros,” among whom intimacy, intermarriage, and miscegenation occurred. It is within this slippery context of racial transformations and archival silences that any search for, or critique of, “New England Indian” presence in Bermuda must carefully proceed.56 Conditions of existence were stressful for Natives and people of color who inhabited Bermuda in the late seventeenth century, and not solely because they had to adapt to a semitropical island environment radically different from most parts of the American mainland. English colonists experienced several threats of slave insurrections or outright revolts before the 1670s, warily put in place a strict slave code, and began to shape Bermuda’s laws and practices in ways that kept Indians and Africans under surveillance. The brutal fate of “Indian John” exemplified these tensions. In 1681 John stood accused of plotting to murder his master, William Maligan, using an elaborate stratagem of setting his master’s house on fire to lure him and his family outside, then shoot them. The plan went awry, however, and officials brought John to trial and convicted him. The court sentenced him to be executed and quartered. His body parts were to be displayed at several points across the islands, including the central location of Gibbet Island at the mouth of Flatts Inlet, where they would be visible to passersby traveling in Bermuda’s principal boat lanes.57 The display of a criminalized Indigenous body, which certainly resonated with

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the dismemberment and exhibition of Philip in 1676, was common English practice of the time. By publicly presenting destroyed bodies of transgressors, colonial authorities warned others away from illegal behaviors and terrorized those in bondage from attempting insurrections that would threaten the racial and social orders of Bermuda. They deliberately fashioned a punitive memoryscape that reminded observers of the violent consequences that could accrue to perpetrators of resistance. This and other gruesome episodes on that notorious island lingered in local folklore, yet it is difficult to say more about “Indian John,” least of all whether he was a “New England” Indian. As slavery persisted throughout the Bermudan archipelago in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, people of Indigenous descent constituted vital participants in domestic and maritime economies, if not being especially visible as a cohesive “Indian” community. Mainland Natives nearly arrived in force in the 1720s, when the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley proposed a missionary school there, hoping that removing “children of savage Americans” from their homes to the remote islands would hasten acculturation and Christianization. The endeavor never came to fruition, however.58 As an English Crown colony—following revocation of the controversial Bermuda Company’s charter in 1684—Bermuda developed trade connections with Virginia, New York, New England, the West Indies, and mainland and European commercial centers, increasingly making the islands a significant Atlantic hub. Simultaneously, off-islands emigration to locales like the American South spread Bermudians’ influence and familial links to new areas. Enslaved people in Bermuda repeatedly took action to resist their bondage, though they faced challenges distinct from those in mainland areas: given the finite terrestrial limits of the archipelago, for instance, running away to nearby “maroon” enclaves was not feasible.59 Abolitionist activism gathered momentum in the United Kingdom in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, critiquing the persistence of slaveholding in the empire’s overseas claims.60 These critiques, amplified following a large-scale slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831–1832, motivated Parliament’s passage of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which emancipated slaves throughout most parts of the empire. While many areas delayed emancipation’s actualization through “apprenticeship” periods and other measures that temporarily kept the target populations in half-subservient positions, Bermuda implemented it immediately, effective August 1834. This act freed enslaved Bermudians. Emancipated residents took on a variety of maritime, domestic, agricultural, and other employments in its aftermath. By the late

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nineteenth century, half a century after emancipation, “Indian” identity gained renewed attention. John Henry Lefroy, the governor of Bermuda from 1871 to 1877, published an influential history of early Bermuda that aimed to be a dispassionate, document-based account. In its widely researched pages, Lefroy discussed the Natives enslaved and sent away from New England “to the Bermudas and other parts” in “the war of the Pequods [and] in that of the Sachem Phillip,” citing Thomas Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts as his authority. Lefroy even printed a portrait of Jacob Minors (d. 1875), a “native Bermudian” and pilot from St. David’s who was “reputed to be of Indian descent, and probably descended from one of the Pequod captives.”61 Similar strains of “Indian” tradition existed in vernacular accounts. During her childhood in the 1870s, Helen Fessenden recalled, she developed an acquaintance on her father’s farm with the striking “old Jim Kiel,” described as having a “strain of Pequot or Indian of the Spanish Main [running] through his veins,” and being set apart in his physique and manner from Bermudians of African descent.62 Anglo-colonial residents of Bermuda had inklings about the Indian heritage of their neighbors, though rarely a robust sense of how they arrived on the islands or kept alive cultural traditions of their ancestors. This attention within Bermuda to Indian presence gained prominence in the same period that Yankee New Englanders also became fascinated by such a prospect. Nineteenth-century popular histories and textbooks produced in the United States frequently discussed the transport of King Philip’s relations to Bermuda in their chapters on New England colonial history. They tended to sympathetically lament this removal as a tragic incident, or they used it to deconstruct the supposed virtue of Puritan forefathers.63 American schoolchildren in the 1850s, for example, would have learned this lesson about Philip’s family from a common textbook: “His son, a prince cherished as the future sachem of the tribes, was sold into a bondage bitter as death, and compelled to drag out his life as a slave, under the sun of Bermuda. So perished the princes of the Pokanokets.”64 Another historical text claimed that Philip’s son and mother, “[s]ent to Bermuda or the Spanish Indies . . . disappear from the pages of history”—and “[w]ith them vanished the race of Massasoit.”65 (Still another writer imagined that Wootonekanuske and her son never made it to the islands. While aboard the ship bound for them, he suggested, they passed by Mount Hope and, full of grief, hurled themselves overboard in apparent suicide, “disappear[ing] beneath the waves” of Narragansett Bay66—an intensely problematic claim of Indigenous self-destruction.) These publications typically recycled previous written accounts rather than conducting fresh

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archival or ethnographic investigations, casually transforming inherited stories into authoritative, printed history. More dangerously, they tended to interpret the departure of Philip’s son as an irreversible deathblow to Wampanoags as a people, culture, and tribal nation, participating in wider cultural discourses about “vanishing Indians” and denying the ongoing presence of Algonquian enclaves and sovereignties throughout the modernizing Northeast. In the early twentieth century, two New Englanders revisited the Bermuda question with a series of semioriginal researches.67 “I can hardly tell you how much interest it has excited among our antiquarians,” Edward Everett Hale of Massachusetts wrote in 1903 to Anna Maria Outerbridge. Outerbridge lived in Bermuda and was respected locally as a historian and keeper of familial knowledge. She shared a tradition that recollected the presence of a female descendent of the King Philip line on the islands, an intriguing connection that Hale probed as far as he could through the mail. But over the course of their epistolary exchanges, he eventually suggested memory’s malleability might obscure the inquiry indefinitely. Hale proposed that a marker be put up in Hamilton, the capital city of Bermuda, and that similar ones be installed in New England, “perhaps in what house . . . the poor little boy [Philip’s son] passed his winter.” His fascination with memorialization of King Philip’s War was not incidental. Hale was the nephew of Edward Everett, who delivered the “Bloody Brook” oration in South Deerfield, and he summered in a coastal part of Narragansett country (Matunuck, Rhode Island).68 He was also a committed abolitionist in the antebellum United States. No monument in Hamilton ever materialized, however, despite Hale’s desires for cross-pollination between New England and Bermudan memoryscapes. Rhode Island schoolteacher Virginia Baker picked up this thread a few years after Hale’s inquiries. Baker was intimately familiar with colonial tellings of the war since she lived in the town of Warren, a few miles up the peninsula from Philip’s homegrounds at Mount Hope, and avidly participated in antiquarian activities around historical Sowams.69 She also corresponded with Outerbridge, writing from Warren to Bermuda in 1912: “The more that I think about the matter the more I am inclined to believe that the story told your father was a true one. I feel very sure that a careful historian like Dr. Hale would not have stated that he had found proof of the fact that the Indian queen and her son had been shipped to Bermuda unless he was in possession of such proof. Rest assured that if I discover proof, myself, I will communicate with you.”70 One of the key topics that surfaced during these transoceanic conversations and photographic exchanges was the uncanny similarity of

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facial features between some Bermudan men and women and New England Natives, specifically the Mitchells, a family of Wampanoag descent residing in the Fall River and Lakeville areas of southeastern Massachusetts.71 Zerviah Gould Mitchell published a Native-centered account of early relations with Europeans, called Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy (1878) (fig. 37). She and her daughters, Melinda and Charlotte Mitchell, spent many years living at Betty’s Neck on Lake Assawompsett, were well known regionally as Wampanoag culture-bearers, frequently appeared in Native regalia, and even took historical Algonquian names for themselves—Melinda going by the name of Teweeleema, Charlotte adopting the name of Philip’s wife, Wootonekanuske.72 The modern-day Wootonekanuske participated in the unveiling of Cyrus E. Dallin’s Massasoit statue at Patuxet during the Plymouth tercentenary.73 Baker likely knew her from her participation in a commemoration at Warren in October 1907, when townspeople marked the site of socalled Massasoit’s Spring on Baker Street. Mitchell helped unveil the tablet and boulder, while Baker read aloud a historical sketch.74 Physiognomic resemblance, Baker thought, might be the clinching piece of evidence for the Bermudan connection. Such physical congruities seemed persuasive to F. Van Wyck Mason, a Harvard College graduate, historian, and novelist who wrote an article for his alma mater in 1937 recounting New England Native presence in Bermuda.75 A visitor might “anywhere in Bermuda recognize striking proof of Frater Mendel’s discovery” about genetic transmission of certain traits, he insisted. “Our fish peddler, though he has the crinkly hair of Africa, yet boasts the bronze complexion, thin lips, and bold eyes of forbears who made life wretched for our ancestors along the coasts of Connecticut and Massachusetts.” Mason focused mostly on “Pequot” presence, but also argued that following King Philip’s War, Massachusetts authorities “dispatched to Bermuda some forty or fifty of the most truculent but able-bodied young warriors.” (“No doubt heaving a collective sigh of relief,” he added.)76 Reflecting on contemporary Bermuda and its islanders’ maritime prowess, Mason judged it “perhaps ironic that red-skinned Bermudians serve as pilots and guide great liners safely in through those same jagged reefs which formed such an effective prison for their ancestors.”77 By the mid-twentieth century public perceptions of some islanders’ Indigenous roots involved multiple layers, complicated by the term “Mohawk” that was sometimes applied to them (taken up as a point of pride by some, seen as a derogatory term by others). Ethnohistorians have since argued that “Mohawk” was a mischaracterization, a misjudging of indigeneity

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Figure 37. This portrait of Zerviah Gould Mitchell, a Wampanoag with affiliations to the Fall River and Lakeville areas, appeared as a frontispiece to her coauthored published recounting of regional Native-colonial histories, titled Indian History, Biography, Genealogy . . . (1878). Her daughters included Charlotte Mitchell and Melinda Mitchell, both of whom were active regionally as culture-bearers, as well as Emma Safford, who moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, close to the homesite of Puritan historian William Hubbard. New England and Bermudan people researching potential connections between their areas sometimes referenced the purported physical resemblances among certain populations as evidence of these links, including the Mitchells. (Image courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College)

that obscured Algonquian or other Indigenous origins, or arbitrarily imposed Haudenosaunee ones on a multiethnic/racial population.78 The Second World War brought crucial transformations in identity and place-sense for the island of St. David’s. Located at the far eastward end of the archipelago, St. David’s long stood isolated from the rest of Bermuda, kept

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apart by a lack of bridges and residents’ proclivities for sustaining their own ways of life. These detachments led outsiders to characterize St. David’s as a backward place, a quaint, slow-paced spot bypassed by modernity.79 This began to change in 1940 when the U.K. government granted a ninety-nine-year lease to the United States for a military base on the island in response to U.S. concerns about obtaining situationally strategic Atlantic outposts. The base proposal initially focused on Bermuda’s West End, but intense resistance to spoiling a key tourist area led to shifting the base to the less densely inhabited, less touristified East End—an area also known for its substantial “non-white” population.80 The controversial redevelopment physically recontoured St. David’s by filling in large swaths of Castle Harbour’s northern reaches to add landmass, by leveling hills, and by bulldozing buildings. Kindley Field, later Kindley Air Force Base, brought thousands of U.S. servicemen to St. David’s to work, an unprecedented mixing of Americans and St. David’s Islanders. Construction displaced some islanders from their homes despite grassroots resistance, fostering a collective narrative of traumatic dispossession by an aggressive United States. In November 1941 The Bermudian magazine assessed the rapidly changing situation: “Some record should be made of old landmarks which have been known and loved for many generations. . . . The filling in of hollows and levelling of hills, cutting roads through lily fields and woodlands, demolishing of houses, some of which date back to the time of the original settlers, the incessant vibration of machinery and drone of engines have shattered the peace and disrupted the tenor of a mode of life that had seen little change in the last three hundred years.”81 It was an uncanny parallel to North American tribal experiences of territorial dispossession and forced removal. This displacement loomed large among the postwar generations. Though in certain respects the infrastructural improvements created by the base were a boon, a profound sense of place-rootedness and community coherence challenged by the wheels of “progress” permeates many stories told today.82 It was in this postwar context of upheaval and contested modernization, as well as resurgent interest in multiethnic heritages and political activism among American Indian groups, that journalists, academics, and other writers in Bermuda and the United States took increased notice of the area’s Indigenous past.83 In the 1970s a researcher from the United States traveled to Bermuda to conduct research, identifying himself as affiliated with a mainland Native community. His work generated a mixed response among islanders: some enthusiasm, tempered later by questions about apparent loss of seventeenthcentury documents said to relate details about King Philip’s family. These

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documents, which used to be in the possession of the local Minors family, attained a kind of legendary status. They loom as written testaments to New England Algonquian linkages, but have become a tantalizingly elusive archive.84 They also highlight the existence of multiple archives, some privately held rather than maintained by states or institutions, which can shift in and out of visibility depending on local contingencies. Connections with New England tribal communities began to take form in the 1980s as a handful of islanders traveled to the Mashantucket Pequot area, forming social links and initiating back-and-forth exchanges. Jean Foggo Simon and the Tucker family, along with “Tall Oak” Weeden and the subsequently formed St. David’s Island Indian Reconnection Committee, acted as lead proponents for learning more, then orchestrating a formal reconnection. Those events culminated in the inaugural mid-June 2002 reconnection.85 The meetings were emotional, even sacred undertakings and gained press attention on both cusps of the Atlantic.86 The gatherings took on momentum of their own, and performances, rituals, and social activities continue to evolve. A recent “powwow” took place at the St. David’s Cricket Club. A spectacle of dancing, singing, and drumming, it included many New England tribal members as well as other Indigenous representatives.87 Besides the powwows, islanders and tribal members crisscrossed the space between New England and Bermuda to attend other events like Schemitzun, the Green Corn feast and dance on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation. In 2008 a student exchange took place between the Petra Academy in Bermuda and the Nuweetooun School in Rhode Island, facilitated by a Narragansett community member— an opportunity for young people to immerse themselves in each other’s meaningful places, and cocreate new geographies.88 One outcome of this relationship building has been the emergence, or overt articulation, of Indigenous memoryscapes within Bermuda. Some have attained visibility through print culture, as with the book St. David’s Island, Bermuda: Its People, History and Culture (2009).89 Authored by St. Clair “Brinky” Tucker, it featured on its cover a photograph of Tucker alongside Everett “Tall Oak” Weeden, a Native community member of Mashantucket Pequot and Wampanoag heritage living in New England, also an active participant in the reconnection processes. Tucker’s rendition of local histories was keyed largely to places and stories about community members rather than beholden to strict chronology. New England Indian wars and the codification of Indian enslavement in Bermuda figured prominently in the memoryscapes it described, with many sites accompanied by photographs to help readers

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visualize the scenes. “This book includes both fact and a bit of folklore,” Tucker noted in an introductory discussion of his methodology. “The folklore was handed down from generation to generation without any validation; some could be true, but I believe many stories were exaggerated. The author has endeavored to provide facts on a wide variety of information about Indian slavery, especially as it relates to St. David’s Islanders.” In this detailed vernacular geography, notable sites include the slave market in St. George’s, now the town square and a tourist destination, and Gibbet Island, where “Indian John” was hanged and quartered in 1681. It highlighted the burial ground on the west side of St. Peter’s Anglican Church in St. George’s, where graves of nonwhites were historically separated from the rest of the graveyard, and related stories about places where King Philip’s kin were said to have been sold and/or resided (Bailey’s Bay and Dolly’s Bay Road areas). It also discussed Dark Bottom and Red Hole as places of ceremony during the reconnection. The published version of St. David’s Island and Indian histories is not the only one; similar stories, linked to myriad thickly textured other anecdotes, can be conveyed through in-person interpretive tours of relevant island memoryscapes, to sites that by and large are not memorialized in any tangible way. Overall, this geography condenses a noncolonial sense of place, underscoring the traumatic effects of a racialized forced labor system, as well as bondspeople’s endurance, eventual emancipation, and ethnogenesis. For historians who privilege documentary archives as the principal foundations for assessing Atlantic World pasts, particularly those pertaining to Indigenous bondage, there may appear to be some misalignment of archival traces and this richly fine-grained memoryscape in and beyond St. David’s Island. Yet it may be that “official” archives simply do not register seventeenth-century importations of certain enslaved Natives in readily perceptible ways. Moreover, the recent reconnections are expansive expressions of kinship, whereby certain tribal community members and St. David’s Islanders have mutually extended their circles of belonging. Their understandings of affiliation revolve around social linkages determined by communities, rather than Westernized notions of blood quantum, DNA markers, reservation residency, or other delimited criteria for “Indian-ness.”90 These expansive understandings can encompass members in far-flung places, challenging colonial certainties that authentic Indigenous communities must be discretely bounded, contiguous spaces. The contemporary reconnection rituals linking St. David’s and New England tribes have their own integrity and logic worthy of respect, grounded in multifaceted ways of knowing.

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Perhaps more important, there is a profound essential truth manifested by these reconnections: realization that Indigenous presence in Bermuda and other Atlantic World sites has long gone unrecognized or has been subsumed within more prominent claims of African descent and public history tendencies to characterize slavery in biracial (white/black) rather than tripartite terms (white/black and Indian). The present-day public memoryscapes of Bermuda have made efforts to reckon with diverse, often painfully exploitative pasts. They are outgrowths of 1960s–1970s upheavals, which transformed the social landscape of Bermuda by questioning and in some cases assertively dismantling entrenched systems of racial segregation and discrimination. Anglocentric frameworks for heritage interpretation faced challenges from Bermuda’s diverse communities: “Conspicuous by its absence from local museums dealing with Bermuda’s national history is the part coloured Bermudians have played in the development of the country,” remarked a 1969 article. “This fact irritates and angers many Bermudians in an age when racial consciousness and pride in one’s heritage is uppermost in many minds.”91 Over time critiques generated substantive revisions to museums and commemorative sites. Today the public history of slavery emerges most forcefully in the Dockyards area at the far western tip of the archipelago. Formerly the site of the British Royal Naval Base, this area now houses the National Museum of Bermuda (formerly the Bermuda Maritime Museum), the islands’ top tourist attraction. A major exhibition has traced Bermuda’s involvement in the slave trade. Its emphasis is Afrocentric, dwelling most intensively on the West African coast and the arrival of Africans via the Middle Passage and West Indies. Native enslavement earned mention in several panels, but elsewhere interpretive text resorted to phrases like “whites and blacks,” reflecting the difficulty of dealing publicly with complex, multiethnic/racial histories of forced labor.92 The only place within the museum complex where Native histories are colorfully present is the Hall of History: Bermuda’s Story in Art, a one-thousandsquare-foot staircase mural completed by Bermudan painter Graham Foster in 2009. He described this mural as critiquing “pink cottage syndrome,” contemporary artists’ tendency to dwell on visually sedate landscapes when depicting the islands. By contrast, Foster’s work—a surrealistic composition highlighting the diversity, dynamism, and even violence of the islands’ past— visualizes slave sales and executions alongside more uplifting scenes. Its “Where’s Waldo?” effect makes the handful of Native figures and icons difficult to locate, but they are present: standing aboard a ship in one spot,

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harvesting ears of corn in another, made conspicuous by long, dark, braided hair. A fishing boat named Mohawk floats through another scene.93 Beyond this prominent museum, public conceptions of the past have been reshaped in recent years through projects like walking tours of an African Diaspora Heritage Trail, a route that challenges notions that an Anglo-colonial memoryscape is dominant, permanent, or pristine.94 Much of the public commemorative artwork is of recent vintage, informed by renewed Afro-Caribbean heritage awareness. We Arrive, a sculpture installed at Barr’s Bay Park on the Hamilton waterfront, commemorates the 1835 arrival of African American slaves and their subsequent emancipation in Bermuda. A statue of enslaved woman Sarah (Sally) Bassett, prominently located in downtown Hamilton near the Cenotaph, shows her bound at the stake, and carries text that does not flinch from narrating her brutal burning alive in 1730 on charges of poisoning.95 Yet visible or formalized manifestations of Native history remain mostly localized, taking form principally within St. David’s at sites like the Carter House Museum. This museum resides in one of the oldest houses on the islands. Whitewashed and dramatically faced with sweeping arms, containing original hand-cut cedar beams, it sits in the Southside area of St. David’s. It is a genuine community museum, its artifacts gathered door-to-door and interpreted by community members and the St. David’s Island Historical Society. The interior has exhibited artifacts from the reconnection gatherings such as a commemorative throw blanket, alongside material culture evoking the area’s deep maritime heritage, like an impressive white-green-and-red pilot boat that fills the main room. Carter House situates the Indian reconnections amid the particular memories and geographies of St. David’s, a place that has generated its own pantheon of influential persons, timeline of momentous events, and oral traditions.96 Within the mainland American Northeast, histories of Indigenous bondage remain comparatively unmarked in public spaces. Community activists and historians have labored to commemorate African slavery, diaspora, and emancipation through interactive constructions like black / African American heritage trails in Martha’s Vineyard, Portsmouth (New Hampshire), Boston, and Nantucket.97 Yet at present few comparable creations confront the Native dimensions of these pasts. Wilbour Woods, a parklike preserve in Wampanoag homelands of Sakonnet (Little Compton, Rhode Island), east of Narragansett Bay, is one of the few spots to do so even obliquely. A boulder inscribed with the name “Wootonekanuski” lies deep within its winding, swampy trails. Installed by antiquarians in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the

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rock memorializes Philip’s wife, though it makes no overt reference to her (or her son’s) apparent enslavement. Wilbour Woods also memorializes several wartime leaders on other boulders, including Philip and Awashonkes, sunksquaw of the Sakonnets, who brokered crucial alliances with the English.98 In the late nineteenth century, Wootonekanuske also attained memorialization by Jeremiah Hale, a homeowner in Medfield, Massachusetts. He had a bronze plaque bearing her name installed on his South Street house, part of a campaign by town historical enthusiasts and landowners to rename sites after prominent Algonquian figures.99 But this small memorial constituted domestic tokenism more than critical reflection upon historically specific Algonquian pasts. In 2010 a Native activist proposed that a plaque be installed in Providence, Rhode Island, noting that Roger Williams participated in the sale of Native slaves at the terminus of King Philip’s War. This signage would have marked at a busy intersection the morally fraught activities of a figure typically lionized in that state, and on the surface it seemed a provocative call for decolonization of urban terrain. Yet the proposal met little support from Narragansett historic preservation leaders. They argued that deeper contextualization of Williams’s activities—including his decades-long support of the Narragansetts, and the initial position of strength from which the tribe negotiated with colonists—would be needed to make such a marker meaningful and crossculturally instructive.100 In West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, the modest seventeenth-century parsonage house inhabited by James Keith has become a minor site of memory due to the minister’s lobbying on behalf of some war captives before they were sent off to slavery. “Ever honor[ed] should be his name for oppos[ition] to the design of putting to d[eath] the child of king Philip,” proclaimed one biographer in the 1860s.101 Local historians interpreted the Scotsman Keith as a relatively compassionate, moral actor in an otherwise dismal conflict, narrating his home on River Street as a Christian safe haven for Native prisoners.102 The blue-and-gray house with a brilliant red front door has been restored by the Old Bridgewater Historical Society. A Bridgewater avocational historian also inquired among Bermudan contacts in the 1980s about the fate of Wootonekanuske, though the queries proved inconclusive.103 What of the captive and fugitive geographies around the Piscataqua region? Several sites in Dover’s vicinity pay homage to Richard Waldron, who died violently in a 1689 Native reprisal, but they relay little about his direct involvement in the rounding up and deception of refugees being sheltered by Wonalancet. The restored Damm garrison house currently located under a

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protective canopy at the Woodman Institute narrates elements of this controversial seizure. But its approach makes few gestures to situate the “sham fight” within larger trajectories of Indigenous confinement, containment, and forced Atlantic dispersal.104 Private, familial, and internal community accounts, especially among tribal groups, maintain other understandings of the long legacies of bondage, certainly. Yet in public terms, the memoryscapes of Native bondage and freedom remain largely silent aside from this handful of places, as perhaps they must until those most directly invested in these pasts decide otherwise. The web of Northeastern and Atlantic sites connected to Native captives from King Philip’s War is wider than most any scholar has acknowledged. In addition to the places discussed above, it stretched to Cádiz in Spain, Barbados, the Azores, and Jamaica at least, possibly Nevis (in the Leeward Islands) and other global nodes as well (fig. 38).105 The variable quality of colonial oversight regarding disposition of captives led to a wide range of destinations, as ships sought to profit from their human cargo. A few of these captives are known to have made their way back to New England or from the brink of overseas transport. Those in the Azores, whose transport there implicated Richard Waldron and his relations, returned following legal disputations.106 When Joseph, taken prisoner in Plymouth Colony, was sold into slavery via Boston, bound for Jamaica, John Eliot reportedly intervened and helped secure his release. Yet Joseph endured in a semibound “servant” state within New England, while his wife and two children, also taken captive, were permitted to remain around Musketaquid (Concord, Massachusetts). Problems arose in obtaining Joseph’s definitive release because of rumors that “he had been active against the English when he was with the enemy.”107 Sagamore George from the North Shore of Massachusetts eventually returned from Barbados, possibly by accessing shipping channels through sympathetic mariners. Daniel Takawombait, the Native preacher at Natick, and Thomas Waban invoked George’s homecoming in the course of remembering Native lineages around Naumkeag (Salem), in order to attest to postwar Native landholdings.108 While in Barbados, George, also known as “No-Nose,” may have interacted with other Indigenous people from the hemisphere. Guianese Arawaks had longstanding relations with Barbados, having initially come there as freemen, though English colonizers rapidly moved to subjugate them. While Indigenous people remained a small proportion of the island’s population, and do not appear to have been concentrated in one household or enclave, by the

Figure 38. English colonization expanded widely across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century. This 1696 map of the “Principall Islands in America belonging to the English Empire” depicted emerging societies on Jamaica, Barbados, Bermuda, and related sites. Indigenous people from several parts of the hemisphere were transported to Caribbean and possibly other islands, where they were subjected to forced labor conditions alongside enslaved Africans within the islands’ domestic

economies and plantations. At least some New England Algonquians were sent to Barbados in the wake of King Philip’s War, though colonial authorities there passed legislation attempting to prevent their entry. Other dimensions of an Algonquian diaspora may have extended to Jamaica and Bermuda. (Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

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1670s Barbados sought to curb Native importations in response to unrest in New England.109 It is possible that other captives returned from overseas as well, bearing harrowing stories, though few details survive archivally. The topic of Native bondage in distant areas, and the prospect of return, seized literary imaginations. An outlandish nineteenth-century play that envisioned enslaved Natives’ commandeering a ship to return from Haiti to New Hampshire may have been fictive, yet not entirely off the mark.110 In more contemporary contexts, John Christian Hopkins, a former member of the Narragansett tribal council, published a swashbuckling novel called Carlomagno (2003), based on the premise of King Philip’s enslaved son becoming a rogue pirate king in the Caribbean. In Hopkins’s version, Philip’s son escapes from bondage; amasses power and wealth through his cunning, intelligence, and principles; and after a long separation, reunites with his aged mother, called Wootonockuse. She dies blind but free. The novel culminates with Philip’s son “Carlomagno” en route to the mainland after a series of adventures around Hispaniola: “It had a ring to it, Carlomagno admitted to himself. He was going to find a new life in America. Carlomagno, the son of King Philip, was bound for America. He was coming home to a place he’d never been before.”111 The very uncertainty surrounding the historical realities of enslavement and deportation has lent the era to creative reimaginings, encompassing continuing Indigenous lineages and homeland restorations. The web of Algonquian diaspora and enslavement stretched to Tangier in North Africa, destination for at least thirty “New England Indians,” and an outpost that generated a detailed documentary trail accessible in British colonial archives (fig. 39).112 A list of “Indians” sent to labor in the galley ships of Tangier—large vessels propelled by rowers—survives, showing that alongside enslaved individuals bearing names like Mustapha, Ibrahim, and Mahomet, coming from places like Tunis, Constantinople, and Tripoli, were Algonquians: Joseph, Anthony, Stephen, John, James, Daniel, Robin, Joseph, John the Father, John the Son.113 The conditions of existence in that sun-baked, multilingual milieu of onerous forced labor can only be imagined. Yet no community reclamation of that past has yet occurred akin to the events at St. David’s. This may be a consequence of that site’s comparative remoteness from the American mainland, of rapid imperial turnovers that repeatedly left Tangier in ruins, or other factors, including the possibility that none of the enslaved Algonquians survived on that rim of the Atlantic. At least nine had died there by mid-December 1675, according to Thomas Hamilton, captain of the Margaret, who had received them following their transatlantic transport and stopover

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in Cádiz. Hamilton reported a dearth of provisions, clothing, and medicine, all of which would have exacerbated the danger of mortality. The Algonquians managed to convey a message to John Eliot in New England via an English mason at Tangier, asking for intercession, but the results of his 1683 plea to Robert Boyle for assistance in their redemption are uncertain. Eliot’s passing remark that at Tangier remained “so many [Natives] as live, or are born there,” raised the possibility that the captives included one or more women.114 Their very presence at the galley oars on the Mediterranean rim arose from escalating English imperial ambitions. Tangier, or Tanja in the Berber tongue, had deep Berber, Carthaginian, Roman, Arab, and other histories before becoming a short-lived English colony. Charles II acquired claim to it in the early

Figure 39. A number of Algonquian captives were transported to Tangier, an English colonial outpost on the North African coast (part of present-day Morocco). There they labored on galley ships alongside a heterogeneous population of captives circulating around the Mediterranean basin. At least nine died in Tangier. Some survivors managed to contact Puritan missionary John Eliot for assistance in returning home, but the outcome of that request is unknown. When the English withdrew from Tangier in 1684, they materially destroyed as much of the city and its harbor mole, or breakwater, as possible to prevent resources from falling into opponents’ control. (Image courtesy of the Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection, The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

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1660s from the Portuguese in a wedding dowry, along with Bombay (Mumbai) in India. He intended to build up English military fortifications at Tangier to control access to the lucrative Mediterranean trade. But continuous besiegement and pushback from troops of the Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco, the “Warrior King” of the Alaouite dynasty who formed part of an Islamic jihad, proved too daunting for the English garrison. It received orders to withdraw in 1683. Before the English departed, they destroyed as much of the site as possible to keep its resources from falling into opponents’ hands, including an enormous mole, or breakwater and pier extending into the harbor. The mole had taken them and enslaved laborers extraordinary effort and money to construct, and it required over two thousand men, working day and night, to demolish the structure.115 They threw the debris into the harbor, aiming to spoil it for future use. Before the last English representatives pulled out in 1684, they paused to leave behind mementos. At the behest of Charles II they buried coins bearing his image deep in the city, “which haply, many Centuries hence, when other Memory of it shall be lost, may declare to succeeding Ages that that Place was once a Member of the British empire.”116 Even at the moment of abandonment, they feared oblivion and eradication of the very memory of colonial footprints in North Africa. What remains today of that brief, failed, but vital experiment in English global imperialism, in which New England Natives played a small part? Very little. Remnants of the mole could be seen at low tide in the early twentieth century but now lie submerged.117 If the most ambitious, physically momentous feature of English presence is so materially ephemeral, could anything as transitory as the presence of enslaved Algonquians have left traces? What about the resting places of those who died there, and may or may not have been mourned in customary ways? Where Bermuda speaks on the western curve of the Red Atlantic, Tangier remains quiet on the eastern one—for now. Today St. David’s stands as a major locus of efforts to memorialize Native bondage stemming from the Algonquian Northeast, while other spots around the Atlantic basin tied to the same history lack comparable prominence. Geographical selectivity can be detrimental, as Anglo-American antiquarians demonstrated in New England by writing out of existence countless places meaningful for Native communities, deeming them non-places, not worthy of registering on maps or in history texts. But in this case, the selected site acts as a staging ground for a new politics of solidarity, a beacon of noncolonial expressions and assertive declarations of ongoing, multiracial, multinational Indian heritages. Bermuda has become a metonym for many Native peoples

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of southern New England, as well as for Indigenous communities like the Cherokee and Taíno, who have formed similar links with the islands: an icon that signifies what the early modern Atlantic World’s colonial violences failed to destroy. It has become a place to tell and enact stories of survivance, ethnogenesis, and (re-)unification. Its meanings will evolve organically in relation to communities’ own needs and desires. St. David’s is an important node in wider decolonizing memoryscapes, where contemporary groups are reclaiming historical locales wracked by violence, and marginalized by mainstream interpretations. As the crow flies it is distant from Deer Island, the Great Swamp, the Great River’s falls, and related terrain. Yet conceptually it is part of a common cultural fabric. In addition to community-driven commemorations, compelling revisitations of these diffuse legacies of Atlantic bondages and liberations have come through material means. Recognizing that documentary sources pertinent to slave societies are by nature ethnocentric and partial in the information they convey, especially regarding non-European populations, historical archaeologists have been assessing the nature of material signatures of enslavement and resistance. Jerome Handler has examined these issues around the Middle Passage and in the sugar plantations of Barbados, considering what it means to track material “transfers” or “survivals” from original African contexts, across the Atlantic, and into environments of pervasive stress, mortality, and attempted dehumanization. These insights might be profitably brought to bear on Indigenous transits into slavery: the recognition, for example, that most captives were forcibly separated from the preponderance of their clothing and belongings before being sent to sea, making it difficult to locate “traditional” materials at the other ends of their journeys, but also worth seeking out ancestrally informed practices in these new locales.118 Stephen Silliman has probed potentials for Indigenous archaeological researches in Bermuda, using a community-connected approach to identify possible sites for investigation around St. David’s (drawing upon previous collaborative methodologies with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation). The Bermuda project focused on areas other than those associated with shipwrecks, historic homes, forts, and town areas, instead exploring sites like caves, which island traditions have long associated with fugitive and/or emancipated slaves. While the project did not conclusively find material evidence indicating seventeenth-century Indigenous presences, it began asking different questions about the fundamental premises of these inquiries. What might Indigenous traces look like in diasporic contexts of island bondage, amid large colonial and African populations? How might they complement other available streams of

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evidence, including community traditions, archival documentation, and cartographic representations?119 Similar questions could be posed at the myriad other Atlantic points where Algonquians are known or surmised to have traveled, under duress, as a consequence of war and concomitant upheavals. Today a striking monument stands at the tip of St. David’s, in a still corner called Great Head Park. Sculptor Bill “Mussey” Ming created Figurehead: Memorial for Those Lost at Sea, depicting an upturned boat, filled with an hourglass, a paddle, a life preserver.120 The installation overlooks the ocean and indicates that numberless people have been lost at sea, their fates and bodies forever in limbo for those who survive them onshore. Stand in the stone circle that surrounds its base and you can turn north, south, east, and west, facing the many global shores that fed Bermuda’s past and remain linked to its present. Figurehead is a uniquely maritime memorial, and one that may bear lessons for the writing of Indigenous, colonial, and circum-Atlantic histories. It movingly encapsulates the need to mark losses that cannot be fully tabulated, only retrieved unevenly or gestured at in the aggregate; to make visible pasts that threaten to be swept away into the waters of the Atlantic, and into conventional practices of fashioning history that can founder on the shoals of fragmentary or elusive evidentiary traces. At St. David’s and its northeastern counterparts, memory speaks resoundingly where history tends to confess its reservations. Memory bridges the “proof” chasm, while history dwells on the vacuum. In the churning, consuming Atlantic World that still binds together Africa, Europe, and the Americas, the diverse corners of the Algonquian Dawnland and the equally distinctive coves of the Bermuda Islands, there is surely room enough for many forms of truthmaking.

Conclusion Reopening History

On a sultry day in July 2012, I visited the Blackstone Valley Historical Society in Lincoln, Rhode Island. Investigators working on the Nipsachuck battlefields project were presenting their most recent findings at a public meeting, including discussion of material evidence from the devastating 1676 assault on the hilly, swampy terrain. Beyond these developments, what stood out were the comments from Doug Harris of the Narragansett Tribal Historic Preservation Office about the project’s larger significance. Nipsachuck, he said, was an opportunity to “re-open history.” It was an occasion (to paraphrase Harris’s eloquent remarks) to cease repeating the same old historians’ boilerplate about King Philip’s War, and instead revisit original documents with fresh eyes and questions, incorporate just-emerging sources like archaeological traces, and recuperate local levels of action and meaning that had been neglected over the centuries. It was a chance for participants to share knowledge, listen to each other’s perspectives, and reconnect pieces of the past that had long been separated. It was a moment, Harris suggested, when we might seek more balanced ways of coexisting in a shared space.1 Reopening history—this is an incisive way of characterizing present approaches to King Philip’s War and placemaking. As Nipsachuck so amply illustrates, we have barely touched the surface of how this conflict originated, across which grounds and waters it ranged, and what its consequences were for the multitudes caught up in its violences, both immediately and over longer timescales. Anthropologist Patricia Rubertone aptly outlined the blind spots in dominant understandings, or limitations of overarching conceptual frameworks, in a review of James Drake’s book King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England (1999). She admired its careful reconstruction of military events, but posed a series of provocative queries: 325

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Could there be still other books to be written about King Philip’s War? Other names for it? Could those books be about the lives of Native people, and those of mixed heritage, whose daily routines continued largely uninterrupted while discussions among the public characters deciding their fate were inscribed in written texts? Might those be books that tell how they struggled to hold onto the traditions that maintained their communities and kept them intact despite the haunting scenes of lifeless bodies, scorched planting fields, and the rest of the chaos created by the war?2 An emphatic “yes,” on all counts. My preceding chapters addressed several of these other stories of war, the forgotten, marginalized, or willfully suppressed dimensions that conventionally have dropped out of historical accountings but can be recuperated by willingness to revisit questions, topics, and methods. Most any history remains subject to reopening, of course. But striking about King Philip’s War is the certainty with which it has been considered “done,” known, finished, a fait accompli—frequently by Euro-American parties loath to shake up treasured myths of origins and collective purpose. They insisted they knew the relevant geographies, campaigns, actors, and legacies, and so committed were they to these versions of the past that they inscribed them out on the land, in stone. Yet as ongoing critiques of those same stones demonstrate, closure and certainty were largely illusions. As my examination of memoryscapes has shown, monuments are rarely interesting in themselves. What is significant is the web of relationships that surround them: the historical negotiations and disagreements that give rise to them, the acts of collective memorialization that take place at their installation, the perpetually unfinished aftermath that keeps their material forms and meanings in flux. Monuments perform cultural labor within particular environments, homelands, and political territories, and they must be considered within those surroundings to understand their functions. And while monuments have tended to attract circles of prominent donors, orators, and politicians, remembrance has never been strictly a top-down process. Indeed, some of the most formidable memory-keepers have been people that dominant societies considered marginal or disenfranchised: individuals and groups with modest economic resources, perhaps possessing literacy in forms other than English-language reading and writing, perhaps without any legal title to property. Their commitments to recollecting other pasts, including those deliberately excluded from stone and bronze, can be challenging to discern, as they have tended to encompass performance, ritual, and semiprivate interventions rather than visually obvious constructions. But they are no less vital.

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As I write this, a national debate over extant monuments to the Confederacy is unfolding in the wake of searing racialized violence.3 Similar critiques deserve to be focused on the scores of New England and U.S. monuments related to settler colonialism and its attendant violences across Indigenous homelands. These objects and signs are not neutral relics of a bygone age. They are active components of social structures invested in maintaining certain power relations, premised on the attempted subjugation and dispossession of sovereign Indigenous communities. In the case of King Philip’s War, many of these objects and signs assert mythologies of Algonquian savagery, conquest, declension, and disappearance. Without addressing entrenched underlying mentalities and systemic realities, any discussion of what to do with these “stories in stone” can only be superficial. Ultimately, recasting these sites may involve not fully consensual, multicultural visions of the past to which everyone subscribes, but an ability to recognize foundational divergences. Regarding Sand Creek, where Colorado troops massacred Cheyennes and Arapahos during the U.S. Civil War, historian Ari Kelman has remarked that “government officials have long viewed public commemoration as a kind of patriotic alchemy, a way to conjure unity from divisiveness through appeals to Americans’ shared sense of history.”4 Yet as he demonstrated in that locale, and as I see across the Northeast, memorialization remains contentious for the very reason that there are not, and perhaps cannot be, unitary conceptions of the past and its enduring effects. Even as it is important to recognize divergences in communities’ understandings of the past, we must also reject simplistic relativism that suggests every story about the past is equally valid. Some stories hew more closely to historical sources—be they documentary, material, ethnographic, environmental—while others take on the character of fiction or willful distortions that have little grounding in the actualities of past lives, politics, and social transformations. There is an ethical as well as intellectual imperative for historians and many others to work at gauging what these qualities are. Doing so almost necessarily involves accounting for why certain individuals and groups have devised and supported mythic versions of the past. Bringing these critical sensibilities to bear on long-entrenched narratives about early America, New England, and Native America will create discomfort among those whose identities are deeply entwined in them, almost surely. But provided they have the willingness to face these frictions, such “disorientation” stands to create new possibilities for understanding, and for constructive action heading farther into the twenty-first century.

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The alternative memoryscapes of the Northeast and Atlantic World extend well beyond the constellation of sites I have examined within the parameters of this book. Given more time and space, I would share the multilayered histories of sites like the diminutive white house in Sillery, on the outskirts of Québec City, today called La Maison des Jésuites. In October 1676 the French missionary Jean Enjalran, freshly arrived at Sillery, reported significant numbers of “abnaquis” flowing into the place: “Those whom we have here have left their country on account of this war.”5 What he perceived was widespread mobility by refuge-seeking Algonquians enmeshed in King Philip’s War. Some looked north to Indigenous relations there, and to an emerging French colonial corridor, to reestablish comparative security. Sillery, long known as a fertile spot for catching eels, lies on the great interior waterway of the St. Lawrence River. If you continue west along it, you arrive by Odanak / St. Francis, where an active Abenaki community maintains complex understandings of migration, ethnogenesis, and regrounding in northern places. Today an international border attempts to separate homelands that historically have been thoroughly interlinked. The case of New France / Québec also presents uneasy questions of dual colonialism wherein people of French descent have critiqued British colonialism yet sometimes found it difficult to confront their own entanglements in colonialism toward les peoples autochtones. Even the provincial motto Je me souviens (I remember) begs the question What? What part of these pervasively contested heritages attains remembrance, and what tends to be quietly disavowed? Other vital memoryscapes persist on Mashantucket Pequot tribal lands of eastern Connecticut. In the 1990s archaeologists working on behalf of that tribe happened to unearth traces of a Native fortification from the era of King Philip’s War. Presently called the Monhantic Fort, what made the discovery all the more compelling was the nearly perfect silence about it in documentary archives. Aside from a brief, inconclusive phrase in a single colonial narrative, the fort effectively does not exist in the written record. It took shovels and serendipity to bring to light remnants of a squared palisade and to begin unfolding lesser-understood dimensions of intertribal violence that lingered after the supposed closure of military conflict in 1676.6 Moreover, tribally backed archaeologists were able to make sense of Monhantic as an Indigenous fortification owing to decades-long efforts to better comprehend the nature of Algonquian lives and Euro-American interactions, and the enormous variations in how specific tribal enclaves chose to conduct themselves during times of outright conflict. From the undulating stretches of nearby Mohegan tribal

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homelands, the conflict and its aftermath appear equally distinctive. For both Mashantucket and Mohegan, limited wartime alliances with certain colonial authorities enabled self-preservation and relative influence in an era of mounting pressures. Similarly in the Sakonnet area, on the eastern rim of Narragansett Bay, a Wampanoag community undertook negotiations with Plymouth authorities in the interests of securing a land base. In June 1676, Peter, son of the sunksquaw Awashonks, “tendered to renew theire peace with the English, and requested libertie to sitt downe in quietnes on theire lands att Saconett.”7 Yet even such a nonconfrontational proposal generated colonial suspicions and stringent oversight. The myriad instances when communities resorted to tenuous peacemaking and alliance building to forestall further losses surely merit further accounting. Finally, the journey into memorial settings could continue with Mount Hope. Not the decontextualized chunk of quartz that Timothy Alden, Jr., deposited in a memory house in the early nineteenth century, or the commercialized Metacom Avenue that runs below it, but the mount itself, now covered in trees after zealous cutting nearly denuded the elevation. Along its surrounding peninsula of Cawsumsett—to reclaim the name from the tenacious grasp of “Bristol”—not one stretch of land or water today falls within an official tribal reservation, owing to multigenerational processes of conquest and dispossession. But the place is still Indigenous and remains traveled, visited, and valued by descendant communities whose links to this fraught terrain have little to do with state—or United States—authorized boundaries.8 “The past has everything to do with who we are in this present moment, both individually and collectively,” Ramona Peters (a Mashpee Wampanoag) has remarked. “Personal and collective histories shape our dominant thought patterns—what we value, what we desire, and what we miss.”9 For Indigenous descendants across the Northeast, the geographies that matter often involve webs of places different from those most visibly, concretely commemorated by New Englanders. The place stories that resonate confront daunting, violent transformations of other times, as well as the ongoing destruction of sensitive areas, as Peters stressed, drawing on her repatriation work for the Wampanoag Confederation. Yet these accounts also convey continuities, enduring lineages, and survivance. “It is not down in any map; true places never are,” Herman Melville assured readers in Moby-Dick.10 Melville’s whaling saga obliquely reckoned with postwar Algonquian continuance across a global maritime world through the figure of Tashtego, the Wampanoag harpooner aboard the fictive Pequod.

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Perceiving and comprehending “true places”—places that vibrate with history, memory, movement, emotion, struggle—necessitates alternate modes of seeing, touching, traveling, mapping than the ones customarily invoked in settler colonial contexts. Across the region placemaking continues in striking and subtle ways, and the story goes on. It can end here, for now, by the turbines and digester eggs of Deer Island. As weather grows cooler, birds undertake their migrations, and a Northeastern winter signals its approach, people will be out there in the harborscape, perhaps readying canoes and mishoonash in the early daylight for a journey (fig. 40). With circuits of airplanes overhead they may carry those vessels down to waters on the edge of the Atlantic, affirming connections with a past that is both painful and regenerative, all the while facing the morning.

Figure 40. Participants in the October 2014 Deer Island Memorial watch canoes begin their crossing of Boston Harbor and journey up the Charles River. The city skyline is in the distance, along with an airplane and Logan International Airport. The memorial itinerary reconnects with a series of historically important places linked to the forced removal of Indigenous ancestors and supports participants in affirming solidarities for the future. (Photograph by Christine DeLucia)

Abbreviations

Repositories and publications referenced frequently are abbreviated in the notes as follows. In a few cases readily available reprints of historical titles are referenced, to facilitate access for readers.

Repositories AAS Ber.Arch. BRBML CPL JCBL Mass.Arch. MHS MPMRC NKFL NPL PHS

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts Bermuda Archives, Hamilton, Bermuda Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut Cumberland Public Library, Cumberland, Rhode Island John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island Massachusetts Archives, Boston, Massachusetts Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation North Kingstown Free Library, South County Room, North Kingstown, Rhode Island Northfield Public Library, Northfield, Massachusetts Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, Kingston, Rhode Island

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PVMA-HD

RIHPHC RIHS UKNA

abbreviations

Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library and Historic Deerfield Library (Memorial Libraries), Deerfield, Massachusetts Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, Providence, Rhode Island Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island U.K. National Archives (includes the former Public Record Office/PRO), Kew, United Kingdom

Publications BMAS Bodge, SIKPW

Dawn.Vcs.

Gookin, Hist.Acct.

Gookin, Hist.Coll.

Hubbard, Narr.

JJW

Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society George Madison Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip’s War, 3rd ed. (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill Press, 1906) Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England, eds. Siobhan Senier et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014) Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England, in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677 (New York: Arno Press, 1972) Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England. Of Their Several Nations, Numbers, Customs, Manners, Religion and Government, before the English Planted There, with notes by Jeffrey H. Fiske (n.p.: Towtaid, 1970) William Hubbard, A Narrative of the troubles with the Indians in New-England, from the first planting thereof in the year 1607, to this present year 1677, but chiefly of the late troubles in the two last years, 1675 and 1676 (Boston: John Foster, 1677) The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649, eds. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia

abbreviations

PP

ProcPVMA

Williams, Key into Lang.

WMQ YIPP

333

Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) The Pynchon Papers, vol. 1, Letters of John Pynchon, 1654–1700, and vol. 2, Selections from the Account Books of John Pynchon, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1982) History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (Deerfield, MA: The Association): vol. 1, 1870–1879 (published 1890); vol. 2, 1880–1889 (published 1898); vol. 3, 1890–1898 (published 1901); vol. 4, 1899–1904 (published 1905); vol. 5, 1905–1911 (published 1912); vol. 6, 1912–1920 (published 1921) Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America: or, An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America, called NewEngland. Together with briefe Observations of the Customes, Manners and Worships, &c. of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death. . . . (London: Printed by Gregory Dexter, 1643) William and Mary Quarterly Yale Indian Papers Project, Yale University, eds. Paul Grant-Costa and Tobias Glaza, yipp.yale. edu (documents and editorial accompaniments are referenced by a short title and YIPP ID number)

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Notes

Preface 1. Alden’s contribution is listed under March 10, 1815, in the Donation Book, AAS. 2. Frank James (Wamsutta), “National Day of Mourning,” in Dawn.Vcs., 455–458. 3. John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 4. Timothy Alden, “Bristol, R.I.,” in A Collection of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions with Occasional Notes, pentade I, vol. IIII [sic] (New York: S. Marks, 1814), 76–79. On Alden’s background, see Jonathan E. Helmreich, Eternal Hope: The Life of Timothy Alden, Jr. (Cranbury, NJ: Cornwall Books, 2001). 5. Lucianne Lavin, Connecticut’s Indigenous People: What Archaeology, History, and Oral Traditions Tell Us about Their Communities and Cultures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 43, 59, 61, 78, 104, 105, 108, 161, 234, 253; Curtiss Hoffman, Maryanne MacLeod, and Alan Smith, “Symbols in Stone: Chiasolites in New England Archaeology,” BMAS 60, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 2–17; Curtiss Hoffman, “Symbols in Stone, Part Two: Quartz Ceremonial Items from the Little League Site, Middleborough, MA,” BMAS 65, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 63–71; David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27–28; Dagmara Zawadzka, “Spectacles to Behold: Colours in Algonquin Landscapes,” Totem: University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology 19, no. 1 (June 21, 2011): 6–36. 6. Melissa Jayne Fawcett (presently Tantaquidgeon Zobel), Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 21. 7. John Paul Murphy, “Aspects of Attributing Human Use to Unworked Quartz: The Quartz Crystals from Magunco Praying Town, Massachusetts,” BMAS 63, nos. 1, 2 (Spring, Fall 2002): 35–43. 8. Alden’s contribution is listed under Jan. 29, 1799, Cabinet Book 1791–1934, p. 10, in MHS Pre–1900 Archives, MHS.

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notes to pages xvii–2

9. Howard Mansfield, In the Memory House (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1993), 8. 10. Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” chap. 1 in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), esp. 1, 19.

Introduction 1. Colin G. Calloway, “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Calloway (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 4. 2. John Demos, “How to Fight Savages,” in Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 372. 3. No systematic study has been made of the war’s remembrance in Native communities, nor of non-Native modes of remembrance after the mid-nineteenth century. Scholarship on its remembrance has been heavily Anglo-American and text-centric. Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias compiled an admirable though selective survey of significant sites and commemorative markers; see Eric B. Schultz and Mike Tougias, King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 1999). Rebecca Faery considered the literary record and case of Lancaster and Mary Rowlandson, viewed comparatively with Pocahontas; see Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). John McWilliams devoted one chapter of his survey of “crises” in New England to the war, looking also at the literary record; see John P. McWilliams, New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Billy J. Stratton revisited Rowlandson and the captivity narrative genre in Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). Studies of William Apess take up the question of remembrance in relation to the specific case of that Pequot intellectual’s 1836 oration about the war; see William Apess and Barry O’Connell, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Accounts of Mary Rowlandson have looked at her cultural legacy; see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 4. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999). 5. Recent tribally and regionally specific studies include Laurence M. Hauptman and James Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991);

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Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Elizabeth S. Chilton and Mary Lynne Rainey, eds., Nantucket and Other Native Places: The Legacy of Elizabeth Alden Little (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); Craig N. Cipolla, Stephen W. Silliman, and David B. Landon, “ ‘Making Do’: NineteenthCentury Subsistence Practices on the Eastern Pequot Reservation,” Northeast Anthropology 74 (2007): 41–64. The flip side is that the few regional studies have not prioritized granular levels of place-analysis, like the wide-ranging works of Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Colin G. Calloway, Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991); Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). 6. Anthropological studies of placemaking have articulated the multivalent, dynamic, multigenerational quality of meaning production about specific locales, attending to both symbolic and material dimensions. On the concept and North American case studies, see Patricia E. Rubertone, ed., Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008). 7. Jonathan Boyarin, “Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory,” in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, ed. Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1–38, esp. 2. A German phrase that approximates the concept is Erinnerungslandschaft, roughly “memory landscape.” See Rudy Koshar, “Introduction,” in From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 9. A useful counterpart is Thomas A. Tweed’s “sacroscapes”; see Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. 61–62. 8. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 309. See also Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 9. For standard summaries and chronologies of the war’s signal events, see Yasuhide Kawashima, Igniting King Philip’s War: The John Sassamon Murder Trial (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Russell Bourne, The Red King’s Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675–1678

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(New York: Atheneum, 1990). Jenny Hale Pulsipher’s Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) accounts for how different colonies’ conceptions of Native sovereignty affected alliances and the course of war. A straightforward though now dated overview is Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 10. Karen Halttunen, “Transnationalism and American Studies in Place,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 18 (2007): 12–13. 11. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 12. The Metacom Condominiums are located on Metacom Avenue (Route 136), a main thoroughfare in Bristol, Rhode Island. King Philip Motors and the King Philip Little League are also in Bristol; Metacom Auto Sales is in neighboring Warren. King Phillip [sic] Apartments are in Raynham, Massachusetts. The King Philip Trading Post and KP Grill are in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. I have visited these (and related) locations on a number of occasions, 2010–2017. 13. Russell Lawrence Barsh, “ ‘Colored’ Seamen in the New England Whaling Industry: An Afro-Indian Consortium,” in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 76–107; Jason Mancini, “Beyond Reservation: Indian Survivance in Southern New England and Eastern Long Island, 1713–1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2009); Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in EighteenthCentury Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Daniel R. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Donna Keith Baron, J. Edward Hood, and Holly V. Izard, “They Were Here All Along: The Native American Presence in Lower-Central New England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” WMQ, 3rd series, 53, no. 3 (July 1996): 561–586; Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War; Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 14. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983; repr. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–2. 15. Christine N. Reiser, “Materializing Community: The Intersections of Pageantry, Material Culture and Indigeneity in Early 20th-Century New England,” Material Culture Review 69 (Spring 2009): 36–50. 16. E.g., Zerviah Gould Mitchell (Wampanoag) copublished a critical history of the war and settler dispossessions; see Ebenezer Weaver Peirce and Zerviah Gould Mitchell, Indian History, Biography and Genealogy: Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit of

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the Wampanoag Tribe, and His Descendants. With an Appendix (North Abington, MA: Z. G. Mitchell, 1878). 17. Quoted in John B. Brown III and Paul A. Robinson, “ ‘The 368 Years’ War’: The Conditions of Discourse in Narragansett Country,” in Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States, ed. Jordan E. Kerber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 62. 18. Karen Halttunen, “Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America,” WMQ, 3rd series, 68, no. 4 (Oct. 2011): 513–532, esp. 531. David Armitage’s formulation of “cis-Atlantic history” provides some room for localized approaches; see his essay “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–27. 19. Simon Gunn, “The Spatial Turn: Changing Histories of Space and Place,” in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850, ed. Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 1–14; Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989). 20. Michel Foucault, “Questions of Geography” (interview with the editors of Hérodote), in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 63–77; Michel Foucault, “The Language of Space,” in Geography, History, and Social Sciences, ed. Georges B. Benko and Ulf Strohmayer (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 51–56; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991). 21. Lawrence Buell, “The Place of Place,” in Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 22. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 23. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, “Introduction: Bringing Ghosts to Ground,” in Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, ed. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 24. Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1, “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory” (Feb. 1988): 36–49, esp. 37. 25. James Clifford, “Prologue: In Medias Res,” in Routes: Travels and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–16, esp. 3 and chap. 1, “Traveling Cultures”; Christine N. Reiser, “Rooted in Movement: Spatial Practices and Community Persistence in Native Southwestern New England” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2010).

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26. In lieu of “collective memory,” which implies a fully coherent, abstracted entity, the field of memory studies has used terms like “remembrance,” insisting on the human agency and practice involved, or “collected memory,” referencing imperfect aggregations of many competing individual memories. See War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9; James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), xi. The valuation of a dispassionate vantage is a relatively modern, Western development in history writing; see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 27. Jay Winter, pt. 4, “The Memory Boom and the Twentieth Century,” in Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory ‘Industry,’ ” Journal of Modern History 81, no. 1 (March 2009): 122–158; Molly Hurley Dépret, “ ‘Troubles Tourism’: Debating History and Voyeurism in Belfast, Northern Ireland,” in The Business of Tourism: Place, Faith, and History, ed. Philip Scranton and Janet F. Davidson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 137–164, esp. 157. On memory studies as a field of inquiry, and its reservations about remembrance as operating conservatively in the interests of capital, the state, and the status quo (affirming hegemonic values rather than critiquing them), see Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 1993): 136– 152; Allan Megill, “History, Memory, Identity,” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 3 (Aug. 1998): 37–62; Daniel Abramson, “Make History, Not Memory: History’s Critique of Memory,” Harvard Design Magazine 9 (Fall 1999): 1–6; Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127–150; James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Karen E. Till, “Staging the Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache,” Cultural Geographies 6, no. 3 (July 1999): 251–283; Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26, Special Issue: “Memory and Counter-Memory” (Spring 1989): 7–24; Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991); John E. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 28. Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” 128–129. 29. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4; also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 55.

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30. Nicholas B. Dirks, “Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 279–313; Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993). 31. On some distinctions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous collecting and archiving, and implications for digitization projects, see Siobhan Senier, “Digitizing Indigenous History: Trends and Challenges,” Journal of Victorian Culture 19, no. 3 (2014): 396–402; Kim Christen Withey, “Does Information Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness,” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 2870–2893. 32. Lepore, The Name of War, x. 33. “A Conversation with Jill Lepore,” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities 30, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2009): 49. 34. Lepore, “The Name of War: Waging, Writing, and Remembering King Philip’s War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1995), 19–20; Lepore, The Name of War, xxii. 35. Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Andrew Newman, On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, eds., Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 36. Lepore, The Name of War, 184. 37. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 38. Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–19; Dell Upton, “The Power of Things: Recent Studies in American Vernacular Architecture,” American Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1983): 262–279; Donald Meinig, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 33–48; Henry Glassie, “Meaningful Things and Appropriate Myths: The Artifact’s Place in American Studies,” repr. in Material Life in America, 1600–1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 62–92. 39. Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 40. Edward Winslow, Good Newes From New England: Or A true Relation of things very remarkable at the Plantation of Plimoth in New-England. Shewing the wondrous providence

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and goodnes of God, in their preservation and continuance, being delivered from many apparant deaths and dangers. Together with a Relation of such religious and civill Lawes and Customes, as are in practise amongst the Indians, adjoyning to them at this day. As also what Commodities are there to be raysed for the maintenance of that and other Plantations in the said Country. Written by E.W. who hath borne a part in the fore-named troubles, and there liued since their first Arrivall (London: I. D. for William Bladen and John Bellamie, 1624), 61. 41. Eva L. Butler, “The Brush or Stone Memorial Heaps of Southern New England,” Bulletin of the Archeological Society of Connecticut 19 (April 1946): 2–12; Stephen Jett, “Cairn and Brush Travel Shrines in the United States Northeast and Southeast,” Northeast Anthropology 48 (Fall 1994): 61–67; William S. Simmons, “Windows to the Past: Dreams and Shrines,” chap. 11 in Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620– 1984 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 247–256; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 91; Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, “Amerindian Power in the Early Modern Northeast: A Reappraisal,” WMQ, 3rd series, 61, no. 1 (Jan. 2004): 103. 42. Calls to arms from practitioners of “deep history” and “deep time” suggest movement in that direction: Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Smail, eds., Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 43. Claudia Koonz, “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,” chap. 13 in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 258. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 224–225. 44. Kent C. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 94. 45. Michael Bentley, “Past and ‘Presence’: Revisiting Historical Ontology,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (Oct. 2006): 357. 46. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, “Setting the Framework,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Winter and Sivan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 37. 47. William J. Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2007), xxiii, 66–68. 48. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 212. 49. Lisa Prosper, “Wherein Lies the Heritage Value?: Rethinking the Heritage Value of Cultural Landscapes from an Aboriginal Perspective,” George Wright Forum 24, no. 2 (2007): 117–124, esp. 118–119.

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50. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 310. 51. Bjørnar Olsen, “Material Culture After Text: Re-Membering Things,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 36, no. 2 (2003): 100; Kristen Asdal, “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History,” History and Theory 42, no. 4, Theme Issue 42: “Environment and History” (Dec. 2003): 60–74. 52. Letter, Jeremy Belknap to Jedidiah Morse, July 26, 1786, in f:1:3A, Correspondence, 1786–June 1789, Jeremy Belknap Papers, correspondence, 1760–1790, New Hampshire Historical Society. 53. Cole Harris, “Archival Fieldwork,” Geographical Review 91, nos. 1 / 2 (Jan.–April 2001): 328–334, esp. 330; Graeme Wynn, “Foreword: Putting Things in Their Place,” in Turkel, The Archive of Place, ix–xviii, esp. xii–xiii; Clifford, “Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology,” chap. 3 in Routes, 52–91. 54. My thinking on decolonizing methodologies has developed through a number of sources and fields, including Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999); Devon Abbott Mihesuah, ed., Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Eli Taylor, Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); T. J. Ferguson and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, History Is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006); Craig S. Womack et al., eds., Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); and in the Northeast specifically, Craig N. Cipolla, Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013); Dawn.Vcs.; and others discussed in the course of specific case studies in chapters that follow. 55. Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 1. 56. Sonya Atalay, Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), esp. 207. Atalay focuses on this methodology in the context of community-based participatory research (CBPR), around which an entire literature is developing. 57. Dawn Dove, “Alienation of Indigenous Students in the Public School System,” in Dawn.Vcs., 524. 58. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). 59. On contemporary critical predilections for “platiality” and historical roots of the “desire to affirm place against place-eroding historical forces,” see Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 58. Also

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Howard Mansfield, In the Memory House (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1993); Howard Mansfield, The Bones of the Earth (Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004); on regionalism and periodic nostalgia for it, see Edward L. Ayers and Peter S. Onuf, “Introduction,” in All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, ed. Ayers et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 60. Deer Island Memorial, Nov. 2009. 61. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), esp. 278. 62. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xi. 63. The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, a collaborative undertaking among the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Assonet, and Herring Pond Wampanoag, is focused internally at the present on building fluency among tribal community members, www. wlrp.org.

Chapter 1. Contested Passages 1. Site visit to Deer Island Sacred Run and Paddle, Oct. 30, 2010 (and 2011–2015); “Wampanoags to commemorate 1675 forced removal,” Boston Globe, Oct. 30, 2010; Paula Peters, “Sacred Paddle,” Naushauonk Mittark (Mashpee Wampanoag newsletter), Dec. 2010, 5. 2. The Boston Harbor Islands (BHI) joined the National Park system in November 1996 by an act of Congress. The planning document referenced is Boston Harbor Islands: A National Park Area. General Management Plan, prepared by Boston Support Office of the Northeast Region National Park Service for the Boston Harbor Islands Partnership (Boston: 2002), available on park website, http://www.nps.gov/boha/ parkmgmt/boston-harbor-islands-general-management-plan.htm (accessed June 16, 2012). 3. William Wood, Wood’s New England Prospect. The Publications of the Prince Society, Established May 25, 1858 (Boston: Printed for the Society by John Wilson and Son, 1865), 45; Edward Rowe Snow, entry on Deer Island, The Islands of Boston Harbor, updated by Jeremy D’Entremont (Carlisle, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2002), 177. On an overview of historical changes at the island, see Jill Lepore, “When Deer Island Was Turned into Devil’s Island,” Bostonia Magazine, Summer 1998, 14–19. The largest island is Long Island, directly south of Deer Island. They comprise 225.2 and 203.5 acres, respectively; see General Management Plan, 31, 41, for maps and topographic data. 4. On possible Native-language names for the Charles River, see R. A. DouglasLithgow, Native American Place Names of Massachusetts (orig. 1909, Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2001), 58. The name “Charles River” appears very early in EuroAmerican cartography of the region. On river history, see Karl Haglund, Inventing the Charles River (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

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5. Joseph Pierre Anselme Maurault, Histoire des Abenakis, depuis 1605 jusqu’à nos jours ([Sorel, QC]: Imprimé à l’atelier typographique de la “Gazette de Sorel,” 1866), ix; Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, pt. 2, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 350; “Pastonki,” in Western Abenaki Dictionary, WAR Radio, and Online Lessons: Home of the Abenaki Language, http:// westernabenaki.com (accessed April 9, 2017). 6. Chris Reidy and Janette Neuwahl, “Legislature votes to repeal 1675 Hub ban on Indians,” Boston Globe, May 20, 2005. 7. Patricia Rubertone has used the phrase “urban homelands” in works in progress about Narragansetts and other Natives living in Providence, Rhode Island. I have borrowed it here for its utility in reframing conceptions of indigeneity and urbanism. 8. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xii. 9. William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 172–234, 211, 218, 221; Rachel Sayet (Mohegan), “Moshup’s Continuance: Sovereignty and the Literature of the Land in the Aquinnah Wampanoag Nation” (ALM thesis, Harvard University Extension School, 2012); Helen Attaquin (Wampanoag), “How Martha’s Vineyard Came to Be,” in Dawn.Vcs., 459–460. 10. On this figure as a place-shaper, see “Gluskabe Fixes the Rivers and Falls,” as narrated by Carol Dana, via Penobscot Nation Cultural and Historic Preservation Department, http://www.penobscotculture.com; Gordon Day, “The Western Abenaki Transformer,” chap. 19 in In Search of New England’s Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day, ed. Michael K. Foster and William Cowan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 11. Barbara E. Luedtke, “Archaeology on the Boston Harbor Islands after 25 Years,” BMAS 61, no. 1 (Spring 2000), 2–11, esp. 8; David Kales, The Boston Harbor Islands: A History of an Urban Wilderness (Charleston SC: History Press, 2007), esp. chap. 1, “Prehistory”; Kimberly Burgess, Paul Grant-Costa, and Tobias Glaza, “The People at the Edge: A Native History. A Contextual Study of Native American Ethnohistory. Boston Harbor Islands, A National Park Area,” Northeast Region Ethnography Program, National Park Service, Boston MA (Sept. 2007); Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), “Natural Resources” interactive website, http://www.wampnrd.com/index.html (accessed April 9, 2017). 12. Jonathan K. Patton, “Considering the Wet Homelands of Indigenous Massachusetts,” Journal of Social Archaeology 14, no. 1 (Feb. 2014): 87–111; Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Matthew R. Bahar, “People of the Dawn, People of the Door: Indian Pirates and the Violent Theft of an Atlantic World,” Journal of American History 101, no. 2 (Sept. 2014): 401–426; on related concepts in the Pacific Northwest, Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

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13. Brona G. Simon, “Massachusetts Bay,” in Highway to the Past: The Archaeology of Boston’s Big Dig, ed. Ann-Eliza H. Lewis (Boston: Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2001), 7–16. 14. Ann Marie Plane, “New England’s Logboats: Four Centuries of Watercraft,” BMAS 52, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 8–17; George Brennan, “Mashpee Wampanoag Dugout Canoe on Way to Smithsonian,” Cape Cod Times, Sept. 5, 2013. 15. Nancy Shoemaker, “Whale Meat in American History,” Environmental History 10 (April 2005): 269–294; Elizabeth Alden Little and J. Clinton Andrews, “Drift Whales at Nantucket: The Kindness of Moshup,” in Nantucket and Other Native Places: The Legacy of Elizabeth Alden Little, ed. Elizabeth Chilton and Mary Lynne Rainey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 63–86. 16. J. Clinton Andrews, “Indian Fish and Fishing Off Coastal Massachusetts,” and Elizabeth A. Little, “Observations on Methods of Collection, Use, and Seasonality of Shellfish on the Coasts of Massachusetts,” both in BMAS 47, no. 2 (Oct. 1986): 42–46, 46–59. 17. [William Wood], Wood’s New England’s Prospect (Boston: Prince Society, 1865), 107. 18. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 65–66; Lisa Brooks, personal communications about water names (pertaining to motion and stillness), 2014; discussion on waterways with Elizabeth James Perry and Jonathan Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Oct. 2013. 19. Charles C. Willoughby, Indian Burial Place at Winthrop, Massachusetts, with Notes on the Skeletal Remains by Earnest A. Hooten, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, vol. 9, no. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Printed by the Museum, 1924); Susan G. Gibson, ed., Burr’s Hill: A 17th Century Wampanoag Burial Ground in Warren, Rhode Island (Providence: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1980); Christina J. Hodge, “Faith and Practice at an Early Eighteenth-Century Wampanoag Burial Ground: The Waldo Farm Site in Dartmouth, Massachusetts,” Historical Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2005): 65–86. 20. William F. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2000); Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 21. David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620: From the Bristol Voyages of the Fifteenth Century to the Pilgrim Settlement at Plymouth: The Exploration, Exploitation, and Trial-by-Error Colonization of North America by the English (New York: Knopf, 1974). 22. Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki) reflected on these disturbances in her poem “Before Moving on to Plymouth from Cape Cod—1620,” from Mother/Land (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2006).

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23. Countering long-standing triumphalist accounts, Kathleen Donegan reconsidered the crises that shaped early English colonization experiments like Plymouth in Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 24. James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), esp. chap. 6, “Still Standing in the Ground: The Archaeology of Early Plymouth”; “Architectural Forms in Plymouth Colony,” The Plymouth Colony Archive Project, http://www.histarch. illinois.edu/plymouth/arch.html. 25. William Bradford, as quoted and contextualized in Deetz and Deetz, The Times of Their Lives, 67–69; also James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, “Descriptions of the Fortified Town of Plymouth, 1620–1628,” in The Plymouth Colony Archive Project, http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/fortdesc.html. 26. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 120–121. 27. Matt Cohen, “Native Audiences,” chap. 1 in The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Thomas Morton, The New English Canaan (Boston: Printed for the [Prince] Society, 1883). 28. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 129–130; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 227. 29. Puritans frequently recast Maushop’s storied places with “Devil”-ish toponyms. I acknowledge Rachel Sayet’s researches on this topic. 30. JJW, 33n.9. 31. Sacvan Bercovitch, “Puritan Origins Revisited: The ‘City Upon a Hill’ as a Model of Tradition and Innovation,” in Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture, ed. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 31–48. 32. JJW, 35. 33. Called Noddle’s Island by colonists. JJW, 36n33. 34. Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), esp. 2; Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 35. JJW, 38. 36. Gookin, Hist.Coll., 18–19. 37. Ibid., 20. 38. Ibid., chap. 7, “Of the Number, Names, and Situation of the Indian praying towns . . .”; W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War

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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Michael Clark, ed., The Eliot Tracts: With letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003); Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 1, “Praying Indians and the Mission upon the Hill.” 39. Gookin, Hist.Coll., 66; Elise M. Brenner, “Archaeological Investigations at a Massachusetts Praying Town,” BMAS 47, no. 2 (Oct. 1986): 69–77; Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1997), chap. 2, “The sinews and the flesh: Natick comes together, 1650–75.” 40. Gookin, Hist.Coll., 74. 41. Stephen A. Mrozowski, “The Tyranny of Prehistory and the Search for a Deeper History,” chap. 11 in The Death of Prehistory, ed. Mrozowski and Peter R. Schmidt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 220–240. Also Elise M. Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey: That is the Question; Strategies for Cultural Autonomy of Massachusetts Praying Indian Towns,” Ethnohistory 27, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 135–152; Catherine Carlson, Archival and Archaeological Research Report on the Configuration of the Seven Original Seventeenth Century Praying Indian Towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Archaeological Services, 1986); Donna Rae Gould, “Wabbaquasset: An Ethnohistorical Analysis and Methodology for Locating a 17th-Century Praying Village” (master’s thesis, University of Connecticut, 2005); Holly Herbster, “A Documentary Archaeology of Magunkkaquog” (master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts-Boston, 2005); Diana DiPaolo Loren, In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Eastern Woodlands (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008). 42. Gookin, Hist.Coll., 71–72. 43. For the important insight that stressors of colonization combined with biological effects contributed to the massive scale of Indigenous population loss during epidemics, see David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” WMQ, 3rd series, 60, no. 4 (Oct. 2003): 703–742. 44. The Indian College could accommodate twenty scholars, and when Native students did not take up many places, English students were accommodated instead. Gookin, Hist.Coll., 52–54, 58, 73; Benjamin Peirce, A History of Harvard University, from Its Foundation, in the Year 1636, to the Period of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Brown, Shattuck, 1833), 25–29; Christina J. Hodge, “ ‘A Small Brick Pile for the Indians’: The 1655 Harvard Indian College as Setting,” in Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement, ed. Mary C. Beaudry and Travis G. Parno (New York: Springer, 2013), 217– 236; Lisa T. Brooks, “The Primacy of the Present, the Primacy of Place: Navigating the Spiral of History in the Digital World,” PMLA 127:2 (2012): 308–316; Drew Lopenzina, “Praying Indians, Printing Devils: Centers of Indigeneity within Colonial Containments (1643–1665),” chap. 2 in Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the

notes to pages 41–43

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Colonial Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); “From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations,” web exhibition, AAS, ed. Kimberly Pelkey et al., 2016, http://www.americanantiquarian.org/EnglishtoAlgonquian. 45. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds., Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); “Off to College: Higher Education in the Americas, 1551–1825,” web exhibition, JCBL, ed. Jeremy Mumford et al., 2014, http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/ John_Carter_Brown_Library/exhibitions/education/index.html. In North America, the Brafferton Indian School at the College of William & Mary also supported Indigenous education in colonial settings. See Louis P. Nelson, “The Brafferton at the College of William and Mary: A Historic Structure Report,” report for director of the Historic Campus at the College of William and Mary, 2003; Karen A. Stuart, “ ‘So Good a Work’: The Brafferton School, 1691–1777” (master’s thesis, The College of William and Mary, 1984); Bobby Wright, “ ‘For the Children of the Infidels’?: American Indian Education in the Colonial Colleges,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 12, no. 3 (1988): 1–14; W. Stitt Robinson, Jr., “Indian Education and Missions in Colonial Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 18, no. 2 (May 1952): 152–168; Andrea Davis, “Digging up our roots: Students join the hunt for historical relics at the Brafferton’s base,” Ideation, Oct. 3, 2011, http://www.wm.edu/research/ideation/social-sciences/ digging-up-our-roots4693.php. 46. Gookin, “Of the Progress of the Gospel among the Indians at Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket . . .,” chap. 9 in Hist.Coll.; David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” WMQ, 3rd series, 62, no. 2 (April 2005): 141–174; David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 47. The quotation on land from Increase Mather is in So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676–1677, ed. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1978), 179. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 387–409, esp. 388; also Walter Hixon, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013). 48. JJW, 42, 55. 49. For regionally pertinent land transactions, see Suffolk Deeds series, published in Boston (beginning 1880, Rockwell and Churchill); for several examples, see Lib. I:34 (1642), about Concord River; Lib. I:63 (1644–1645), by Socananoco; Lib. II:51–52 (1649), by Robin Hoode for island; Lib. II:92 (1641), by Quoshamakin; Lib. III:143–144 (1657), by Peter, Josias Hoddin, Solomon about Whip Sufferage; Lib. V:450–452 (1665), by Josiah Wampatuck et al. about Hingham; Lib. V:462–463 (1668), by Josiah Wampatuck; Lib. V:463–464 (1668), by Josiah Wampatuck and George Wampe about

350

notes to pages 43–45

Tohkecommumwackuck; Lib. VI:288–289 (1662), by Anaussanuk et al., about area by Nipmugg Great Pond and Medfield; Lib. XII:264–265 (1682), by Waban, John Awasamog, Peter Ephraim et al. about Sherborn area, which maintains Indian rights for “fishing and fowling” at waterways; Lib. XII:297–298 (1682), by Black James et al. about land beyond the Kuttutuk/Providence River, with tract reserved. See also Sidney Perley, The Indian Land Titles of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem, MA: Essex Book and Print Club, 1912). 50. On New England Puritanism as a system deeply entwined with entrepreneurial commercialism and emerging capitalist systems, see Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 51. Gookin, Hist.Coll., 62–63. 52. JJW, 65, 75. 53. George H. Haynes, “ ‘The Tale of Tantiusques.’ An Early Mining Venture in Massachusetts,” in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 14, pt. 3 (Oct. 1901), 471–497; Dennis Connole, The Indians of the Nipmuck Country in Southern New England, 1630–1750 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), esp. 143–145 on Tantiusques, and chap. 9, “Nipmuck Land Transfers and Settlement by the English Prior to 1675”; Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013), 109–110, 138, 270, 282, 305, 307; Vincent Antil, Russ Hopping, Susan Edwards, and Dick O’Brien, for the Trustees of Reservations, “Tantiusques Management Plan” (2009); J. Edward Hood and Holly V. Izard, “Two Examples of Marginal Architecture in Rural Worcester County: Identifying & Documenting the Homes of N[ew] E[ngland]’s Marginalized Peoples” (Jan. 1999), OSV Research Paper, Old Sturbridge Village website, http://resources.osv.org/explore_learn/document_viewer.php?DocID=770 (accessed April 9, 2017). 54. John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991), 23–38; Connole, Indians of the Nipmuck Country, 149–154. 55. Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, gestures at these interlocking interests (28n38), but does not take the conclusion far enough, given that his study focuses on colonial motivations rather than Indigenous interests. 56. JJW, 47, 50–52, 54, 57, 101; related episode, 105, 110. 57. JJW, 190–192. Two years later Ninigret, sachem of the Niantics, traveled to Boston in the company of John Winthrop, Jr., likewise to speak with United Colonies commissioners. It has been speculated that he sat for a portrait during this visit; see Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts:

notes to pages 46–50

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Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), xii, 68–69. 58. JJW, 399. 59. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 60. Fisher and Silverman, Ninigret, 61. 61. On Passaconaway, JJW, 510, 568; on Masconomet and Wachusett sachems, JJW, 498–499; on Pomham, JJW, 458–462, 513. 62. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 440–441. 63. Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), esp. chap. 3, “Native Tongues”; Fisher and Silverman, Ninigret, esp. chap. 3, “ ‘I doe but Right my owne quarrel,’ ” and chap. 4, “A Time of Decision.” 64. For one synopsis of causations, see John Easton, “A Relacion of the Indyan Warre, by Mr. Easton, of Roade Isld., 1675,” in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675– 1699, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913). 65. Christine M. DeLucia, “Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 467–502. 66. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 436. 67. Connole, Indians of the Nipmuck Country, 162–165, chap. 10, “The Nipmucks Go to War,” chap. 11, “The Spring Campaign of 1676.” 68. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 445; Hubbard, Narr., 27. 69. Jason W. Warren, Connecticut Unscathed: Victory in the Great Narragansett War, 1675–1676 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). 70. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 450–451. 71. Oct. 13, 1675, in Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1674–1686, vol. 5, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston: William White, 1854), 46–47. 72. Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, “Deer Island,” chap. 36 in A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston (Boston: Printed by request of the City Council, 1871); Connole, Indians of the Nipmuck Country, 173–175; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 138–141; Hubbard, Narrative, 30. 73. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 468–472. For an account of other Natives, from Nemasket area, being removed to Clarke’s Island at the mouth of Plymouth Harbor, see “Appendix” in Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial, 5th ed. (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1826), 410. 74. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 473–474; March 8, 1675/76, Mass.Arch. 30:195; Suffolk Deeds Lib. XII:163–165 (1670); Shrimpton found himself directly involved with Native

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prisoners when the council ordered five of them to be delivered to him to labor on Noddle’s Island. Sept. 22, 1675, Mass.Arch. 30:177A. On the Shrimptons and the islands, see Illustrated Boston: The Metropolis of New England; Containing also Reviews of Its Principal Environs (New York: American Publishing and Engraving, 1889), 79–80. 75. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 474. 76. March 8, 1675/76, Mass.Arch. 30:195. 77. Nov. 30, 1675, Mass.Arch. 30:185C. 78. General Management Plan, 76, 80. 79. Feb. 29, 1675/76, Mass.Arch. 30:194. On council orders granting Natives planting land on Long Island, and also authorizing Henchman to appropriate the house of Widow Evans there, see March 20, 1675/76, Mass.Arch. 30:198A. 80. March 14, 1675/76, Mass.Arch. 30:197. 81. Mass.Arch.: Feb. 28, 1675/76, 30:193; March 11, 1675/76, 30:193B; March 4, 1675/76, 30:192; March 15, 1675/76, 30:197A. Also Louise A. Breen, “Praying with the enemy: Daniel Gookin, King Philip’s War and the dangers of intercultural mediatorship,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Martin J. Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 101–122. 82. March 8, 1675/76, Mass.Arch. 30:195. 83. Undated [ca. 1676], Mass.Arch. 30:200A. 84. March 29, 1676, Mass.Arch. 30:199; Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 180–181. 85. Nov. 5, 1675, Mass.Arch. 30:184A. 86. “The Examination & Relation of James Quannapaquait,” Jan. 24, 1675/76, unpublished transcription courtesy of YIPP. See also Lepore, The Name of War, 141–143. 87. “The Third Remove,” in Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 1997), 73–77. Rowlandson’s text spelled Menemesit as Wenimesset. 88. For larger context of wartime ties to the French (in actuality and rumor), see Emerson W. Baker, “New Evidence on the French Involvement in King Philip’s War,” Maine Historical Society Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1988): 85–91. 89. I thank Lisa Brooks and Ed Londergan for a day-long tour of Quaboag and its vicinity, including sites along Foster Hill Road and possible locations of Menemesit (June 25, 2013). 90. April 4, 1676, Mass.Arch. 30:201. On peace medals in this context, see Lisa Brooks, “Peace medal,” in Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (New York: HarperCollins, in association with the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2010), 189. 91. General Management Plan, 4. 92. Peirce, A History of Harvard University, 46.

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93. “Information and Authority in Samuel Sewall’s Boston, 1676–1729,” chap. 1 in Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 94. Entry of Sept. 13, 1676, Diary of Samuel Sewall 1674–1729, vol. 1: 1674–1700, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 5—Fifth Series (Boston: The Society, 1878), 17. 95. Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 128; entry of Sept. 26, 1676, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1:22. 96. Entry of Sept. 22, 1676, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1:21. 97. Entries of July 1, 1687; July 12, 1688; April 4, 1690, in Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1:181, 219–220, 316. 98. Nov. 1, 1675, A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing the Boston Records from 1660 to 1701 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1881), also titled (and used hereafter) Boston Town Records, 97. 99. Jan. 23, 1676–77, Boston Town Records, 106–107. 100. July 24, 1677, Boston Town Records, 111–112. 101. Suffolk Deeds, Lib. XII:164 (1670). 102. On that site context, see Emerson W. Baker, The Clarke & Lake Company: The Historical Archaeology of a Seventeenth-Century Maine Settlement (Augusta, ME: Maine Historic Preservation Commission, 1985). 103. John Norton, Historical Sketch of Copp’s Hill Burying-Ground with Descriptions and Quaint Epitaphs (Boston: Hull Street, 1907), 13. See also a modern interpretive placard at Copp’s Hill: “The Kennebec Raid,” sign 5, Seventeenth Century Copp’s Hill. Some grave-marker information in this chapter is drawn from site visits, some from the Find a Grave database, http://www.findagrave.com (accessed March 10, 2012). 104. Oct. 15, 1675, Mass.Arch. 003:309A. 105. Jan. 1, 1678, Mass.Arch. 010:19. 106. “Indian Children Put to Service,” Aug. 10, 1676, later dated Cambridge, Oct. 28, 1676, copied from a manuscript in Gookin’s hand, published in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 8, no. 3 (July 1854): 270–273; Margaret Ellen Newell, “Indian Slavery in Colonial New England,” chap. 1 in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 33–66, esp. 47. 107. “Indian Children Put to Service,” 272. 108. Ibid., 271. 109. Ibid., 272–273. 110. “Captain Thomas Prentice,” in Charles James Fox Binney, The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, or Prentiss Family, in New England, Etc., from 1631 to 1883 (Boston: Published by the Editor, 1883), 161–164.

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notes to pages 56–59

111. “Indian Children Put to Service,” 272. For earlier orders from the council to Gookin to have two Native boys sent as messengers to England, see Mass.Arch. 30:224A [ca. 1676]; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 317n97. On longer histories of Indigenous transits to England, for an array of purposes, see Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 112. On terms of the indentures, “Indian Children Put to Service,” 271. On General Court orders, Edward Rawson on behalf of the General Court, June 5, 1677, printed in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 8, no. 3 (July 1854): 273. 113. “Unquiet Settlement (1676–1731),” chap. 2 in Kenneth J. Moynihan, A History of Worcester, 1674–1848 (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007), esp. 31–34. 114. Charles A. Chase, “Old Lincoln Street.—The Daniel Henchman Farm,” in Proceedings of the Worcester Society of Antiquity 18 (1902): 255–263. 115. Mel Yazawa, ed., The Diary and Life of Samuel Sewall (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 91–92. 116. Daniel Gookin, “An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677,” in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 2 (1836). 117. Sept. 28, 1685, Boston Town Records, 179. 118. Feb. 25, 1686, Boston Town Records, 190. 119. Peirce, A History of Harvard University, 32–33. 120. Inventory, Papers of Urian Oakes, UAI 15.855, Harvard University Archives. 121. Hamilton Andrews Hill, History of the Old South Church (Third Church) Boston, 1669–1884, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1890), 226–227. 122. Peirce, A History of Harvard University, 76. 123. Ibid., 69–70. 124. The deed was dated Oct. 11, 1715, and signed by “Thomas Waban, Samuel Abraham, Solomon Thomas, Abraham Speen, Thomas Pegun, Isaac Nehemiah, and Benjamin Tray, a committee or agents for the Indian proprietors of the plantation of Natick.” Peirce, A History of Harvard University, 103–104; “Letter of Natick Indians about Magunkaqoug; their unwillingness to sell it,” Sept. 5, 1715, HUY 26, box 2, folder 14, and rest of “Records relating to early land purchases and interactions with the Natick Indians, 1700–1724,” Series II: Hopkinton Records, 1700–ca. 1880s, Trustees of the Charity of Edward Hopkins, Records of the Trustees of the Charity of Edward Hopkins, 1700–1983, HUY 26, Harvard University Archives. See also entries of Sept. 28 and Oct. 11–12, 1715, in The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, vol. 2, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 800, 801–802; Peirce, A History of Harvard University, 103–104; Daniel Mandell, “ ‘Standing by His Father’: Thomas Waban of Natick, circa 1630–1722,” chap. 8 in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816, ed. Robert S. Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 166–192, esp. 184–185.

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125. Increase Mather, A Relation Of the Troubles which have hapned in New-England, By reason of the Indians there. From the year 1614. to the Year 1675 (Boston: John Foster, 1677). 126. Stephen Carl Arch, Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in SeventeenthCentury New England (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 3, “History in Pieces: Increase Mather and the New England Past,” and chap. 4, “Back to the Future: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana”; Lepore, “The Story of It Printed,” chap. 2 in The Name of War. 127. Increase Mather, A Brief History of the War With the Indians in New-England, (From June 24, 1675. when the first English-man was murdered by the Indians, to August 12, 1676. when Philip alias Metacomet, the principal Author and Beginner of the Warr, was slain.) Wherein the Grounds, Beginning, and Progress of the Warr, is summarily expressed, Together with a Serious Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Land (Boston: John Foster, 1676). 128. Diary by Increase Mather, March, 1675–December, 1676. Together with Extracts from Another Diary by Him, 1674–1687. With an Introduction and Notes, by Samuel A. Green (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son / University Press, 1900), esp. 13, 18, 43–45. 129. Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 16; on Mather’s life, see Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); on the fire, see 127–128. 130. Diary by Increase Mather, 38. 131. Ibid., 32. 132. Ibid., 39. 133. Ibid., 39. 134. Dec. 28, 1676, and Jan. 1, 1676, Boston Town Records, 105–106. 135. “The Mather-Eliot House, near corner of Hanover and North Bennet Streets, Boston MA. 1898 (approximate).” Photograph. Print Department, Boston Public Library. 136. Cotton Mather, The Bostonian Ebenezer. Some Historical Remarks, On the State of Boston, The Chief Town of New-England, and of the English America. With Some Agreeable Methods, For Preserving and Promoting, the Good State of THAT, as well as any other Town, in the like Circumstances. Humbly Offer’d, By a Native of Boston (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, for Samuel Phillips, 1698). The volume joined two published lectures: “The History of Boston, Related and Improved,” delivered in 1698; followed by “Household Religion, Recommended, for the Preservation of our Houses,” originally delivered in 1695, beginning on 44. Quotations from 73, 75. 137. Dickran Tashjian, “Puritan Attitudes toward Iconoclasm,” Puritan Gravestone Art II, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 1978 (Boston: Boston University, 1979), 37–45; Dickran and Ann Tashjian, Memorials for Children of Change: The Art of Early New England Stonecarving (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan

356

notes to pages 61–64

University Press, 1974); Francis J. Bremer, “Endecott and the Red Cross: Puritan Iconoclasm in the New World,” Journal of American Studies 24, no. 1 (April 1990): 5–22; Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2003); Bruno Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, ed. Latour, Peter Weibel, and Charlotte Bigg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 16–38. 138. Mark A. Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” WMQ, 3rd series, 58, no. 2 (April 2001): 307–346; Mark A. Peterson, “Stone Witnesses, Dumb Pictures, and Voices from the Grave: Objects, Images, and Collective Memory in Early Boston,” in Commemoration in America: Essays on Monuments, Memorialization, and Memory, ed. David Gobel and Daves Rossell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013); also Philip B. Gould, Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57–58. The lack of early monumentalizing in New England has been partly explained through “iconophobia”: “For generations, the Puritans and their heirs built no monuments as material equivalents of written histories,” in “The Necessity for Monuments: Art and Public Commemoration in the Young Republic,” chap. 5 in Blanche M. G. Linden, Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, in association with the Library of American Landscape History, 2007), 95–116, esp. 96. 139. Mather, The Bostonian Ebenezer, 4. 140. Ibid., 4–5. 141. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of NewEngland, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of our Lord, 1698. In Seven Books (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702). 142. Ibid., bk. 7, 49. 143. Ibid., 58. 144. Ibid., 53. 145. Ibid., 55. 146. Ibid., 58–59. 147. Abiel Holmes, American Annals; or, A Chronological History of America, From Its Discovery in 1492 to 1806, vol. 1 (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1813; repr. from Cambridge, MA, edition, 1805), 361. Wadsworth’s diary covered the period (1725–1736) when the monument was erected, but made no remarks about the monument. Benjamin Wadsworth, Diary, 1725–1736, UAI 15.868, box 1, Papers of Benjamin Wadsworth, Harvard University Archives. 148. James Deetz and Edwin S. Dethlefsen, “Death’s Head, Cherub, Urn and Willow,” Natural History 76, no. 3 (1967): 29–37. 149. Bodge, SIKPW (1896), 230; Alfred Sereno Hudson, “The Wadsworth Monument,” in The History of Sudbury, Massachusetts. 1638–1889 (Boston: R. H. Blodgett, 1889), 515–522.

notes to pages 64–66

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150. For an argument about the rise of gravestones in the Boston area post-1680 in connection with military honors accorded to soldiers from King Philip’s War, see Colin Porter, “Gravestones and King Philip’s War: Commemoration in Seventeenth-Century New England” (master’s thesis, Brown University, 2009). 151. “That Blasphemous Leviathan,” chap. 7 in Lepore, The Name of War. 152. A History of the Book in America: Volume I, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), esp. 188; Rollo G. Silver, “Publishing in Boston, 1726–1757: The Accounts of Daniel Henchman,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 66 (1956): 17–36; Samuel G. Drake, The History and Antiquities of Boston, The Capital of Massachusetts and Metropolis of New England, From Its Settlement in 1630, to the Year 1770 (Boston: Luther Stevens, 1856), 647–648. 153. O’Brien, “ ‘Friend Indians’: Negotiating colonial rules, 1676–1700,” chap. 3, and “Divided in their desires, 1700–40,” chap. 4 in Dispossession by Degrees. 154. Edward Rawson on behalf of the General Court, June 5, 1677, printed in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 8, no. 3 (July 1854): 273. 155. May 25, 1685, Mass.Arch. 30:304. 156. Mandell, “ ‘Standing by His Father’ ”; Connole, The Indians of the Nipmuck Country, 230, also “Dispersal of the Nipmuck Tribes,” chap. 13, and “Disposal of the Remaining Lands in the Nipmuck Country,” chap. 14; Nan Goodman, “The Deer Island Indians and Common Law Performance,” chap. 2 in Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832, ed. Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); and Goodman, “Deer Island and the Banishment of the Indians,” chap. 4 in Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 157. Donna Rae Gould, “Contested Places: The History and Meanings of Hassanamisco” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2010), 5, 42. 158. Ibid., 44; Daniel Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. 145–148; Records of the Trustees of the Indians of Hassanamisco (Grafton) from 1718 to 1857, and related documents, in John Milton Earle papers, AAS. 159. Thomas L. Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts, A People Who Had ‘Vanished,’ ” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 207–230; O’Brien, “ ‘They are so frequently shifting their place of residence’: Natick Indians, 1741–90,” chap. 6 in Dispossession by Degrees. 160. March 23, 1675/76, Mass.Arch. 30:198B. 161. May 19, 1677, Boston Town Records, 110–111. 162. Oct. 2, 1677, Boston Town Records, 113. 163. Aug. 9, 1683, Mass.Arch. 30:275A. 164. June 18, 1684, Boston Town Records, 169.

358

notes to pages 66–71

165. May 25, 1685, Boston Town Records, 177; “Indian deed for Boston, 19 March 1685,” MHS online “Object of the Month,” Sept. 2006, http://www.masshist.org/ object-of-the-month/objects/indian-deed-for-boston-2006–09–01. 166. May 23, 1746, A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing the Boston Town Records, 1742 to 1757 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1885), 96–97. 167. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 168. On Aug. 22, 1724, “28 Indian scalps brought to Boston; one of wc was Bombazens, and one fryer Railes.” Jeremiah Bumstead, “Diary of Jeremiah Bumstead of Boston, 1722–1727,” printed in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 15, no. 3 (July 1861), 193–204, esp. 202 on the twenty-eight scalps. In July 1722 he reported a number of Natives brought into Boston from Dunstable and Nashaway, 195–196. He reported more scalps brought into Boston in March 1725, 204. 169. July 2, 1689, Mass.Arch. 30:312. On observance of prayer and fast days for success against the Wabanaki and French, see Aug. 20, 1690, Mass.Arch. 011:57; April 23, 1691, Mass.Arch. 011:58. 170. March 11, 1700, Boston Town Records, 241. 171. Entry of Oct. 19, 1722, “Diary of Jeremiah Bumstead,” 196. 172. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 1, “Patriotic Indians and Identities of Revolution”; Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), chap. 7, “ ‘Resolute Men (Dressed as Mohawks).’ ” 173. Rakashi Chand, “ ‘Bedazzling the Eyes . . . Like an Angel of the Sun’: Shem Drowne’s Indian Archer Weathervane,” MHS online “Object of the Month,” Oct. 2008, http://www.masshist.org/object- of- the- month/objects/bedazzling- the- eyes- likean-angel-of-the-sun-2008–10–01; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” in Mosses from an Old Manse, vol. 2 (London: Wiley & Putnam, 1846), 54–73; Jean Lipman, “Weathervanes,” in American Folk Art in Wood, Metal and Stone (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 49. 174. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. I: 1791–1835 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1879), xv. 175. “Circular Letter of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Respectfully addressed to every Gentleman of Science in the Continent and Islands of America,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, For the Year M.DCC,XCV (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1795, repr. John H. Easton, 1835), 5. 176. Entry of Oct. 30, 1804, p. 15, in Cabinet Book 1791–1934, MHS Pre–1900 Archives, MHS. The bowl was loaned to the Harvard Peabody Museum in 1927 and returned to MHS in 1982. 177. Sept. 1803, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. I: 1791–1835 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1879), 163.

notes to pages 71–74

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178. Elizabeth James-Perry, personal correspondence with the author, Jan. 6, 2015. I also acknowledge Lisa Brooks and Nancy Shoemaker for conversations about potential provenance and meanings, and MHS for allowing me to present research on this item to staff and fellows. For extended consideration of material culture issues and this bowl, plus a related object purportedly associated with Weetamoo at the Old Colony Historical Society (Taunton, MA), see Christine DeLucia, “Philip’s Corn Bowl, Weetamoo’s Grinding Stone: Re-situating ‘War Relics’ within Historical Algonquian Indian and Colonial Spaces,” paper for “Survivor Objects: The Material Culture of Memory” symposium, University of Delaware, Nov. 14–15, 2014; and Allyson LaForge, “Burl Bowls and Birchbark Baskets: Decolonizing Indigenous Material Culture in the Native Northeast,” esp. chap. 1, “Indigenous Persistence after King Philip’s War: The Wampanoag Elm Burl Bowl” (bachelor’s thesis, Mount Holyoke College, 2016). 179. “Appendix. No. 1. Articles on which the Society request information,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, For the Year M.DCC,XCV, 6. 180. Jan. 1799 meeting, 124, and Oct. 1795 meeting, 88, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. I: 1791–1835. 181. Jan. 1809 meeting, ibid., 203. 182. A Catalogue of the Paintings, Engravings, Busts, And Miscellaneous Articles, Belonging to the Cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: Published by the Society, 1885). See esp. Item No. 35, Lath, 115–116; Item No. 24, Indian Corn, 113–114; Item No. 30, Bowl (King Philip’s Samp bowl), 115; Item No. 37, Stone (the Sudbury monument fragment), 116, given in 1809; Item No. 41, Lock of the Gun by which King Philip Was Killed, 41. See also Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. I: 1791–1835, 68, 76, 88, 114, 147, 76. 183. Colonial museums with Native items also took shape at Yale College, the American Philosophical Society, the East India Marine Society of Salem, and other venues, in the mid- to late eighteenth century and early nineteenth. On these forms of collecting and their relations to museums in Europe (particularly Great Britain), see Christine M. DeLucia, “Indigenous Objects in Motion: Rethinking Native Material Cultures and Early American Collecting,” fellow’s talk, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, Aug. 5, 2015. 184. Savage previously transcribed, edited, and published the first part of the Winthrop manuscript as The History of New England from 1630 to 1649. By John Winthrop, Esq. First Governour of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay. From His Original Manuscripts, vol. 1, ed. James Savage (Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1825); on publication context, see also The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), xii–xiii. 185. Letter from James Savage, May 1, 1826, printed in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. I: 1791–1835, 393.

360

notes to pages 74–77

186. Quarterly meeting, Oct. 1832, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. I: 1791–1835, 456. 187. Josiah Quincy, A Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston, During Two Centuries. From September 17, 1630, to September 17, 1830 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1852), 193. 188. Frederick W. A. S. Brown, A Valedictory Poem; Addressed to the Inhabitants of Rainsford’s, George’s, Gallop’s, Light House, and Deer ISLANDS, in Boston Harbour (Boston: True & Weston, 1819), 8. 189. Ibid., 37, 17. 190. Sarah Sprague Jacobs, “Deer Island,” chap. 19 in Nonantum and Natick (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1853), esp. 275. 191. Jacobs, Nonantum and Natick, 319. 192. Ibid. 193. Lisa Brooks, “Regenerating the Village Dish: William Apess and the Mashpee Woodland Revolt,” chap. 4 in The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. 189–190 on the Boston visit, also, “Envisioning New England as Native Space: William Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip,” chap. 5. I thank Paul Grant-Costa for discussions on Apess’s selfpresentation and kinship/community ties, particularly links to Mohegan. 194. William Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal Street, Boston (1836),” in A Son of the Forest and Other Writings, by William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Todd Vogel, “William Apess’s Theater and a ‘Native’ American History,” chap. 2 in ReWriting White: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), esp. 49; Philip F. Gura, The Life of William Apess, Pequot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), esp. chap. 6, “King Philip’s Heir (1835–1836).” 195. In other Boston theatrical events, the celebrated actor Edwin Forrest performed in Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags in the 1830s and 1840s. Ojibway Indians came to Boston for performances of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, released by city booksellers in 1855. For an overview of Apess at the Odeon and Metamora, see Lepore, “The Curse of Metamora,” chap. 8 in The Name of War; Alan Trachtenberg, “Staging Hiawatha,” chap. 1 in Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 196. I thank Daniel Radus for sharing his research on Apess’s multiple deliveries: Radus, “Apess’s Eulogy on Tour: Kinship and the Transnational History of Native New England,” chap. 2 in a forthcoming dissertation from Cornell University, “Writing Native Pasts in the Nineteenth Century.” 197. Frederick Freeman, Civilization and Barbarism, Illustrated by Especial Reference to Metacomet and the Extinction of His Race (Cambridge, MA: Printed for the author at Riverside Press, 1878), 3.

notes to pages 77–80

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198. Ibid., 167. 199. Freeman previously authored The History of Cape Cod: The Annals of Barnstable County and of Its Several Towns, Including the District of Mashpee. In Two Volumes (Boston: Printed for the Author by Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1860), in which he discussed Apess and the Mashpees, 703, 712–713. 200. Freeman, Civilization and Barbarism, 2–3. 201. Ibid., 182. 202. Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 203. Arthur Walworth, School Histories at War: A Study of the Treatment of Our Wars in the Secondary School History Books of the United States and in Those of Its Former Enemies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938); Kyle Roy Ward, History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years (New York: New Press, 2006). 204. Arthur Gilman, A History of the American People (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1883), 168. 205. Samuel G. Goodrich, A Pictorial History of the United States: With Notices of Other Portions of America North and South (Philadelphia: J. H. Butler, 1874), 472. 206. John J. Anderson, Preface, A Pictorial School History of the United States; To Which Are Added the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, With Questions and Explanations (New York: Clark & Maynard, 1880). 207. Goodrich, A Pictorial History of the United States, 472. I acknowledge the Historical Textbooks Collection at the Gutman Library, Harvard Graduate School of Education, for facilitating access to many of these texts. 208. Anderson, A Pictorial School History of the United States, 53, in the section on King Philip’s War. 209. Benson J. Lossing, A Pictorial History of the United States. For Schools and Families (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 102. 210. Dawn Dove, “Alienation of Indigenous Students in the Public School System,” in Dawn.Vcs., 524. 211. Joe Starita, “I Am a Man”: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), esp. 180–189. 212. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1881). 213. Ibid., “Appendix,” 382. 214. Valerie Sherer Mathes, ed., The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 8–9. 215. Ibid., 9. 216. Edward Everett Hale, “Boston in Philip’s War,” chap. 9 in The Memorial History of Boston, including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630–1880, I: The Early and Colonial Periods, ed. Justin Winsor (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880), 311–328; Hezekiah Butterworth,

362

notes to pages 80–83

Young Folks’ History of Boston. Fully Illustrated (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1881), 132, esp. “The Old Elm on Boston Common,” and “The Story of Old Jethro,” 124–128, 131–132. Hale had ties with the Mitchell sisters (Wampanoag); see Charles Wells Moulton, “Hezekiah Butterworth,” Magazine of Poetry: A Quarterly Review 2, no. 4 (Oct. 1890): 393; “Last of Cape Rulers,” Boston Globe, Aug. 4, 1901, 32. Also “Deer Island,” entry in Edwin Munroe Bacon and George Edward Ellis, Bacon’s Dictionary of Boston, with an Historical Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1886), 128–129; Edwin M. Bacon, Rambles Around Old Boston (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), esp. chap. 4, “The Common and Round About.” 217. “Note—August, 1848,” on Deer Island, in [James Lloyd Homer], Nahant, and Other Places on the North-Shore; Being a Continuation of Notes on the Sea-Shore, by the Shade of Alden (Boston: William Chadwick, 1848), 27. 218. “Boston Harbor Census Snapshots,” in Burgess et al., “The People at the Edge,” 184–186. 219. Snow, Islands of Boston Harbor, 127–176; M. F. Sweetser, King’s Handbook of Boston Harbor (Boston: Moses King, 1888), 220–224; “Deer Island and the City Institutions,” Daily Evening Traveller (Boston: 184[8?]); “Natick,” by S. D. Hosmer et al., in History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Containing Carefully Prepared Histories of Every City and Town in the County, by Well-Known Writers; and a General History of the County, From the Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 2, ed. Samuel Adams Drake (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1880), 188. 220. “ ‘Settlers’ Beat Band of Indians; Annual Fight of Boys on Thompson’s Island,” Boston Globe, Feb. 23, 1923, 15. 221. I wish to acknowledge that this episode first came to my attention through a social media posting by a Nipmuc community member. For historical context, see Marta Weigle and Peter White, “Centering: Southwestern Indian Concepts of Space,” in The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 150; Robert G. Hays, “A Boston Revival,” March 31, 1882, in Editorializing “The Indian Problem”: The New York Times on Native Americans, 1860–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2007), 337–339; Jerold S. Auerbach, Explorers in Eden: Pueblo Indians and the Promised Land (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 32–33; Frank Hamilton Cushing, Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879–1884 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 218; Curtis M. Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age,” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 169–207, esp. 193–198; Mary Robinson Reynolds, “Recollections of Sixty Years of Service in the American Antiquarian Society,” Proceedings of the AAS 55 (April 1945): 25. 222. Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, eds., The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 52. 223. “The Zuni Indians. Yesterday’s Pilgrimage to the Sea—Interesting Ceremonies and Unusual Scenes at Deer Island,” Boston Daily Journal, March 29, 1882, 3. For

notes to pages 83–85

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other press coverage, see “Ancient Americans. Mystical Rites and Ceremonies of the Zuni Indians in Boston Harbor,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), March 29, 1882, 1; “The Pilgrimage of the Zunis. They Visit the Ocean at Boston. Unique Ceremonies on the Shore,” New York Herald-Tribune, March 29, 1882, 1; “Local Topics. Events of Interest in the City Yesterday,” Boston Daily Advertiser, March 28, 1882, 8. 224. Items 16, 23, 24, in The Club of Odd Volumes: Tenth Anniversary Exhibition at the Boston Art Club, February 17–24, 1897 (Cambridge, MA: University Press / John Wilson and Son, 1897), 4–6.

Chapter 2. Protesting the “Perfect City” 1. Williams, Key into Lang., 63–64. On Indigenous and Western-colonial temporalities, see, e.g., Vine Deloria, Jr., “Thinking in Time and Space,” chap. 4 in God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 30th ann. ed. (1973; Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003); David W. Dinwoodie, “Time and the Individual in Native North America,” chap. 14 in New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, ed. Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); John Demos, Circles and Line: The Shape of Life in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 2. “ ‘Cave Life to City Life’: The Pageant of the Perfect City,” in New Boston: A Chronicle of Progress in Developing a Greater and Finer City—Under the Auspices of the Boston1915 Movement 1, no. 7 (Nov. 1910): 277–294. On pageantry, see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), esp. 4 and 80. 3. Alison Griffiths, “Hiawatha: Redeemable Ethnography,” in Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 276–278. For an account of the Boston performance, see Lewis E. Palmer, “ ‘Cave Life to City Life,’ ” New England Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly 43, no. 3 (Nov.–Dec. 1910): 316–318. 4. Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 95. 5. John Milton Earle, Report to the Governor and Council, Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth, Under the Act of April 6, 1859 (Boston: William White, Printer to the State, 1861), esp. 44, 73–75, 176, 191, 192, 194, 201–202, 213–214, 222–223; “Maine Indians in the Commonwealth,” in Kimberly Burgess, Paul Grant-Costa, and Tobias Glaza, “The People at the Edge: A Native History. A Contextual Study of Native American Ethnohistory. Boston Harbor Islands, A National Park Area,” Northeast Region Ethnography Program, National Park Service, Boston, MA (Sept. 2007), 189–202; Bunny McBride, Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), esp. chap. 5, “Road Shows and Ballyhoo”; Daniel R. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), esp. 42–43.

364

notes to pages 87–89

6. A worthwhile future project would involve mapping Indian households within Boston to identify locative patterns and neighborhood affinities. New England had a notably higher urban Indian population in the first third of the twentieth century (by percentage) than any other U.S. region. It rose from 38.5 percent in 1910 to 42.2 percent in 1930: i.e., nearly half of Native people in New England lived in urban areas. “Indian Population by Urban and Rural Areas,” in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. The Indian Population of the United States and Alaska (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1937), 6. 7. Charles H. Trout, Boston, The Great Depression, and the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Thomas H. O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950–1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 9–12. 8. City of Boston Archives and Records Management Division, “Guide to the Boston Tercentenary Committee Records,” Collection No. 0200.002, 1829–1830, 1928–1930; Elizabeth M. Herlihy, Tercentenary of the Founding of Boston. An Account of the Celebration Marking the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Site of the City of Boston, Massachusetts ([Boston]: 1930); Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 173–174. 9. Philip engaged with Plymouth multiple times in the 1660s–1670s, and the program is not clear about which Plymouth event was being represented—arguably the notable Sept. 1671 visit. Tercentenary of the Founding of Boston, esp. 196, 212. 10. Catalogue, Boston Tercentenary Fine Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Horticultural Hall, July, 1930 (n.p.: [1930]), 7, 12; Carol Clark, “Indians on the Mantel and in the Park,” in The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 24–55; “Tribal Chiefs” section, Leslie Jones: The Camera Man, Boston Herald Traveler: 1917–1956, digital collections (based on Boston Public Library holdings), http:// www.lesliejonesphotography.com/taxonomy/term/1862/all; Michael Wallis, The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 11. Donna Rae Gould, “Contested Places: The History and Meanings of Hassanamisco” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2010), 43–44; Report of the Commissioners Relating to the Condition of the Indians in Massachusetts, House No. 46 (Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1849), “The Hassanamisco, or Grafton Tribe,” 44 (including admission of mismanagement); National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Hassanamisco Reservation, prepared by Rae Gould, Eric Johnson, Betsy Friedberg, July 2011; Deborah A. Rosen, “State Citizenship by Legislative Action,” chap. 6 in American Indians and State Law: Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship, 1790– 1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Ann Marie Plane and Gregory Button, “The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act: Ethnic Contest in Historical Context, 1849–1869,” chap. 8 in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997).

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12. “Jethro’s Tree” marker, Concord MA, photographed by the author July 13, 2013. 13. Andrew J. Manuse, “The unvarnished truth: Natick post office mural gets fresh look,” Wicked Local Natick, Sept. 16, 2007; Patricia Raynor, “Off the Wall: New Deal Post Office Murals,” EnRoute 6, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1997); Heather Becker, Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904–1943 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 59; Richard B. Megraw, Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 96; Andrew J. Manuse, “Former postmaster immortalized in mural,” Wicked Local Natick, Jan. 25, 2008; “Indians at the Post Office: Native Themes in New Deal–Era Murals,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, online exhibition, http://postalmuseum. si.edu/indiansatthepostoffice/mural16.html. Holbrook produced another mural depicting Natick relations with Puritan missionaries, but it has been off view at the Morse Institute Library: Libby Franck, “Natick’s Murals of the Praying Indians,” July 26, 2012, Framingham History Center website, https://www.framinghamhistory.org/ naticks-murals-of-the-praying-indians. 14. Quoted in Howard Hull, Tennessee Post Office Murals (Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1996), 6. 15. “New Deal / WPA Art in Massachusetts,” http://www.wpamurals.com/ Massachu.html (accessed June 2, 2012); Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 16. Martin Moore, Memoirs of the Life and Character of Rev. John Eliot, Apostle of the N.A. Indians (Boston: T. Bedlington, 1822); Convers Francis, Life of John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1836); Wilimena H. (Eliot) Emerson, Ellsworth Eliot, and George Edwin Eliot, Jr., Genealogy of the Descendants of John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians,” 1598–1905 (New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press, 1905), 252–256, 269–273; on the Arizona pumping station, 274. On the Harvard images, see Francis Millet’s window titled “Gen. Joseph Warren and Rev. John Eliot,” manufactured by Tiffany Studios (1889), discussed by Mason Hammond in The Stained Glass Windows in Memorial Hall, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: [Mason Hammond], 1978), a reference adapted to digital form by Office for the Arts at Harvard, https://www.fas.harvard.edu/~memhall/staingls.html (accessed April 11, 2017). On the other works, see “Interesting Mural Paintings,” Official Journal, Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America 19, no. 3 (March 1905): 180; “Massachusetts State House,” American Art Annual 4 (1903–1904): 162; The Copley Prints: Reproductions of Notable Paintings publicly & privately owned in America—also of the mural Decorations in the New Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library & other public buildings (Boston: Curtis & Cameron, 1907), 96. 17. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 157–158.

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notes to pages 92–95

18. Eliot, Genealogy of the Descendants of John Eliot, 256. 19. William Biglow, History of Natick, Mass. From the Days of the Apostle Eliot, MDCL, to the Present Time, MDCCCXXX (Boston: Marsh, Capen, & Lyon, 1830), esp. 52; Rev. J. P. Sheafe, Jr., “The Indian Burying Ground,” in A Review of the First Fourteen Years of the Historical, Natural History and Library Society of South Natick, Mass. with the FieldDay Proceedings of 1881–1882–1883 (South Natick, MA: Printed for the Society, 1884), 29, 31–32; O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 66–68. 20. James Raymond Simmons, “Eliot Oak and Other Trees of South Natick,” chap. 7 in The Historic Trees of Massachusetts (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919), 39–46; Boston Evening Transcript, Aug. 14, 1852, referenced in “The Eliot Oak,” in William H. Eliot, Jr., and William S. Porter, Genealogy of the Eliot Family (New Haven, CT: George B. Bassett, 1854), 134–136; “The Eliot Oak,” Bay State Monthly 1, no. 2 (Feb. 1884): 87–88; “The Eliot Oak,” in A Review of the First Fourteen Years, 56–58; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Natick, Mass. / Eliot’s Oak,” in Poems of Places, ed. Longfellow (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1879), 102; “Eliot Oak, South Natick, June 18, 1896” (1896), photograph, scan no. 000420–0034, AAS. 21. A Review of the First Fourteen Years, 8, 13–14; on the 1872 fire, 9. 22. Robert Lowell, “At the Indian Killer’s Grave,” in Lord Weary’s Castle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 54–57; John P. McWilliams, “A cloud of blood: King Philip’s War,” chap. 4 in New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106–133, esp. 106–108; Alan Holder, The Imagined Past: Portrayals of Our History in Modern American Literature (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1980), 260; Jake Adam York, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2005), 131–132. 23. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Gray Champion,” first published in New-England Magazine 8 (Jan. 1835): 20–26; reprinted in Twice-Told Tales (Boston: American Stationers, 1837). 24. Gould, “Contested Places,” 44. 25. Ibid., 108; Zara Ciscoe Brough, “Days of Hassanamesit,” in Dawn.Vcs., 378–381. 26. Cheryll Toney Holley, current Nipmuc Nation chief, contextualizes her biography in “A Brief Look at Nipmuc History,” in Dawn.Vcs., esp. 410. 27. Biglow, History of Natick, Mass., 15–16. 28. Gould, “Contested Places,” 11. On items loaned or given to the Harvard Peabody Museum by other regional collecting institutions, including MHS and AAS, see John Otis Brew, Early Days of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: Published by the Museum, 1966), 7. These chains of movement can also be tracked in the collections and associated provenance files. I am grateful to Nan Wolverton at AAS for sharing information on the transit of material culture collections. On these regional object histories, see Christine DeLucia, “Antiquarian Collecting and the Transits of Indigenous Material Culture: Rethinking ‘Indian Relics’ and Tribal Histories,”

notes to pages 95–97

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Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life 17, no. 2 (Spring 2017), http:// common- place.org/book/antiquarian- collecting- and- the- transits- of- indigenousmaterial-culture-rethinking-indian-relics-and-tribal-histories (accessed April 11, 2017). 29. Thomas Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts, A People Who Had ‘Vanished,’ ” chap. 9 in Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War. 30. Donald L. Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Alan L. Sorkin, The Urban American Indian (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1978); James B. LaGrand, Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Jeanne Guillemin, Urban Renegades: The Cultural Strategy of American Indians (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). On tribal termination, see Charles F. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), esp. 85–86. 31. Johanna Brand, The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash: The true story of a Micmac woman, her role in the American Indian Movement—and her unsolved murder (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1993), esp. 58–59. On the activities and institutional struggles of the BIC, see Joe Pilati, “Indian Council seeking funds for new Boston headquarters,” Boston Globe, Dec. 21, 1973, 16; Tony Chamberlain, “Vanishing Americans: Indians of Northeast see others making gains while real natives are left in backwaters,” Boston Globe, Oct. 5, 1975, J14; William R. Cash, “Boston’s Indians—the forgotten minority?” Boston Globe, Oct. 9, 1977, 58; Judith Gaines, “Boston Indian Council Battles Bankruptcy,” Boston Globe, Aug. 7, 1989, 17; North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB), formerly BIC, “About Us,” http://www.naicob.org/about-us.html. 32. Frank James (Wamsutta), “National Day of Mourning,” in Dawn.Vcs., 455–458; Robert Carr and Andrew Blake, “Indians Take Over Mayflower II,” Boston Globe, Nov. 27, 1970, 1; Benjamin Taylor, “50 Indians protest at Plymouth,” Boston Globe, Nov. 24, 1972, 11; for context, Russell G. Handsman, “Landscapes of Memory in Wampanoag Country—and the Monuments upon them,” in Patricia E. Rubertone, ed., Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 161–194; on Dallin’s work, see Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien, “What Is a Monument to Massasoit Doing in Kansas City? The Memory Work of Monuments and Place in Public Displays of History,” Ethnohistory 61, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 635–653. 33. “Agreement Between the Town of Plymouth and the United American Indians of New England,” Oct. 19, 1998, signed by Eleanor Beth for the Town of Plymouth, and Mahtowin Munro and Roland “Moonanum” James for UAINE; Zachary R. Dowdy and Dan Scannell, “A Thanksgiving pact: Plymouth, Indian group reach agreement on holiday observance,” Boston Globe, Oct. 26, 1998. 34. Charles M. Haar, Mastering Boston Harbor: Courts, Dolphins, & Imperiled Waters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 2; Robin Toner, “Bush, in Enemy Waters, Says Rival Hindered Cleanup of Boston Harbor,” New York Times,

368

notes to pages 97–101

Sept. 2, 1988; Mark D. Flora, “Boston Harbor Islands—A National Park Area, Massachusetts, Water Resources Scoping Report,” Technical Report NPS/NRWRD/NRTR— 2002/300, National Park Service, Water Resources Division (Dec. 2002); Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, “A History of the Sewer System,” http://www.mwra. com/03sewer/html/sewhist.htm (accessed June 13, 2012). 35. “Tribe Fights Harbor Funding,” Patriot Ledger (Quincy, MA), Nov. 15, 1995, 40; Keith Regan, “Harbor Project Opposed / Indian Group Says Deer Island Sacred,” Boston Globe, Feb. 22, 1993, Metro-Region 16. 36. Eric Jay Dolin, Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive But Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor—A Unique Environmental Success Story (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 160–161; site-visit and MWRA plant tour of Deer Island, Aug. 6, 2013. 37. George E. Price and United States National Park Service, Boston Support Office, Boston Harbor Islands, A National Park Area: Draft General Management Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Boston: Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area, 2000). This document is no longer publicly available on the NPS Harbor Islands website in its entirety, but has been substituted with the final General Management Plan (2002) and a version with errata of the Environmental Impact Statement, http://www. nps.gov/boha/parkmgmt/gmp-eis.htm (accessed June 12, 2012). 38. On the prominence of Native history and culture in Alternative A, see “Environmental Consequences: Summary of Management Alternatives,” Draft General Management Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement (hereafter DGMP and DEIS), 88–101, esp. 96. 39. “Appendix 1: Boston Harbor Islands Partnership and Advisory Council,” DGMP and DEIS, 117. 40. “List of DEIS Recipients,” DGMP and DEIS, 114–115. 41. Della Klemovich, “Harbor Islands plan will have tribal input,” Patriot Ledger, March 10, 1998, 5; Mia Taylor, “Broader input of tribes sought on harbor park; Federal officials urged to conduct regional meetings,” Patriot Ledger, Dec. 7, 2000, 8. 42. Elizabeth Stankiewicz, “Group spotlights rivers in paddle down the Charles,” Boston Globe, Nov. 29, 1992, Metro-Region 34. 43. “Appendix 5: Implementation Costs,” DGMP and DEIS, 133–138. 44. Taylor, “Broader input of tribes sought on harbor park.” 45. The Muhheconneuk Intertribal Committee on Deer Island, “MICDI Response to National Park Service Draft General Management Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement of the Boston Harbor Islands,” Aug. 1, 2000, esp. Public Comment, pt. 1—Policy Declaration, and Public Comment, pt. 2—Recommended Changes, in DGMP and DEIS, 47–70. 46. Ibid., Public Comment: pts. 3–6, DGMP and DEIS. 47. “Cultural Landscapes,” notes on p. 84: para. R-2, in “Errata Sheet Attachments to Draft Environmental Impact Statement,” Final Environmental Impact Statement, 7.

notes to pages 102–105

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48. The Muhheconneuk Intertribal Committee on Deer Island, “MICDI Response to National Park Service Draft General Management Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement of the Boston Harbor Islands,” 50. 49. “Archaeological Sites,” notes on p. 85: para. L-4, in “Errata Sheet Attachments to Draft Environmental Impact Statement,” Final Environmental Impact Statement, 7. 50. “Ethnographic Sites,” in “Errata Sheet Attachments to Draft Environmental Impact Statement,” Final Environmental Impact Statement, 7–8. 51. Adrian Walker, “No Walk in the Park,” Boston Globe, July 17, 2003, MetroRegion B1. 52. Donovan Slack, “Seeking Respect for the Dead at Last / Indians Seek to Bar Dogs in Island Park,” Boston Globe, April 27, 2003, Metro-Region B1. 53. Peter J. Howe, “MWRA Disturbing Graves, Say Indians,” Boston Globe, June 17, 1992, Metro-Region 30. 54. Scott Allen, “MWRA lets tribal group dig up the past / Search for Indian graves to proceed on Deer Island,” Boston Globe, Oct. 1, 1993, Metro-Region 29; Michael Kenney, “An Island of Sad Memory for Indians,” Boston Globe, Feb. 19, 1993, Op-Ed 15. On archaeological considerations in the context of the MWRA plant construction and previous work, see Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, Under Construction: Building the Boston Harbor Project: 1992–2001, 89, MHS. 55. Slack, “Seeking Respect for the Dead at Last.” 56. Howe, “MWRA Disturbing Graves, Say Indians.” 57. Harold Marcuse’s analysis of the evolving landscapes at Dachau is an illustrative study of how selective and politically inflected preservation of European concentration camp grounds has been. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the changeability of Holocaust memorialization, see Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Andrew Charlesworth, “Contesting Places of Memory: The Case of Auschwitz,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, no. 5 (1994): 579–593. 58. Robert T. Hayashi, “Transfigured Patterns: Contesting Memories at the Manzanar National Historic Site,” Public Historian 25, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 51–71; Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 304–306. 59. Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs (MCIA), 2000 Annual Report, 8, http://www.mass.gov/dhcd/components/Ind_Affairs/com_rpt1.pdf (accessed April 19, 2005). 60. Tim Cornell, “Tribes want Deer Island park renamed to reflect tragic past,” Boston Herald, March 9, 1998, 21. 61. The Muhheconneuk Intertribal Committee on Deer Island, “MICDI Response to National Park Service Draft General Management Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement of the Boston Harbor Islands,” 50.

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62. David Arnold, “Native Americans ponder past, future; Deer Island deaths marked in ceremony,” Boston Globe, Oct. 31, 1991, Metro-Region 42. 63. Kevin Rothstein, “Bitter memories; Indians meet to commemorate the forced internment of their ancestors,” Patriot Ledger, Oct. 29, 2001, 11. 64. Foote, Shadowed Ground, 32. 65. MCIA, 2001 Annual Report, May 31, 2002, 8, http://www.mass.gov/dhcd/components/Ind_Affairs/com_rpt2.pdf (accessed April 19, 2005); MCIA, 2002 Annual Report, Nov. 10, 2003, 8–9, http://www.mass.gov/dhcd/components/Ind_Affairs/com_ rpt3.pdf (accessed April 19, 2005); “The Deer Island Native American Memorial,” report prepared for the Deer Island Native American Memorial Committee by the UrbanArts Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (updated April 2008); “Deer Island Native American Memorial,” National Park Service, Boston Harbor Islands website, http://www.nps.gov/boha/learn/historyculture/native-americanmemorial.htm (accessed June 18, 2015). I acknowledge discussion of this memorial at successive annual Deer Island Memorial gatherings, as well as with Tobias Vanderhoop (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Jan. 30, 2006. 66. For examples of contemporary Northeastern Indigenous stoneworkers, see Tim Shay (Penobscot), Ralph Sturges (Mohegan), Russell Spears (Narragansett); Stories in Stone: A Documentary, film prod. John Brown, Marc Levitt, Lilach Dekel (Levittation Production, 2006). 67. Ryan Richardson, “Mistaken Mishoonash,” Wicked Local Mattapoisett, Oct. 27, 2007. On Plimoth Plantation, see Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 26–27; James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, “The Time of Their Lives: Plimoth Plantation,” chap. 7 in The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000); Stephen Eddy Snow, Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical Role-Playing at Plimoth Plantation (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), esp. 98–101; Handsman, “Landscapes of Memory in Wampanoag Country,” esp. 166– 167. I thank Timothy Roderick and Allyson LaForge for coordinating a visit for me to Plimoth Plantation and the Wampanoag Homesite, July 10, 2015. 68. Linda Coombs, “Holistic History: Including the Wampanoag in an Exhibit at Plimoth Plantation,” in Dawn.Vcs., 473–476; “Presenting the Story of Two Cultures: A Bicultural Historical Perspective,” Plimoth Plantation, http://www.plimoth.org/about/ who-we-are/presenting-story-two-cultures. 69. George Brennan, “Mashpee Wampanoag dugout canoe on way to Smithsonian,” Cape Cod Times, Sept. 5, 2013. 70. Two “war canoes” brought down from the Penobscot River in Maine accompanied the mishoonash. These were piloted by Penobscot canoeists who have their own long-standing traditions of river expertise, mobilized for this pan-Northeastern intertribal collaboration. Personal conversations with canoeist Mark Ranco (Penobscot) and event coordinator Rick Pouliot (Abenaki), Oct. 30, 2010.

notes to pages 107–109

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71. Kim Sloan, Joyce E. Chaplin, Christian F. Feest, and Ute Kuhlemann, A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 50–53. 72. Jacob M. Orcutt, “Mishoonash in Southern New England: Construction and Use of Dugout Canoes in a Multicultural Context” (master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2014). 73. Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), esp. 27–28. 74. Bob Datz, “Nipmuc mystery below Quinsigamond; Project Mishoon wants to raise up centuries-old Nipmuc canoes,” Worcester Telegram & Gazette, May 20, 2012; Rae Gould, “Tribal Historic Preservation Office Seeks Support for ‘Project Mishoon’,” http://www.blackstonedaily.com/mishoon.htm (accessed June 18, 2015); Project Mishoon homepage, http://projectmishoon.homestead.com/Index.html (accessed June 25, 2012). 75. Submerged dugouts or “logboats” are relatively uncommon archaeological finds, but others have been located in Florida and in a number of New England sites (or if not the actual vessel, the materials for construction). See Chester B. Kevitt, “Aboriginal Dugout Discovered at Weymouth,” BMAS 30, no. 1 (1968): 1–5; Arthur Petzold, “The Eaton Site: A Dugout Workshop,” BMAS 22, nos. 3 and 4 (April–July 1961): 47–49; Ann Marie Plane, “New England’s Logboats: Four Centuries of Watercraft,” BMAS 52, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 8–17; William C. Sturtevant, “Quelques réprésentations de canots et de pirogues, à partir du XVII siècle,” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 11, no. 4 (1981): 297–309. 76. Stephen A. Mrozowski, “Pragmatism and the Relevancy of Archaeology for Contemporary Society,” chap. 17 in Archaeology in Society: Its Relevance in the Modern World, ed. Marcy Rockman and Joe Flatman (New York: Springer, 2012), 239–256, esp. 240. 77. Exhibition placard, New Hampshire Historical Society Museum, Eagle Square, Concord NH, viewed summer 2009; “Canoe, Dugout,” Object ID 1994.501, New Hampshire Historical Society Collection. The Worcester Historical Museum displayed a dugout in 2000; that exhibition, “Presence and Persistence: Nipmuc Indians in New England,” developed collaboratively, Nipmucspohke 5, no. 1 [2000?], 6. 78. “Summary under the Criteria and Evidence for Proposed Finding, The Nipmuc Nation,” United States Department of the Interior, Office of Federal Acknowledgment, Sept. 25, 2001, re: Petition #69A; Connecticut Attorney General’s Office, Press Release, “Attorney General Applauds Denial Of Federal Recognition To Nipmuc, Nipmuck Groups,” June 18, 2004, http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=1779&q=284388 (accessed June 25, 2012); Rae Gould, “The Nipmuc Nation, Federal Acknowledgment, and a Case of Mistaken Identity,” in Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States, ed. Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien (Chapel Hill:

372

notes to pages 109–114

University of North Carolina Press, 2013); James Cossingham, “So What’s the Story— Really?” in Nipmucspohke 2, no. 4 [1996], 4. 79. “Deer Island Memorial,” Sat., Oct. 26, 1996, in Nipmucspohke 2, no. 4 [1996], 6. See also “Nipmucs gather to remember,” Nipmucspohke 1, no. 3 (Winter 1994), 1; “The Deer Island Memorial Ceremony,” Nipmucspohke 5, no. 2 [2000], 6. 80. Nok-Noi Ricker, “Maine tribes finish 100-mile Spiritual Run,” Bangor Daily News, Sept. 8, 2010; Julia Spitz, “Nipmucs add history to memorial to Deer Island internment,” MetroWest Daily News, Oct. 24, 2010. 81. Pam Ellis, quoted in Spitz, “Nipmucs add history to memorial to Deer Island internment.” 82. On these and other material items from the Indian College site, see “Digging Veritas: The Archaeology & History of the Indian College and Student Life at Colonial Harvard,” online exhibition, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/DV-online. Also site-visit to opening ceremony for archaeology project, Harvard Yard, Sept. 11, 2014. The Harvard Peabody’s ongoing work around repatriation of artifacts and human remains to relevant tribal communities has been a source of progress but also tension, by some accounts. 83. “A degree delivered: Harvard honors Native American who completed course work in 1665,” Harvard Gazette, May 26, 2011; Susan Peterson, “Harvard Honors First Native American Students,” Harvard Gazette, May 8, 1997. 84. Susan Power, “First Fruits,” Roofwalker (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2002), 11–137, esp. 126–127. 85. “CRWA Water Quality Projects and Data,” Charles River Watershed Association reports, http://www.crwa.org/reports_papers.html (accessed June 25, 2012). 86. “Deer Island Memorial Observances,” episode 20, radio interview with Kristen Wyman (Natick Nipmuc Indian Council) by J. Ke ¯ haulani Kauanui, producer and host, on Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond, WESU, Middletown CT, Nov. 2, 2010, http://www.indigenouspolitics.com (accessed June 25, 2012). 87. “Dam in South Natick with Eliot Oak, June 18, 1896” (1896), photograph, scan no. 000420–0035, AAS. 88. Manuse, “The unvarnished truth.” 89. Andrew J. Manuse, “Mural-ity piece: Painting of Eliot speaking to bound natives to be restored,” Wicked Local Natick, Sept. 8, 2007. 90. Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Archipelago Books, 2006), 64–68, esp. 64, 66; Judith Dupré, Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory (New York: Random House, 2007), xiii, xv. 91. Alfred F. Young, “Revolution in Boston? Eight Propositions for Public History on the Freedom Trail,” Public Historian 25, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 17–41, esp. 38. The physical reassertion of Native presence in Boston is presently occurring at other sites,

notes to pages 114–124

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like the Boylston T stop; see Brian MacQuarrie, “Trapping History: Native American Fishweir on Common Catches Interest,” Boston Globe, May 20, 2003, Metro-Region B1; “Ancient Fishweir Project,” http://www.fishweir.org (accessed April 9, 2005). 92. Christina Pazzanese, “To Titus, Venus, Bilhah, and Juba: Faust unveils plaque honoring the contributions to Harvard of four slaves in the 1700s,” Harvard Gazette, April 6, 2016, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/to-titus-venus-bilhahand-juba; Drew Gilpin Faust, “Wadsworth House Plaque Dedication,” April 6, 2016, http://www.harvard.edu/president/speech/2016/wadsworth- house- plaquededication. This effort arose from many years of work on campus to research histories of institutional slavery and was aided by Faust’s own training as a scholar of slavery. 93. Site-visit, Aug. 13, 2013. The MWRA makes efforts to conduct tours open to interested members of the public. I first visited the non-MWRA plant sections of the island in Jan. 2006. 94. Stephan Feuchtwang, “Ritual and Memory,” chap 19 in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 281–298, esp. 295, 282, 285. 95. Gould, “Contested Places,” 58–63, 100. 96. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope,” quoted and used in Apache context by Keith Basso; see Basso, “Stalking with Stories,” chap. 2 in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 37–70, esp. 40, 61–62. 97. Power, “First Fruits,” 127. 98. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” chap. 7 in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).

Chapter 3. Habitations by Narragansett Bay 1. “Theodore Dennis Brown,” Narragansett Dawn 1, no. 2 (June 1935), 10. 2. Paul A. Robinson, “One Island, Two Places: Archaeology, Memory, and Meaning in a Rhode Island Town,” in Interpretations of Native North American Life: Material Contributions to Ethnohistory, ed. Michael S. Nassaney and Eric S. Johnson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 398. 3. Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (May 2008): 193, 195–196. 4. The pond, a remnant of a large glacial lake, is today called Worden’s Pond. Many archaeological sites around the pond, swamp, and Pawcatuck River have confirmed long-standing Native presence. See Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, Native American Archaeology in Rhode Island (Providence: The Commission, 2002), 56.

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5. On geologic history of the area, see “Geology and Landforms,” 3–5, and on early Native uses, “Prehistoric Native Occupation and Settlement,” 6–8, both in Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, Historic and Architectural Resources of South Kingstown, Rhode Island: A Preliminary Report (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, 1984). 6. On swamps’ ecological composition, emergence, and functions, see Ralph W. Tiner, In Search of Swampland: A Wetland Sourcebook and Field Guide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 7. On submerged cultural resources around Narragansett Bay, see Daria E. Merwin, Daniel P. Lynch, and David S. Robinson, “Submerged Prehistoric Sites in Southern New England: Past Research and Future Directions,” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut 65 (2003): 41–56, esp. 47–50. 8. A “homelands model” is defined in Russell G. Handsman, “A Homelands Model and Interior Sites: A Phase II Archaeological Study of Rhode Island Site 2050, Phenix Avenue, Cranston, Rhode Island” (Kingston RI: Public Archaeology Program, University of Rhode Island, 1995); Handsman and Trudie Lamb Richmond, “Confronting Colonialism: The Mahican and Schaghticoke Peoples and Us,” in Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: The New Pragmatism, ed. Robert W. Preucel and Stephen A. Mrozowski (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 470–490. 9. For surveys of Native land use and habitations in the area, see, e.g., Alan E. Strauss, “Narragansett Basin Argillite: Lithology, Chronology, and Prehistoric Tool Manufacture,” North American Archaeologist 10, no. 1 (1989): 25–37; E. Pierre Morenon, “Archaeological Sites at an Ecotone: Route 4 Extension, East Greenwich and North Kingstown, Rhode Island” (1986); Joseph N. Waller and Alan Leveillee, “Archaeological Investigations at Site RI 2050 in Cranston, Rhode Island: A Native American Steatite Processing Site,” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut 61 (1998): 3–16; Joseph N. Waller, Jr., “Late Woodland Settlement and Subsistence along the Point Judith Pond of Southern Rhode Island” (master’s thesis, University of Connecticut, 1998); Christopher Jazwa, “Temporal Changes in a Precontact and Contact Period Cultural Landscape Along the Southern Rhode Island Coast,” in The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes: When the Land Meets the Sea, ed. Ben Ford (New York: Springer, 2011), 129–146, which examines the “pond region” of saltwater lagoons formed by glacial retreat. 10. Many Algonquian oral traditions sustain stories about mysterious, ghostly, or supernatural events taking place in swamps; see William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 129, 140, 125, 153, 138, 136, 142. 11. For analysis of Narragansett country between 1524 and 1709 C.E., see Paul A. Robinson, “The Struggle Within: The Indian Debate in Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Country” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1990). Robinson argues that Narragansetts rose in prominence between the epidemics and

notes to pages 126–127

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1636: “Their ability to increase their influence in the region was enabled by the massive depopulation to the east,” 82. He links this dominance to their control of wampum supplies, “apparent ability to ward off European diseases,” and “apparent success in controlling the irrational, incomprehensible and unpredictable English,” leading to “an ideology of dominance that denied the authenticity of neighboring Indian groups,” 82–83. 12. The word is from Williams, Key into Lang., 107. On this episode in the context of emerging cross-cultural diplomatic practices, see Colin G. Calloway, Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 19–20. 13. Janice Artemel et al., Providence Covelands Phase III Report, prepared by De Leuw, Cather/Parsons, Washington, DC, for the Federal Railroad Administration, Northeast Corridor Project, U.S. Department of Transportation, Washington, DC (1984), on file at RIHPHC; also Mary Lynne Rainey, “Middle Archaic Period Settlement and Lithic Use in Upper Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts,” Archaeology of Eastern North America 33 (2005): 127–140. 14. “Deed from Cannaunicus and Miantonomi to Roger Williams [March 1637],” in John Russell Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, Vol. I: 1636 to 1663 (Providence: A. Crawford Greene and Brother, 1856), 18. 15. On the centrality of the bay in English colonial settlement, see Christopher L. Pastore, Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 16. John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2011); for a critique of its disregard for ethnohistorical context, see Joyce Chaplin, review of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, in New York Times, Dec. 30, 2011; Linford D. Fisher and Lucas Mason-Brown, “By ‘Treachery and Seduction’: Indian Baptism and Conversion in the Roger Williams Code,” WMQ, 3rd series, 71, no. 2 (April 2014): 175–202. 17. Williams, Key into Lang., 106. Paul A. Robinson, “A Narragansett History from 1000 B.P. to the Present,” in Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England, ed. Laurie Lee Weinstein (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1994), 79–89; Dena F. Dincauze, “A Capsule Prehistory of Southern New England,” in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); William S. Simmons, The Narragansett (New York: Chelsea House, 1989); Robert L. McMaster, “A 9,000-Year View of Narragansett Bay,” Maritimes 27, no. 1 (Feb. 1983): 7–10; William A. Turnbaugh, Sarah P. Turnbaugh, and Thomas H. Keifer, “Characterization of Selected Soapstone Sources in Southern New England,” in Prehistoric Quarries and Lithic Production, ed. Jonathon E. Ericson and Barbara A. Purdy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 129–138.

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notes to pages 127–130

18. Natives west of the bay have been described in political terms as a tribe, confederacy, sachemdom, or extended sachemdom. Robinson, “The Struggle Within,” 86. 19. Charles Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War; the Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardener (Cleveland, OH: Helman-Taylor, 1897), 84; Ronald Dale Karr, “ ‘Why Should You Be So Furious?’: The Violence of the Pequot War,” Journal of American History 85 (Dec. 1998): 876–909. 20. Robinson, “The Struggle Within,” esp. 117–120, 120–121, 140–141, 153–155, 158–161, 186–189. On growing tensions among Narragansetts, other tribal communities, and the English, see Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 21. I am grateful to Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel and Stephanie Fielding for sharing Mohegan perspectives on these events, individuals, and places, in the context of conversations about historical signage (Spring 2015). For a new public presentation of this episode, see “Uncas Leap Trail,” in Walk Norwich project, www.walknorwich.org. 22. “Submission of the Chief Sachem of the Narragansett to Charles I,” April 19, 1644 (1644.04.19.00), YIPP; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 29–32; Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 57–59. 23. Fisher and Silverman, Ninigret; Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), esp. chap. 3. 24. Williams, Key into Lang. The Key was written by a colonial observer, and Narragansett culture was not static, so the words and views of the 1640s cannot be assumed to be coextensive with their state in the 1670s or later. For a critique, see Patricia E. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 25. Williams, Key into Lang., chap. 29, “Of their Warre, &c.,” 179, 180, 182. 26. Meredith Baldwin Weddle, Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pt. 3: “War.” 27. Robinson, “The Struggle Within,” 206. 28. One possibility for the Native name of this swamp is Quawawehunk. See R. A. Douglas-Lithgow, Native American Place Names of Rhode Island (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2001), 37; also cited in John C. Huden, Indian Place Names of New England, Contributions from the Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation, vol. 18 (New York: Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation 1962), 206, which identifies it as an Eastern Niantic word meaning “where the land shakes and trembles.” Also Sidney Smith Rider, The Lands of Rhode Island As They Were Known to Caunounicus and Miantunnomu When Roger Williams Came in 1636 (Providence: Published by the Author, 1904), 250.

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29. Williams, Key into Lang., 72. 30. Ibid., 47. 31. Ibid., 46–47, 72–73. 32. Ibid., 72. 33. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 85–89; “Evil Swamps,” in Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999), 33–37; Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2006). 34. Douglas-Lithgow, Native American Place Names of Rhode Island, 6, 25, 27, 45. 35. Two contemporaneous authors described the site: “In the midst of the Wood was a plain piece of Ground on which the Indians had built a Fort; the Stone-Wall whereof enclosed about four or five Acres, in which Rampart was about 1000 Indians,” Anonymous, A Farther Brief and True Narration of the Late Wars Risen in New-England, Occasioned by the Quarrelsome Disposition and Perfidious Carriage of the Barbarous and Savage Indian Natives there. With an Account of the Fight, the 19th of December last, 1675 (London, Feb. 17, 1675/76), 9–10. “The next Day, about Noon, they came to a large Swamp, which by Reasons of the Frost all the Night before, they were capable of going over (which else they could not have done). They forthwith in a Body entered the said Swamp, and in the midst thereof was a Piece of firm Land, of about three or four Acres of Ground, whereon the Indians had built a Kind of Fort, being Palisado’d round, and within that a Clay Wall, as also felled down abundance of Trees to lay quite round the said Fort, but they had not quite finished the said work,” A Continuation of the State of New-England; Being a Farther Account of the Indian Warr, And of the Engagement betwixt the Joynt Forces of the United English Collonies and the Indians, on the 19th of December, 1675. With the true Number of the Slain and Wounded, and the Transactions of the English Army since the said Fight. With all other Passages that have there Hapned from the 10th of November, 1675, to the 8th of February 1675/76 (London, 1676), 6. 36. Gaynell Stone, ed., Native Forts of the Long Island Sound Area (Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological Association, 2006) details fortifications at Corchaug, Shantok, Massapeag, Weinshauks, Monhantic, Ninigret, Block Island, and Montauk. Comparable archaeological work has not been done for the Great Swamp fort, so it is difficult to assess its architectural and locational characteristics. 37. That winter was particularly cold—“Sharp & stormy until Jan.” See Table 1.1, “Reported Weather Conditions in New England, 1607–1699,” in Thomas L. Purvis, Colonial America to 1763 (New York: Facts on File, 1999), 3; and Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 105. 38. Conversation with John Brown, Dec. 2010. 39. For an account that combines heroic overstatement and alleged regret about the scale of the fort encounter, see Thomas Church, Entertaining Passages Relating to

378

notes to pages 133–134

Philip’s War Which Began in the Month of June, 1675. As Also of Expeditions More lately made Against the Common Enemy, and Indian Rebels, in the Eastern Parts of New-England; with Some Account of the Divine Providence Towards Benj. Church Esq. (Boston: B. Green, 1716), 14–17. 40. Letter, [James Oliver to ?], Jan. 26, 1675, repr. in Bodge, SIKPW, 175. The letter was drawn from Thomas Hutchinson’s The History of the Colony of Massachuset’s Bay, From the First Settlement Thereof in 1628, Until Its Incorporation with the Colony of Plimouth, Province of Main, &c. by the Charter of King William and Queen Mary, in 1691, which went through a number of editions (e.g., London: Printed for M. Richardson, 1765). The original letter’s location was not known when Bodge wrote (173n1). On the “renegade” Joshua Tefft’s testimony about the Mohegan and Pequot as firing into the air, see Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 132. The Mohegans who fought at the swamp (under Owaneco) and Pequots (under Catapezet) may have been unaccustomed to attacking such fortifications; see Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 181–184. On the crucial roles played by Mohegans and Pequots, see Jason W. Warren, Connecticut Unscathed: Victory in the Great Narragansett War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). 41. “The Examination & Relation of James Quannapaquait,” Jan. 24, 1675/76, unpublished transcription courtesy of YIPP. 42. Glenn W. LaFantasie and Paul R. Campbell, “Narragansett Country: Indians, Whites, and Land in Rhode Island: An Historical Narrative” (1978), typescript, RIHS, 182. 43. Ibid., 198. 44. The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, From 1665 to 1678; With the Journal of the Council of War, 1675 to 1678, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (Hartford: F. A. Brown, 1852), 458–460; David Naumec, “Analysis of Primary Sources,” in Richard Greenwood et al., “The Battles of Nipsachuck: Research and Documentation,” Final Technical Report to National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, GA-2255–09–023, Aug. 2011, 34–36. 45. Hubbard, Narr., 97, explicated in Greenwood et al., “The Battles of Nipsachuck,” 62. 46. Bodge, SIKPW, 190. 47. On necropolitics—the cultural and political values embedded in relations between the living and the dead—I am indebted to Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 48. Robinson, “The Struggle Within,” 164–165; The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630– 1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 410. 49. John A. Sainsbury, “Indian Labor in Early Rhode Island,” New England Quarterly 48, no. 3 (Sept. 1975): 378–393; “Indian Slaves of King Philip’s War,” and “Note on

notes to pages 134–137

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the Transaction of Roger Williams and Others, in Selling Indians into Slavery,” Publications of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1 (1893): 234–240. On Native labor and indentures in colonial New England, see three articles by Ruth Wallis Herndon, coauthored with Ella Wilcox Sekatau, the late ethnohistorian of the Narragansett Tribe: “Pauper Apprenticeship in Narragansett Country: A Different Name for Slavery in Early New England,” Slavery/Anti-Slavery in New England, 2003 Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 2005): 56–70; “Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Early Rhode Island,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 137–173; “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 433–462; LaFantasie and Campbell, “Narragansett Country,” 201–202. 50. Increase Mather, Brief history of the war with the Indians in New-England, from June 24, 1675 (when the first Englishman was murdered by the Indians) to August 12, 1676, when Philip, alias Metacomet, the principal author and beginner of the war, was slain (London: 1676), 46. 51. Lepore, The Name of War, 184. 52. Jay Winter proposes “silence” as an important third category for memory studies, in addition to the more typically recognized “remembering” and “forgetting”: “Silence . . . is a socially constructed space in which and about which subjects and words normally used in everyday life are not spoken. The circle around this space is described by groups of people who at one point in time deem it appropriate that there is a difference between the sayable and the unsayable, or the spoken and the unspoken, and that such a distinction can and should be maintained and observed over time.” Jay Winter, “Thinking About Silence,” in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Winter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3–31, esp. 4. 53. Williams, Key into Lang., 194. 54. A Court Martial Held at Newport, Rhode Island, in August and September, 1676, For the Trial of Indians, Charged with Being Engaged in King Philip’s War (Albany: J. Munsell, 1858), esp. 4–5. 55. No. 151, “Petition of the Narragansett Queen,” April 4, 1680, Stevens Transcripts, JCBL; Richard A. Wheeler, “The Petition of Weounkkass to the King,” Narragansett Historical Register 7, no. 1 (Jan. 1889): 36–39. On her career, see LaFantasie and Campbell, “Narragansett Country,” 209–210. For one explanation of Ninigret’s perhaps surprising choice to ally with the English during the war, see Fisher and Silverman, Ninigret, chaps. 4–5. 56. The grave of Weeounkkass/Weunquesh is believed to be the one looted by Rhode Islanders in 1859, an act that became the subject of a court case brought by Narragansetts against the alleged looters. See Rubertone, Grave Undertakings, 176–177.

380

notes to pages 137–139

Remains of members of the Ninigret family were taken to Smith College in the early twentieth century, transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and repatriated in 2004. 57. No. 143, “Information touching the Narrogansett Country,” Stevens Transcripts, JCBL; Information Touching Ye Narragansett Country, Aug. 15, 1679 (1679.08.15.00), YIPP. 58. LaFantasie and Campbell, “Narragansett Country,” 213. 59. Jan. 22, 1676/77, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, in New England vol. 2, 1664–1677 (Providence: 1857), 560–561. 60. Town Meeting entry, April 27, 1683, in Henry C. Dorr, “The Narragansetts,” Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society 7 (1885): 227–228. 61. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 83. 62. Abby Isabel Brown Bulkley and Henry Truman Beckwith, The Chad Browne Memorial: consisting of genealogical memoirs of a portion of the descendants of Chad and Elizabeth Browne; with an appendix, containing sketches of other early Rhode Island settlers, 1638–1888 (Brooklyn, NY: [Brooklyn Daily Eagle Book Printing Department], 1888), 156. For an effort at debunking the millpond story, see State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century: A History, vol. 1, ed. Edward Field (Boston: Mason Publishing, 1902), 419–420. 63. John Callender, An Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations in New England in America. From the first Settlement 1638, to the End of the first Century (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1739); on its approach to historical research, see Christine M. DeLucia, “Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 467–502. 64. Whether the house of Richard Smith, Jr., at Cocumscussoc was burned during the war has not been conclusively demonstrated through archaeological investigations of the grounds, though it is a strong part of settler oral traditions and local histories. See Patricia E. Rubertone, “Cocumscussoc, North Kingstown, Rhode Island,” in Archaeology in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Francis P. McManamon et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), 126–129. 65. “Petition of Richard Smith and others” [1678], in Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, in New England, vol. 3: 1678–1706 (Providence: Knowles, Anthony, 1858), 50–51. 66. LaFantasie and Campbell, “Narragansett Country,” 243, 286. 67. Simon Bradstreet, John Saffin, and Elisha Hutchinson, An Advertisement. Whereas the Lands of Narrhaganset, and Niantick Countryes, and parts adjacent, are places very pleasant and fertile (Boston, 1678); John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century

notes to pages 139–143

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(Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 65–83. 68. LaFantasie and Campbell, “Narragansett Country,” 216. 69. Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York: Scribner, 1975), 99. 70. On the history of compensating veterans, see Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 2, “Pensions for Revolutionary Patriots.” 71. Session of May 11, 1676, General Court, Hartford, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678; With the Journal of the Council of War, 1675–1678, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (Hartford: F. A. Brown, 1852), 276. 72. Letter from Clement Minors of New London, June 26, 1676, 1 CW 1:93a (Colonial Wars [hereafter abbreviated CW], Series 1, 1675–1775, Connecticut State Library, copies/transcriptions on file at MPMRC). 73. Session of Oct. 12, 1676, General Court, Hartford, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678, 288. 74. Letter of William Leet, July 15, 1680, in R. R. Hinman, Letters from the English Kings and Queens, Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, George II, etc., to the Governors of the Colony of Connecticut, Together with the Answers Thereto, from 1635 to 1749 (Hartford: John B. Eldredge, 1836), 129–130. 75. Richard A. Radune, Pequot Plantation: The Story of an Early Colonial Settlement (Branford, CT: Research in Time Publications, 2005), esp. 48–50. 76. “A Message from the House of Representatives of the General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, advocating a liberal answer to the petition of the Narraganset Soldiers and their descendents,” Massachusetts Court Records, Jan. 19, 1731, repr. in Bodge, SIKPW, 410–411. 77. Thomas Jefferys, A Map of the Most Inhabited part of New England, containing the Provinces of Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, with the Colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island (London: Thos. Jefferys, 1755). 78. Site-visits to Gorham, ME, May 9, 2011, and Bedford, NH, July 22, 2011. 79. David Arthur Fogg, Images of America: Gorham (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1998), 39. 80. Marshall petition, May 8, 1718, 1 CW 1:146. 81. Chapman petition, May 8, 1718, 1 CW 1:147. 82. Samuel Sewall to Jeremiah Dummer, Aug. 17, 1714, quoted in Caroline Hazard, “Judge Sewall’s Gifts in the Narragansett Country,” Publications of the Rhode Island Historical Society 6, no. 1 (April 1898): 127–128. 83. Harvard Alumni Bulletin 18, no. 16 (Jan. 19, 1916): 286; “Strange Gifts Help Students in University,” Harvard Crimson, Oct. 11, 1949. 84. Caroline Hazard, Anchors of Tradition: A Presentment of Some Little Known Facts and Persons in a Small Corner of Colonial New England called Narragansett, to which are Added Certain Weavings of Fancy from the Thread of Life upon the Loom of Time

382

notes to pages 143–145

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924), 10–11; Elisha R. Potter, “The Early History of Narragansett; With an Appendix of Original Documents, Many of Which are Now for the First Time Published,” in Collections of the Rhode-Island Historical Society III (Providence: Marshall, Brown, 1835), 290–293, esp. 291. 85. Will of William Harris, Dec. 4, 1678, in The Early Records of the Town of Providence, vol. 6 (Providence: Snow and Farnham, 1894), 55. 86. Bodge, SIKPW, 191. 87. Carl R. Woodward, Plantation in Yankeeland: The Story of Cocumscussoc, Mirror of Colonial Rhode Island (Chester, CT: Pequot Press, 1971), 44. 88. Local Euro-American traditions around Cocumscussoc attest to a range of hauntings, both inside the colonial structures and across the surrounding landscapes. Some relate graphic accounts of violence, as well as invasive disruptions to sensitive Native American sites. See materials collected at NKFL, e.g., “Smith’s Castle at Cocumscussoc” brochure, n.d.; “Cocumscussoc: Its Personalities and Influences,” MS, n.d., 10. On the Smith family’s role in colonial Rhode Island and the evolution of their property into the public history site today known as Smith’s Castle, see Patricia E. Rubertone and Robert K. Fitts, “Historical Archaeology at Cocumscussoc: A Pilot Study for Local Preservation Planning,” 1990, NKFL, 13–28. 89. Colin A. Porter, “ ‘Monuments to a Nation Gone By’: Fortified Houses, King Philip’s War, and the Remaking of a New England Frontier, 1675–1725” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2013), esp. 253. 90. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, “Introduction: Bringing Ghosts to Ground,” in Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, ed. Boyd and Thrush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), ix. 91. Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham. From the Original Manuscripts, Written in 1704 & 1710 (New York: Wilder & Campbell, 1825), 21. 92. Ibid., 17. 93. Ezra Stiles, entry from May 1755, MS Vault Stiles MP f.159 22 Apr 1755 ITN, 2, Stiles Papers, BRBML. References to Stiles’s manuscripts are to the collection at BRBML. The principal sources for this discussion are two series: the “Itineraries” (ITN, notes from his travels, ca. 1750–1790s); and the “Miscellaneous papers” (MP, including historical writings and other commentaries spanning his entire career). An edited version of the Itineraries was published as Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D. D., LL. D., 1755–1794: with a selection from his correspondence, ed. Frank Bowditch Dexter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916). The edition omits many of the site-visits discussed here. See also The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, edited under the authority of the Corporation of Yale University, ed. Frank Bowditch Dexter (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1901). The most extensive study to date on Stiles is the biography by Edmund Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962). It glosses over Stiles’s traveling and Native interests.

notes to pages 146–149

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94. Stiles, entry from May 10, 1755, in Stiles, MP f.159 22 Apr 1755 Itineraries, 9, BRBML. 95. On a debate over memorialization of Narragansett service during the American Revolution, see Joanne Melish, “Recovering (from) Slavery: Four Struggles to Tell the Truth,” chap. 6 in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, ed. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (New York: New Press, 2006). 96. For the 1782 swamp visit, see Stiles, ITN III f.13 (May 1782), 535–536, map on 537, Stiles Papers, BRBML. George Bodge elaborated in 1896 on the swamp’s environmental transformations: “Saving the changes incident upon the clearing and cultivation of contiguous land, the place could be easily identified as the battlefield, even if its location were not put beyond question by traditions and also by relics found from time to time upon the place. . . . The island was cleared and plowed about 1775, and at that time many bullets were found deeply bedded in the large trees; quantities of charred corn were plowed up in different places, and it is said that Dutch spoons and Indian arrowheads, etc., have been found here at different times.” Bodge, SIKPW, 184–185. 97. On later constructions of American battlefields as sacred terrain, see Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 98. Robinson, “The Struggle Within,” 183; Rubertone, Grave Undertakings, 175. 99. Stiles, ITN I f.11 (May 1762), 519, Stiles Papers, BRBML. 100. Stiles, ITN I f.8 (July 1761), 353, Stiles Papers, BRBML. 101. Stiles, ITN I f.8 (June 1761), 335, Stiles Papers, BRBML. On Stiles’s travels in this area and his interests in Native populations, see John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 102. Williams, Key into Lang., 71, 73, 75. 103. On the geographical specifications of the 1709 reservation limits, see Potter, “The Early History of Narragansett,” 111–112; also Ethel Boissevain, “The Detribalization of the Narragansett Indians: A Case Study,” Ethnohistory 3, no. 3 (Summer 1956): 227. On the consequences of indentured servitude and the reservation establishment, see Herndon and Sekatau, “The Right to a Name,” esp. 434. Herndon and Sekatau dispute previous scholarly claims that indentured servitude or labor among colonial communities affected most Narragansetts; see “The Right to a Name,” 455n4. 104. Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Alanna J. Rice, “Renewing Homeland and Place: Algonquians, Christianity, and Community in Southern New England, 1700–1790” (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, Ontario, CA, 2010); William Scranton Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765–1776 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982).

384

notes to pages 149–151

105. Craig N. Cipolla, Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013); David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Christine DeLucia, “Speaking Together: The Brothertown Indian Community and New Directions in Engaged Scholarship,” Early American Literature 50, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 167–187. Brothertown members have paid emotional return visits to the Narragansetts and other New England tribal communities; see Paul Davis and Katie Mulvaney, “Shared blood, shared history: Native Americans whose ancestors left the area many years ago pay a return visit,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Aug. 13, 2003, C-01. 106. Thomas Commuck, A Narragansett Indian, Indian Melodies, Harmonized by Thomas Hastings, Esq. (New York: G. Lane & C. B. Tippett, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, James Collard, printer, 1845), esp. v, vi. “Philip” is Hymn 35, p. 75. On Commuck’s biography and his collaboration with Thomas Hastings on this hymnal, see Hermine Weigel Williams, Thomas Hastings: An Introduction to His Life and Music (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 109–111. On Commuck as arguably the first Native American to employ this Euro-American musical genre and notation, see Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2002), xxxvii. On Commuck’s historiographical writings about the Brothertown Indians and his strategic use of “the racial clichés of Manifest Destiny” rhetoric, see Silverman, Red Brethren, 1–4, esp. 2; and Brad Devin Edward Jarvis, “Preserving the Brothertown Nation of Indians: Exploring Relationships Amongst Land, Sovereignty, and Identity, 1740–1840” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2006), 315–318. 107. Commuck, Indian Melodies, 78, 79. 108. Thomas Commuck, letter to Wilkins Updike, July 14, 1837, in Dawn.Vcs., 501–503. 109. Richard E. Greenwood, “Zachariah Allen and the Architecture of Industrial Paternalism,” Rhode Island History 46 (Nov. 1988): 117–135; and Greenwood, “Scientific Engineering and Useful Improvements: the Manufacturing Career of Zachariah Allen, 1822–1872” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1996). Many of Allen’s personal writings and diaries are in the Zachariah Allen Papers, MSS 254, RIHS. 110. The Colonial Revival was a late-nineteenth-century movement that promoted interest in America’s colonial heritage, especially the founding persons and events of New England and other English settlement areas on the East Coast. It tended to foster a sanitized, filiopietistic view of the past that seemed reassuring and morally sound in an era of rapid social transformation. See Alan Axelrod, ed., The Colonial Revival in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986); William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, eds., Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

notes to pages 152–154

385

111. Allen Diary 5, [ca. 1875?], 238–239, and [ca. March 1875], 276–277, Zachariah Allen Papers, MSS 254, RIHS. 112. “Historical Society Excursion to Mount Hope,” Allen Diary 6, [ca. June/Summer 1875], 3–7, Zachariah Allen Papers, MSS 254, RIHS. 113. Allen Diary 6, Aug. 1877 entry, 159–160, Zachariah Allen Papers, MSS 254, RIHS. 114. “The Swamp Fight in South Kingstown,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1876–77 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1877), 70. See also “A Commemorative Discourse. The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Great Swamp Fight at Kingston,” Providence Evening Press, Dec. 20, 1875, 2; “Ye Tale of Ye Great Swamp Fight, Foughten Ye 19th Day of December, Anno Domini 1675,” Providence Evening Press, Aug. 12, 1876, 1. 115. Zachariah Allen, Bi-Centenary of the Burning of Providence in 1676. Defence of the Rhode Island System of Treatment of the Indians, and of Civil and Religious Liberty. An Address Delivered Before the Rhode Island Historical Society, April 10th, 1876 (Providence: Providence Press Company, 1876). 116. The Sangeen, more commonly spelled Saugeen, are today the Saugeen First Nation, inhabiting the Bruce Peninsula on Lake Huron near Ontario, Canada. The quotation is from Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1877–78 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1878), 30. 117. Allen Diary 6, 1877 entry, 148, Zachariah Allen Papers, MSS 254, RIHS; Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1877–78 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1878), 30; Allen Diary 6, 114–120, Zachariah Allen Papers, MSS 254, RIHS. 118. Allen claimed French Huguenot heritage as well, and felt himself to be a slightly embattled minority on that count: “Visit to French Huguenot Fort in Oxford September 30th 1881,” Allen Diary 7, 62–64, Zachariah Allen Papers, MSS 254, RIHS. 119. William G. McLoughlin, Rhode Island: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 156–157; Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1889–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Joseph R. Muratore, Italian-Americans in Rhode Island (Dover, NH: Arcadia, 1997), and Muratore, Italian-Americans in Rhode Island, Volume II (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000); Judith E. Smith, Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900–1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985); Waltraud Berger Coli and Richard A. Lobban, The Cape Verdeans in Rhode Island (Providence: Rhode Island Heritage Commission and Rhode Island Publication Society, 1990). 120. Wilfred H. Munro, “President’s Address,” Jan. 8, 1907, Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1906–1907 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1909), esp. 20–22. 121. The Narragansett Historical Register 1, no. 2 (Oct. 1882): 83–85, esp. 83.

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notes to pages 155–159

122. Woodward, Plantation in Yankeeland, 59; Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island (New York: Garland, 1998). 123. “The Last of the Narragansetts: Visit to the Indian Settlement in Charlestown,” Providence Press, Nov. 16, 1869, clippings files, RIHS. For a similar description of exhausted landscapes, written just after detribalization, see “Consigned to History / Final proceedings in the matter of the Narragansett Indians / Dedication of the monument at Fort Ninigret. . . . Close of the labors of the Indian commissioners,” n.p., Aug. 31 [1883], clippings files, PHS: “The most striking feature of the former Indian reservation in Charlestown is the old and neglected appearance of many of the dwellings . . . . the rule is the old house with shingled sides, the tottering chimney of stone or brick, and a sickly acre or two of scraggy corn, drawing weak sustenance from a poor and exhausted soil.” 124. “The Last of the Narragansetts,” Providence Journal of Commerce 1, no. 1 (June 1893): 15. This was a news item about the death of Daniel Noka. 125. Anonymous, “The Tale of Ninigret,” The Dredge 15 (Dec. 29, 1898), in Ann Elizabeth Club Records, MSS 262, series I, box 6, folder 8, RIHS. 126. Narragansett Tribe of Indians. Report of the Committee of Investigation; A Historical Sketch, and Evidence Taken, Made to the House of Representatives, at Its January Session, A.D. 1880 (Providence: E. L. Freeman, 1880), 7. 127. The number fluctuated seasonally as some men went “abroad” to work in the summer and returned in winter. 128. Narragansett Tribe of Indians, 29. 129. Ibid., 6. 130. Ibid., 31–32. 131. Ibid., 31. 132. Ibid., 81. 133. Ibid., 36. 134. Ibid., 35–36. 135. Ibid., 38. 136. Ibid., 30. 137. Reservation boundaries established in 1709 were supposedly documented on a map made at the time, but it appeared to have vanished. Narragansett Tribe of Indians, ibid. 138. Third Annual Report of Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, Made to the General Assembly, at Its January Session, 1883 (Providence: E. L. Freeman, Printers to the State, 1883), 13. 139. Ibid., 5. 140. Ibid., 4. 141. Appendix A, ibid., 15–16. 142. Boissevain, “Detribalization of the Narragansett Indians,” 225–245. Charles Babcock recalled that his parents used the money to buy him a new suit, “the first store

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clothes I ever had.” See “Councilman—Charles Babcock,” Narragansett Dawn 1 (June 1935), 10. Many tribal members considered the $15.43 “too small an amount to come and collect,” as a magazine item in 1936 recalled. “Fireside Stories—Since 1880,” Narragansett Dawn (Jan. 1936), 205. Alberta Stanton Wilcox remembered that her grandfather refused the $15.43, and she added, “What good is it if you’re signing away your life?” Quoted in Katie Mulvaney, “One Nation, Two Worlds: From Church to Citadel, Narragansetts Endure,” Providence Journal, Aug. 4, 2004. Ella Sekatau, a tribal ethnohistorian, recalled that one of her relatives purchased a jackknife and candy with the money, while others never claimed their payments. She said, “They laughed about it. They said, ‘We will never cash this in because this is a form of genocide.’ ” Quoted in Paul Davis, “One Nation, Two Worlds, Part 3: Erasing the Narragansetts from the Rhode Island Map,” Providence Journal, Aug. 3, 2004. 143. Third Annual Report of Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, 6. 144. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form. Former Reservation of the Narragansett Tribe of Indians / Historic Village of the Narragansetts in Charlestown,” prepared by Ethel Boissevain for Rhode Island Historic Preservation Commission, Feb. 1973, on file at RIHPHC. 145. Fourth Annual Report of the Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, Made to the General Assembly, at Its January Session, 1884 (Providence: E. L. Freeman, 1884); “Consigned to History,” PHS. 146. Patricia E. Rubertone, “Memorializing the Narragansett: Placemaking and Memory Keeping in the Aftermath of Detribalization,” in Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America, ed. Rubertone (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 195–216. 147. Fourth Annual Report of the Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, 26. 148. Ibid., 25. 149. Ibid., 13. 150. Ibid., 11. 151. Ibid., 15, 23. 152. Denison was an avid collector of “Indian relics,” and his materials from Rhode Island and Connecticut caught the eye of John Whipple Potter Jenks, who was working to establish a museum of natural history at Brown University. Jenks contacted Denison, solicited his donation of the collections, and installed the “specimens” in Rhode Island Hall at Brown in a venue later called the Jenks Museum. See Reuben Aldridge Guild, Memorial Address on the Late John Whipple Potter Jenks, A.M., Professor of Zoology Emeritus and Curator of the Museums. Delivered Before the Faculty and Students of Brown University, in Sayles Memorial Hall, February 6, 1895 (Providence: Press of Casey Brothers, 1895). 153. Denison desired a monument near Narragansett Bay to commemorate Canonicus, a “mild and generous prince”; one by Great Swamp, “where the fate of the

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notes to pages 162–165

Narragansett nation was decided by the sword”; one in Newport for Miantonomi, the “last sachem of the ancient Aquidnecks”; and one in Bristol County for Massasoit, to commemorate the “spot where he generously entertained Roger Williams and cordially welcomed the Pilgrims.” Fourth Annual Report of the Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, 19–20. 154. Millen S. Greene, poem, stanzas 15, 16, in ibid., 30. 155. Fourth Annual Report of the Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, 34. 156. Greene, poem, stanza 17, in ibid., 30. 157. Fourth Annual Report of the Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, 35. 158. Ibid., 32. 159. The inscription is badly eroded today and nearly illegible; site-visit, June 10, 2012. 160. It said only that they “felt grateful to the State” and “spoke highly of the Commissioners.” See “Consigned to History,” PHS.

Chapter 4. Monumentalizing After “Detribalization,” and Swamp Discourse from Casinos to Carcieri 1. Clarke participated in Rhode Island Historical Society events commemorating King Philip: “King Philip’s Day,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1876–77 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1877), 54–55. 2. “An Old Colonial Battlefield,” Newport Mercury, March 12, 1892, 6. 3. Coginaquint, also spelled Coganaquant or Coginaquand, is referenced in a number of land-transfer documents from the seventeenth century; see Elisha R. Potter, “The Early History of Narragansett; With an Appendix of Original Documents, Many of Which are Now for the First Time Published,” in Collections of the Rhode-Island Historical Society III (Providence: Marshall, Brown, 1835), 234. For reference to the Clarke house as being on land deeded by Kachanaquant, see J. R. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, Rhode Island (New York: W. W. Preston, 1889), 484. On Clarke’s construction of the site and naming of it as Coginaquant, see Narragansett Times, April 2, 1886, 2. 4. A transcription of settler oral tradition attributed to the Clarke family gave numerous details about the geography of the site and commented on grotesque local practices of displaying disinterred human remains. Because the provenance of this account is not presently verified, I have not highlighted it. See copy of unpublished MS, “Letter written by John Gideon Clarke Sr. in Oct. 1859,” clippings files, PHS. 5. “Swamp Fight Memorial to Be Unveiled Tomorrow,” Pawtucket Times, published as Evening Times, Oct. 19, 1906, 3; “Monument Unveiled,” Pawtucket Times, published as Evening Times, Oct. 20, 1906, 1.

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6. A Record of the Ceremony and Oration on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Monument Commemorating the Great Swamp Fight, December 19, 1675, in the Narragansett Country, Rhode Island. Erected by the Society of Colonial Wars of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, October 20, 1906 (Boston: Societies of Colonial Wars / D. B. Updike and Merrymount Press, 1906), 4–5. 7. Ibid., 5. 8. Ibid., 9–10. 9. Ibid., 53. Similar words are in the working papers by Rowland G. Hazard II, Great Swamp fight oration drafts, 1913, folder 23, box 10, subseries 6, series 2, subgroup 7, MSS 483, Rowland G. Hazard II and Mary P. (Bushnell) Hazard Papers, RIHS. 10. A Record of the Ceremony and Oration, 53. 11. Caroline E. Robinson, The Hazard Family of Rhode Island, 1635–1894: Being a Genealogy and History (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1895), 207–208. Title to Great Swamp Fight Site, May 24, 1906, copy at RIHS, from original in Town Clerk’s Office, South Kingstown, on file at RIHPHC. 12. On the “turf and twig” ritual, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–2, 4, 16, 67, 179. 13. A Record of the Ceremony and Oration, 6. 14. In 1931 the society acquired “Queen’s Fort,” residence of Quaiapen (later killed at Nipsachuck Swamp in 1676), from Marsden J. Perry. In 1980 the fort and sixteen acres were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1987 the society considered selling some of the land to support other budgetary needs. Colleen Fitzpatrick, “Historical Society considers sale of Queen’s Fort land to developer,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, 1987, C-1, C-3, clippings files, PHS. On the site, see also Stephen Cole for Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, “Queen’s Fort,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form, March 1980, RIHPHC. 15. Wilfred Munro, “President’s Address,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1906–1907 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1909), 26. 16. Frank Heppner, Railroads of Rhode Island: Shaping the Ocean State’s Railways (Charleston SC: History Press, 2012), 24–27. 17. “Here Comes Autumn,” Newport Mercury and Weekly News, Sept. 23, 1938, 4; Donald B. Willard, “C.C.C. Disturbs Ghosts of 1000 Indians Slain in Battle of Great Swamp; Government Is Building Road Over Bog to Site of Bloody Combat During King Philip’s War—Colonists Invaded Fort and Broke Power of Narragansetts 263 Years Ago,” Daily Boston Globe, Jan. 1, 1939, D1. 18. On lobbying the legislature, “President’s Address,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1906–1907 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1909), 22. On the installation of tablets, “President’s Address,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1907–1908 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1910), 18–20; on

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Wickford, “Tablet Dedicated to the Heroes of the Great Swamp Fight,” The News (Newport, RI), June 17, 1907, 4; “Great Swamp Fight Tablet Dedicated,” Pawtucket Times, June 15, 1907, 11. 19. Patricia E. Rubertone, “Cocumscussoc, North Kingstown, Rhode Island,” in Archaeology in America: An Encyclopedia, eds. Francis P. McManamon et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), 127–128. 20. A farther Brief and True Narration of the Great Swamp Fight in the Narragansett Country . . . Written a few days later and first printed at London in February, 1676 ([Providence]: Printed by S. P. C. for the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, [1912]). On the exhibition, see “Colonial Wars / Important Collection of Records Shown at Local Library,” news clipping, n.p., n.d., inside back cover of this text, copy at JCBL. 21. Caroline Hazard Papers, MSS 483 sg 11, RIHS; Helen S. French, “Caroline Hazard: Fifth President of Wellesley College,” Wellesley Magazine, June 1945, 283–284. 22. Caroline Hazard, Anchors of Tradition: A Presentment of Some Little Known Facts and Persons in a Small Corner of Colonial New England called Narragansett, to which are Added Certain Weavings of Fancy from the Thread of Life upon the Loom of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924), viii. 23. Caroline Hazard, “The Great Swamp Fight,” in Narragansett Ballads with Songs and Lyrics (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894), 1–12. 24. “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” from William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene 7. 25. Hazard, “The Great Swamp Fight,” 12. 26. Hazard, “A Survivor. 1725. Fifty Years after the Great Swamp Fight,” in Narragansett Ballads, 13–21. 27. These included many burying grounds, the Narragansett Church, “Queen Esther’s” gravesite, and others. Hazard, “Narragansett Tombstones and Monuments,” in Anchors of Tradition, 125–148. 28. Ibid., 147–148. 29. Ibid., 148. 30. For a similarly romantic, female-authored treatment of South County traditions and personalities published contemporaneously with Hazard’s study, see Esther Bernon Carpenter, South County Studies of Some Eighteenth Century Persons, Places & Conditions in that Portion of Rhode Island called Narragansett (Boston: Printed for the Subscribers, 1924). 31. All of the issues of The Narragansett Dawn published short news items about the social activities, jobs, and travel of various tribal people and families, both Narragansett and communities beyond, like the Wampanoag enclave at Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard. These seemingly mundane anecdotes (often under the header of “The Narragansett Mail Box” or “Sunrise News”) served the important function of keeping distant

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readers informed about the whereabouts and accomplishments of their relatives and acquaintances. 32. Theodore Dennis Brown, “Narragansett Territory,” Narragansett Dawn 1, no. 3 (July 1935), 11–12. 33. Other essays in The Narragansett Dawn (Dawn) that expressed tribal senses of place and heritage included a piece about the first Rhode Island Indian Day in 1936, and public gatherings at a “typical Narragansett Indian Village” built as a WPA project, in “First R I Indian Day,” Dawn 2, no. 5 (Sept. 1936), 2–3; the Narragansett school and nearby ponds and burying grounds, “A Bit of History,” Dawn 2, no. 5 (Sept. 1936), 5; the Narragansett Church and a nearby freshwater spring, “Editorial,” Dawn 2, no. 4 (Aug. 1936), 65–66; repairs to the steps of the Narragansett Church, “Indian Meeting House Steps Repaired,” Dawn 2, no. 3 (July 1936), 52–53; Narragansett travels, local place-names, and hills, “Editorial,” Dawn 2, no. 2 (June 1936), 20–21; camping areas at Camp Ki-Yi, run by the Glasko family, “Camp Ki-Yi,” Dawn 2, no. 2 (June 1936), 26–27; sites related to religion and Christianity among the Narragansetts, by Red Wing, “The Religious Influences of Rhode Island on Her Indians,” Dawn 1, no. 12 (April 1936), 288–290; a reconsideration of King Philip and Great Swamp, by Rising Sun, “King Philip,” Dawn 1, no. 11 (March 1936), 257–258; sites with Narragansett stonemasonry, by Owl’s Head, “In and About Peacedale,” Dawn 1, no. 11 (March 1936), 263–264; an island in Point Judith Pond, by Mrs. Maud Neves, Dawn 1, no. 11 (March 1936), 267; a small community along the King’s Highway in Charlestown, by Ishonowa, “Christian Indian Homes,” Dawn 1, no. 8 (Dec. 1935), 178–179; burial areas, in “The Ancient Burial Place of the Narragansett Sachems,” Dawn 1, no. 7 (Nov. 1935), 158–159; a poem on “Assawompsett Lake” by Charles Thomas Pope, Sr., Dawn 1, no. 3 (July 1935), 13. 34. On Brown’s itineraries as “countertours” useful for tribal members who might have moved away from the reservation, see Patricia E. Rubertone, “Memorializing the Narragansett: Placemaking and Memory Keeping in the Aftermath of Detribalization,” in Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America, ed. Rubertone (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 205. 35. Theodore D. Brown, “Historic South County,” Narragansett Dawn 1, no. 6 (Oct. 1935), 135–137. 36. Red Wing (born as Mary Glasko) claimed descent from the Simonds or Simons family (Wampanoag) and particularly from the King Philip line; see John Cech, “Princess Red Wing; Many Reasons, Many Thanksgivings,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 28, 1980. Also her obituary, “Indian historian, lecturer ‘Princess Red Wing,’ Mary Congdon, at 92,” n.p., Dec. 3, 1987, C-2, clippings file, RIHPHC. Red Wing’s authority as a bearer of cultural knowledge has not been uncontested among Narragansetts and Pokanokets. See Ann McMullen, “Culture by Design: Native Identity, Historiography, and the Reclamation of Tradition in Twentieth-Century Southeastern New England” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1996), esp. 162–171, 184–186.

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37. An image of an Indian wearing a Plains-style headdress and associated with Great Swamp was the only Native presence on the Colonial Revival–style map created by Norman Morrison Isham and Thomas George Hazard, Jr., A Map of Old Narragansett Plotted for the Honorable Company of Gentlemen Adventurers (1915), Map 2508, RIHS. See also Ann McMullen, “Soapbox Discourse: Tribal Historiography, Indian-White Relations, and Southeastern New England Powwows,” Public Historian 18, no. 4 (1996): 53–74, and “What’s Wrong with This Picture?: Context, Conversion, Survival, and the Development of Regional Native Cultures and Pan-Indianism in Southeastern New England,” in Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England, ed. Laurie Weinstein (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1994), 123–150; Christine N. Reiser, “Materializing Community: The Intersections of Pageantry, Material Culture and Indigeneity in Early 20th-Century New England,” Material Culture Review 69 (2009): 36–51. 38. Emily Estes, “History lessons from a princess,” Narragansett Times, Sept. 25, 1980, 3-SC, clippings file, PHS. 39. Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), chap. 13. I thank her (now Melissa Tantaquidegon Zobel) and Rachel Sayet for sharing perspectives on the origins and ongoing work of the Tantaquidgeon Museum. 40. Red Wing, 1936, quoted in William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 142. 41. For an excellent historical overview of the “Great Swamp Massacre Ceremony,” see Patricia E. Rubertone, “Monuments and Sexual Politics in New England Indian Country,” in The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects, ed. Barbara Voss and Eleanor Casella (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 232–251. Jill Lepore concludes her study of King Philip’s War with a brief examination of the gathering as it appeared in the early 1990s, in The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 237–238. 42. “Narragansetts commemorate a 1675 tragedy, in Great Swamp,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Sept. 26, 1994, D-5, clippings file, PHS; “A Charge of Treachery Stirs Indian Ceremony,” Providence Evening Bulletin, Sept. 25, 1972. 43. Profile on Emeline Thomas Colbert, Rhode Islander: The Providence Sunday Journal Magazine, April 8, 1979, 26. 44. Red Wing to White Flower, June 20, 1960; Sept. 15, 1960; Oct. 9, 1961; July 6, 1967; Aug. 5, 1969, in Hassanamisco Archives, Nipmuc Nation (contents as listed in archival Finding Aid, copy at YIPP). 45. “Great Swamp Memorial Pilgrimage” flyer and map, 1968, PHS. 46. Barry Bayon, “Narragansetts dance the dance of history,” letter to the editor, Providence Journal, Oct. 1, 2008; “R.I. Indians Recall Massacre,” Newport Daily News, Sept. 29, 1972, 19; “328 years later, ‘voices on the wind’ echo from Great Swamp

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Fight,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Dec. 14, 2003; “Narragansetts commemorate a 1675 tragedy, in Great Swamp; Members of the tribe recited poems about the past, of anger at the white Colonists and their descendants for taking the natives’ land, and delivered speeches of hope,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Sept. 26, 1994; John Hill, “Narragansetts commemorate a 1675 tragedy, in Great Swamp,” Providence Journal, Sept. 26, 1994, 5D. Visit to Great Swamp Memorial Ceremony, Aug. 2014. 47. “State Purchases Great Swamp Area,” The News (Newport), Aug. 9, 1950, 16. 48. “Archer gets 200 L. B. Doe,” Daily News (Newport), Jan. 15, 1962, 9; Tom Humphreys, “Surf, Stream, Field,” Newport Daily News, Aug. 4, 1962, 13. 49. “6 Quonset Pilots End Survival Test,” Newport Daily News, Feb. 5, 1954, 1; “9 Bearded Quonset Fliers End Swamp Survival Test,” The News (Newport), March 20, 1954, 4. 50. “Scouting in Newport County,” Newport Mercury and Weekly News, Aug. 26, 1932, 3; “Scout Indian Group Exhibits Regalia,” The News (Newport), Feb. 25, 1957, 14; “4-Hers Will Explore South County Swamp,” Newport Daily News, April 11, 1972, 9. 51. “Historical Bus Tours Slated in South County,” Newport Daily News, July 21, 1965, 23. 52. “The Great Swamp Wreck,” in Jim Ignasher, Rhode Island Disasters: Tales of Tragedy by Air, Sea and Rail (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2010), 45–47. 53. Lawrence M. Howard, “Exploring Rhode Island: Nature in the Raw in Great Swamp,” Providence Sunday Journal, April 17, 1960, N-36, clippings file, PHS. 54. James H. McCormick, “Many-Sided Marsh: Rhode Island’s Great Swamp Is Rich in Historic, Natural Attractions,” New York Times, July 5, 1964, XX-7, clippings file, RIHS. 55. Joint Tribal Council of the Passamaquoddy Tribe v. Morton, 528 F.2d 370 (1st Cir. 1975), which resulted in the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act (1980) and was later amended to include the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians and Aroostock Band of Micmacs. On the historical context of this decision and ongoing problems caused by it, from the vantage of a Penobscot historian, see Maria L. Girouard, “The Original Meaning and Intent of the Maine Indian Land Claims: Penobscot Perspectives” (master’s thesis, University of Maine, 2012). 56. “Congress’ aid sought in Indian suit,” Newport Daily News, April 28, 1977, 10. 57. Nine hundred acres were ceded by the state; $3.5 million in federal money was used to purchase the remaining nine hundred acres from private landowners, resulting in a slightly “checkerboard” appearance to the final reservation (tribal and nontribal lands interspersed). 58. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Federal Acknowledgment, “Recommendation and Summary of Evidence for Proposed Finding for Federal Acknowledgment of the Narragansett Indian Tribe of Rhode Island Pursuant to 25 CFR 83,” July 29, 1982, 2, 6, https://www.bia.gov/cs/groups/xofa/ documents/text/idc-001511.pdf (accessed April 11, 2017).

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59. Donald D. Breed, “Exile ends as Indians regain their tribal land,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Oct. 12, 1985, A-1, clippings file, RIHPHC. The newspaper items collected by Paul Robinson, former Rhode Island state archaeologist, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, constitute a useful informal archive of the Narragansetts’ political and cultural history as well as relations with the state and its municipalities (cited as RIHPHC). 60. “Indians Reclaim Land Seized a Century Ago,” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1985, RIHPHC; Colleen Fitzpatrick, “Narragansett Indians regain tribal lands after nearly two decades of negotiations,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Oct. 11, 1985, RIHPHC. 61. “1978 agreement may rule out high-stakes bingo,” Narragansett Times, July 26, 1991, RIHPHC; Kim Keim, “Bingo seen [as] panacea for tribe’s woes,” Narragansett Times, n.d., RIHPHC. 62. Gerald M. Carbone and Tatiana Pina, “Narragansetts say they plan to build casino on their land,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, July 15, 1992, A-1, A-10, RIHPHC. 63. Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). A vocal critic of Mashantucket Pequot gaming is Jeff Benedict, Without Reservation: The Making of America’s Most Powerful Indian Tribe and the World’s Largest Casino (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 64. Keith Brochu, “Casino plans stir fears, questions / Clergy pray for no casino / Officials discuss sites’ pros, cons,” Narragansett Times, July 31, 1992, RIHPHC. Also, Matthew Ortoleva, “Rhetorics of Place and Ecological Relationships: The Rhetorical Construction of Narragansett Bay” (Ph.D. diss, University of Rhode Island, 2010). 65. Patricia Almeida, Ann L. Maynard, Marion G. McAusland, Forrester C. Safford, “Casino offensive taking many lines of attack,” Narragansett Times, Aug. 20, 1993, 19A, RIHPHC. 66. Sam Jones, “South County living in jeopardy,” letter to the editor, Narragansett Times, Oct. 20, 1993, 17-A, RIHPHC; also Rep. Rodney D. Driver, “Casino would lead to increased crime . . .,” Narragansett Times, Dec. 10, 1993, 17-A, RIHPHC. 67. Michael McDonnell, “Casino would help economy,” letter to the editor, n.p., Aug. 1992, RIHPHC. 68. “A Spreading Infection,” editorial, n.p., July 20, 1992, A10, RIHPHC. 69. Bruce Fellman, “Gambling Away the Land,” in A Naturalist’s Journal, published in Narragansett Times, Standard-Times, East Greenwich Pendulum, n.d., PHS. 70. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Megan Waples, “The EcoIndian: Myths and Realities in the Narragansett Indian Tribe and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation” (bachelor’s thesis, Brown University, 1997), esp. 24–26, 29–41, 60–68. 71. “Two locations announced for proposed bingo hall,” Narragansett Times, Aug. 16, 1991, 3-A, RIHPHC.

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72. Ruth Platner, “Environment the biggest loser if state gambles on casino,” Narragansett Times, June 4, 1993, RIHPHC. 73. Evelyn Flynn, “South County would be ruined,” Narragansett Times, Dec. 10, 1993, 17-A, RIHPHC. 74. Ruth Schell, “Swamp Yankee,” American Speech 38, no. 2 (May 1963): 121–123. 75. Alan Rosenberg, “ ‘Swamp Yankee’ an insult? That view doesn’t hold water,” Providence Journal, Feb. 29, 2008, D-01. Swamp Yankees feature in Bousquet’s published work, like Beware of the Quahog: A Cartoon Collection on the Rhode Island Experience (Wakefield, RI: Wilson Publishing, 1982). 76. Barbara Hackey, a “lifelong South County resident,” quoted in Rosenberg, “ ‘Swamp Yankee’ an insult?” 77. “I’m just an 85-year old Swamp Yankee with a long memory,” wrote Nancy Allen Holst of Warwick in a critique of the Narragansetts’ claim to “nation” status, adding, “The Narragansett nation became extinct in 1675 with the burning, sacking, and massacre” of their homes. Holst, “Narragansetts have no immunity,” letter to the editor, Narragansett Times, Sept. 9, 1992, RIHPHC. 78. Matthew Thomas, “You’ve already destroyed town’s character,” Chariho Times, Dec. 23, 1994, RIHPHC. 79. Cheryl J. LaMalfa, “RI, wake up and work with the tribe,” letter to the editor, Narragansett Times, June 4, 1993, RIHPHC; Michael McDonnell, letter to the editor, “Casino would help economy,” Aug. 1992, RIHPHC. 80. Carole A. Costanza and Mark H. Vinbury, “Editorial showed hostility, condescension,” letter to the editor, Narragansett Times, April 8, 1992, RIHPHC. 81. Ellen Liberman, “Narragansetts, developers battle over use of R.I. land,” Boston Sunday Globe, Sept. 30, 1990, 39, 42, RIHPHC. 82. Carla Ann Cesario, “Of Stone Talking and History Writing: The Discourse of the Narragansett Indian Church” (master’s thesis, University of Wyoming, 1995), 41, original quotation in John Hill, “New hope amid the ruins,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Dec. 23, 1993, A7. On its reconstruction and reopening, see John Hill, “Tribe hopes for grants to help rebuild church,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Sept. 1, 1994, D-1, D-3, RIHPHC; James A. Merolla, “Narragansett Indian Church, rebuilt from ashes, to reopen Sunday,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, Nov. 22, 1996, 3B. 83. Jeff Corntassel and Richard C. Witmer II, Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challenges to Indigenous Nationhood (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 21–23; National Congress of American Indians, Resolution #FTL-04–103, “Repeal Chafee Rider to Support Restoring IGRA Rights to the Narragansett Tribe,” passed Oct. 10–15, 2004. 84. Katie Mulvaney, “One Nation, Two Worlds: Rules keep changing in Narragansetts’ fight for casino,” Providence Journal, Aug. 5, 2004, A-11; “Narragansetts Say Prejudice Motivates Almond, Chafee,” Ojibwe News, Nov. 22, 1996, 2; Timothy C. Barmann, “Indians, supporters protest new law on gambling,” Providence Journal, Nov. 17, 1996,

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1B; Paul Davis, “Tribe plans protest at State House tomorrow; The protest, called ‘Massacre Revisited,’ links efforts to stop a proposed casino to other injustices against the Narragansett Tribe,” Providence Journal, Nov. 15, 1996, 5B. 85. Interest in gaming is not unanimous among Narragansetts, who have seen both its pros and cons at Mohegan and Mashantucket. The post-2008 economic downturn and faltering business model at Mashantucket has raised questions about gaming’s long-term viability. Michael Sokolove, “Foxwoods Is Fighting for Its Life,” New York Times, March 14, 2012. 86. Jean M. Pacillo, “Tribe asks for spot on base reuse committee,” Narragansett Times, June 17, 1992, RIHPHC; Stephen Heffner, “Ancient Indian site lies in path of proposed freeway: Narragansett Tribe requests review role,” Journal-Bulletin, March 25, 1991, A-3, RIHPHC. 87. As just one example, Wakefield resident Charles Potter boasted “more than 1,000 Indian arrowheads and various other Indian artifacts in 13 glass covered cases in his home.” See “In Charlestown / Unearths Ancient Indian Relic,” n.p., [1958], PHS. Such collecting has been rampant across Rhode Island and southern New England. 88. Paul A. Robinson, “One Island, Two Places: Archaeology, Memory, and Meaning in a Rhode Island Town,” in Interpretations of Native North American Life: Material Contributions to Ethnohistory, ed. Michael S. Nassaney and Eric S. Johnson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), esp. 402; William S. Simmons, Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970). 89. Conversation with E. Pierre Morenon, Patricia Rubertone, and Kevin McBride, June 6, 2012; Patricia E. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 117–120. On the process and findings of RI-1000, see Paul A. Robinson, Marc A. Kelley, and Patricia E. Rubertone, “Preliminary Biocultural Interpretations from a Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Indian Cemetery in Rhode Island,” in Cultures in Contact: The European Impact on Native Cultural Institutions in Eastern North America, A.D. 1000–1800, ed. William Fitzhugh (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985); William A. Turnbaugh, The Material Culture of RI-1000, a Mid-17th Century Burial Site in North Kingstown, Rhode Island (Kingston, RI: University of Rhode Island, 1984); Marc A. Kelley, “Ethnohistorical Accounts as a Method of Assessing Health, Disease, and Population Decline Among Native Americans,” in Human Paleopathology: Current Syntheses and Future Options, ed. Donald J. Ortner and Arthur C. Aufderheide (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Patricia E. Rubertone, “Archaeology, Colonialism, and Seventeenth-Century Native America: Towards an Alternative Interpretation,” in Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions, ed. Robert Layton (New York: Routledge, 1994), 32–45. 90. The THPO program was made possible by a 1992 amendment to the National Historic Preservation Act, section 101(d)(2). The Narragansett office is often referred to

notes to pages 183–185

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as NITHPO. It was preceded by the Narragansett Anthropological-Archaeological Committee. 91. Paraphrased in John B. Brown III and Paul A. Robinson, “ ‘The 368 Years’ War’: The Conditions of Discourse in Narragansett Country,” in Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States, ed. Jordan E. Kerber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 74. Also Paul A. Robinson and Charlotte C. Taylor, “Heritage Management in Rhode Island: Working with Diverse Partners and Audiences,” in Cultural Resource Management in Contemporary Society: Perspectives on Managing and Presenting the Past, ed. Francis P. McManamon and Alf Hatton (New York: Routledge, 2000), 107–119. On the NITHPO’s effects on Rhode Island preservation, see Liz Abbott, “Persistence, perspective earn Brown award,” Westerly Sun, Dec. 6, 2009. On the history and current state of that relationship, see Paul A. Robinson, remarks in roundtable forum, “The State of Archaeology in New England: Indian/Archaeology Interactions and Collaborations,” Fourth Annual Meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Mohegan Sun, June 6, 2012. 92. Lawrence K. LaCroix, “Captain Pierce’s Fight: An Investigation into a King Philip’s War Battlefield and Its Remembrance and Memorialization” (master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2011), esp. 95–96, and appendix B: “Nine Men’s Misery,” 131–140. The encounter is memorialized in several spots, including Pierce Park, located on the banks of the Blackstone River in the shadow of the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls. Visit to Pierce Park, July 2011. James A. Rosenthal, “King Philip, another view . . .,” Evening Bulletin, Aug. 19, 1976, A-10, clippings file, NKFL. 93. “The Cistercians to Occupy New Home Christmas Day,” Evening Times (Pawtucket), n.d., CPL. 94. “First Scenes of New Cistercian Novitiate at Cumberland Monastery,” Pawtucket Times, March 27, 1937, 3, CPL. 95. The plaque is now bright green due to patina, and heavily incised with initials, scratches, and other marks. Site-visit, July 5, 2011. 96. Sumathi Reddy, “A fiery test of faith; Trappists recall blaze in 1950 that destroyed their monastery home, Our Lady of the Valley,” Providence Journal, March 22, 1999, C1, C2, CPL; Jack Walsh, “Jelly-making monks celebrate 50-years in Spencer,” The Pilot, Nov. 17, 2000, 14, CPL. 97. “Monastery Bought by Cumberland,” Pawtucket Times, Oct. 27, 1972, CPL; “Town Plans For Financing Friary Purchase Questioned,” n.p., n.d., CPL; Norm Chamberland, “ ‘Future Seat of Cumberland Govt.’; Monastery Purchase Voted,” Woonsocket Call and Evening Reporter, Oct. 27, 1972, CPL. 98. Paul R. Dubois, “Cumberland monastery is recreational showplace,” Woonsocket Call, Sept. 15, 1985, C-6, clippings file, CPL. 99. Sandy Oxx, “Cumberland monastery a neighborhood oasis,” Providence Journal, March 31, 1990, CPL; Paul R. Dubois, “All is set for final plantings Sat. in new water

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garden,” Valley Breeze, May 31, 2001, 5, CPL; George Beaubien, “ ‘Go take a hike’ on one of area’s many wilderness trails,” Valley Breeze, Sept. 25, 2003, 8, CPL. 100. Jo C. Goode, “Trashing trail work,” Journal Register News Service, June 9, 2004, 14, 23, CPL. 101. Luci Lemos and Sigrid Howells, letter to the editor, “Black residue on Monastery trails: You call this an improvement?” Valley Breeze, June 10, 2004, 32, CPL. 102. Marcia Green, “Monastery trails get new topcoat . . . and that’s no asphalt,” Valley Breeze, May 27, 2004, 10, CPL; Jo C. Goode, “Lab study finds too much arsenic in Monastery trail; Contractor agrees to remove contaminated rock,” Journal Register News Service, June 23, 2004, 12, 14, CPL. 103. Jo C. Goode, “Monastery walking trail work has begun,” Journal Register News Service, April 28, 2004, 14ff., CPL. 104. Green, “Monastery trails get new topcoat.” 105. “Eagle candidate Kenwood and helpers clear a path to Nine Men’s Misery,” Valley Breeze, April 22, 2004, 2, CPL. 106. Marcia Green, “Indian artifacts? State halts Monastery trail work, wants survey,” Valley Breeze, July 15, 2004, 6, CPL; Marcia Green, “Trails open, but Monastery grounds may get wider search for artifacts,” Valley Breeze, July 22, 2004, 1, 31, CPL; Brian Jones, Daniel Forrest, and Bruce Clouette for PAST, Inc., “Phase I(c) Archaeological Survey, Monument Loop Trail Project, FHWA Recreational Trails Program, Cumberland, Rhode Island,” RIDOT Archaeology Series no. 152, Prepared for Rhode Island Department of Transportation (2008), report on file at RIHPHC. See also Deepa Ranganathan, “Survey on Monastery trail unearths Indian artifacts,” Providence Journal, Sept. 1, 2004, B2, CPL. In the wake of the archaeological survey and trail controversy, the town moved to thwart further development of the site; see Jo C. Goode, “Monastery protected from new development including Senior Center,” Journal Register News Service, Nov. 10, 2004, CPL; and Paul R. Dubois, “Council’s intent for Monastery? Leave it the way it is—forever,” Valley Breeze, Nov. 11, 2004, CPL. 107. Robinson, quoted in Green, “Trails open,” 31. 108. Jo C. Goode, “ ‘Monastery Watch’ established to protect area,” Journal Register News Service, Sept. 29, 2004, 14, 19, CPL; and “Town police institute citizens’ Monastery watch,” Valley Breeze, Sept. 30, 2004, 15, CPL. 109. Russ Olivo, “Tribe stakes claim to land,” Woonsocket Call, March 13, 2003; John Larrabee, “Judge dismisses tribe’s land claim,” Woonsocket Call, Nov. 4, 2003; Marcia Green, “Wampanoags get 55 acres of Cumberland land; Tribe leaders hopeful, but town says donated parcel near worthless,” Valley Breeze, Feb. 15, 2007, 1, 28, CPL. 110. Matthew Thomas, “ ‘Still fighting King Philip’s War’: Narragansetts have right to their dream,” Providence Journal, March 3, 2004, B-04; also discussed in Brown and Robinson, “ ‘The 368 Years’ War,’ ” 63.

notes to pages 187–192

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111. For an account of this raid and its backstory by Narragansett journalist John Christian Hopkins, see “Troopers Lead Attack on Narragansett Reservation,” in Dawn. Vcs., 530–533. 112. Paul Davis and Katie Mulvaney, “A fight as old as America: ‘I always wondered how my ancestors felt,’ ” Providence Journal-Bulletin, July 20, 2003, A-01. 113. “Narragansett Indians want smoke-shop trial moved to Providence,” Boston Globe, March 3, 2007. 114. Katie Mulvaney, “Tribe: move smoke-shop case to Providence,” Providence Journal, March 3, 2007, A-02. 115. Michael P. McKinney, “Smoke-shop sentence: No jail time for Narragansetts,” Providence Journal, June 19, 2008; Paul Davis, “Sachem’s penalty is a boon for students,” Providence Journal, Dec. 21, 2008, 1. 116. Donald L. Carcieri, Governor of Rhode Island, v. Ken L. Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, et al., 129 S.Ct. 1058 (2009). 117. Heidi McNeil Staudenmaier and Celene Sheppard, “Impact of the Carcieri Decision,” American Bar Association Newsletter (Spring 2009); Matthew L. M. Fletcher, “Decision’s in. ‘Now’ begins work to fix Carcieri,” Indian Country Today, Feb. 25, 2009. 118. John Paul Stevens, dissenting, Supreme Court of the United States, Donald L. Carcieri, Governor of Rhode Island, et al., Petitioners v. Ken L. Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, Feb. 24, 2009, 2. 119. Liz Abbott, “Tribe protests court’s decision,” Westerly Sun, March 21, 2009. 120. Tom Meade, “It’s a Great Swamp in every way,” Providence Journal, May 7, 2009, Weekend 1. 121. Site-visits to Great Swamp in Nov. 2005, May 2010, June 2012, Aug. 2014. The sign at the entrance on Route 2 was missing as of June 2012. 122. Ellen Liberman, “Indians hold ceremony, mourn memorial’s state,” Narragansett Times, Sept. 26, 1990, 4-A, PHS. 123. Bruce MacDonald, “Assault on Great Swamp monument,” letter to the editor, Providence Journal, Aug. 13, 2008. 124. Among the practices of engagement Rubertone identifies are “digging small holes in the ground, piling heaps of stone or branches, making offerings of material objects, food, or alcoholic beverages, lighting ceremonial fires, and drawing petroglyphs.” Rubertone, “Memorializing the Narragansett,” 200. Such signs of engagement have also been present by the Canonchet statue in the town of Narragansett, and at Fort Ninigret (site-visits, 2012–2015). 125. David W. Dumas, “Mute testimonial to an ancient war,” letter to the editor, Providence Journal, Aug. 30, 2008, 3. 126. Richard Greenwood et al., “The Battles of Nipsachuck: Research and Documentation,” Final Technical Report to National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, GA-2255–09–023, Aug. 2011; conversations with Albert Klyberg,

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June 19, 2010; Paul Robinson, Dec. 2010, July 2011, Aug. 2011; Kevin McBride and David Naumec, Feb. 2011; Kevin McBride, July 2011, June 2012. 127. Greenwood et al., “The Battles of Nipsachuck,” esp. 10–11. 128. The area, battles, and relevant land transactions were detailed in Fred A. Arnold, “The Inman Purchase in North Smithfield,” Narragansett Historical Register VI, no. 1 (1888): 49–92. Nipsachuck is not mentioned in Lepore, The Name of War, nor in James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); it is mentioned once in passing in Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 70. Nathaniel Philbrick briefly mentions it in Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006), 257. “Disaster at Nipsachuck” does receive an entry in Cormac O’Brien, The Forgotten History of America: Little-Known Conflicts of Lasting Importance from the Earliest Colonists to the Eve of the Revolution (Beverly, MA: Fair Winds Press, 2008), 114–121. 129. On K.O.C.O.A., see Greenwood et al., “The Battles of Nipsachuck,” 65, 67–68. 130. The University of Connecticut Field School, under the direction of Kevin McBride from the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, arrived at the site for a week’s work. Site-visit to Nipsachuck, June 29, 2011. The field school returned in the 2012 summer season. 131. John Brown and Paul Robinson, walking tour, “Narragansett Indian Reservation,” April 25, 2009, Kingston, in The 24th Annual Rhode Island Statewide Historic Preservation Conference program, 6. Kristin Elizabeth Swanton, “Landscape, Memory, and Public Archaeology: An Ethnographic Study of Stakeholder Communities and Conflict Archaeology at the Battle of Mystic Fort” (master’s thesis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2012). 132. Abigail Sprague Papers, History of Cumberland notes, MSS 1023, RIHS. 133. Sprague, History of Cumberland notes, MSS 1023, box 1, folder 49: Indians, and folder 54: King Philip’s War, RIHS. 134. Characterizing Algonquian people as vagabonds was a common trope in town histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as authors failed to perceive connections to place and kin networks. For discussion of this in various parts of the Northeast, see Daniel Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Jason R. Mancini, “Beyond Reservation: Indian Survivance in Southern New England and Eastern Long Island, 1713–1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2009); Christine N. Reiser, “Rooted in Movement: Spatial Practices and Community Persistence in Native Southwestern New England” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2010). 135. Adin Ballou, born in Cumberland, recalled Purchase as an employee at his father’s sawmill. See Adin Ballou and William S. Heywood, Autobiography of Adin Ballou, 1803–1890 (Lowell, MA: Vox Populi Press, 1896), 10. See also History of Providence

notes to pages 196–198

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County, ed. Richard M. Bayles (New York: W. W. Preston, 1891), 268. Purchase appeared in the 1800 U.S. federal census in the township of Glocester, Rhode Island, listed among the “Free Blacks.” 136. Sprague, History of Cumberland notes, MSS 1023, box 1, f. 54: King Philip’s War, RIHS. 137. E.g., Lepore, The Name of War, 236–238. 138. Wilfred Munro, “President’s Address,” Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1906–1907 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1909), 26. 139. Peter Brannen, “Wind Forum Stirs Debate as Task Force Remains Skeptical,” Vineyard Gazette Online, Dec. 24, 2010, https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2010/ 12/23/wind-forum-stirs-debate-task-force-remains-skeptical; Elizabeth Abbott, “Ancient Indian Village in Rhode Island Pits Preservation Against Property Rights,” New York Times, April 6, 2010; and Paul Robinson, memo, “Salt Pond Archaeological Site RI 110: Site Summary,” July 3, 2007. 140. Bill Rodriguez, “Building stone walls and legends,” Narragansett Times, March 25, 1982, 1-SC, PHS. 141. Cesario, “Of Stone Talking and History Writing”; Wendi-Starr Brown, “The Church Is the People: The Role of a Christian Church in a Native American Community” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2002). 142. George H. Hopkins et al., “Where the Spirit Is: The 319th August Meeting,” Narragansett Indian Tribe application, Historic Preservation Fund Grants to Indian Tribes, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiian Organizations, Jan. 28, 1994, RIHPHC. 143. On “urban homelands” inhabited by Narragansetts and other Native peoples in Providence, such as the “Indian doctress” Sarah Baxter, see Patricia E. Rubertone, “Archaeologies of Native Production and Marketing in 19th-Century New England,” chap. 11 in Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, ed. Craig Cipolla (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 204–221. 144. Paul Davis, “Game based on King Philip’s War angers Native Americans,” Providence Journal, March 15, 2010; “Protest Set for Saturday Over King Philip War Game,” Feather News, March 19, 2010; event photos by LeeLee Phillips, via facebook. com photo albums; “Annawon Protests Board Game,” youtube.com video in three parts, uploaded by milwaukeeindymedia, March 20, 2010. For a critique of the protests as “roiling the professional victimologists’ lobby,” see editorial “King Philip’s War,” Providence Journal, April 7, 2010. 145. Karen Ziner, “Urban Pond Procession raises awareness about environment,” Providence Journal, May 21, 2011; talk by William Simmons, Tomaquag Indian Museum, Dec. 2010; Through Our Eyes: An Indigenous View of Mashapaug Pond, ed. Dawn Dove and Holly Ewald (Exeter, RI: Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum and Holly Ewald, 2012). 146. Some interpretation takes place through the Tomaquag Indian Museum and Nuweetooun School in Exeter, curator of Red Wing’s papers and belongings.

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notes to pages 198–207

Conversation with Loren Spears, Dec. 2010. On the contemporary cultural work of the Tomaquag, including a new song written to commemorate Great Swamp, see Tom Meade, “Native American pathways,” Providence Journal, Jan. 26, 2012, Weekend 6. 147. Examination of Chechaubabeto, “a Squaw brought in by Constable Stebens, concerning the Indians at Providence,” June 1676, Mass.Arch. 30, 202a. 148. Thomas, “ ‘Still fighting King Philip’s War.’ ” 149. Williams, Key into Lang., 74. 150. Hiawatha Brown, quoted in James A. Merolla, “A grim lesson at the Great Swamp; In their annual ceremony, Narragansett Indians honor ancestors killed in a massacre by Colonial militia in 1675,” Providence Journal, Sept. 23, 1996, 1B.

Chapter 5. The Gathering Place 1. Janet Bond Wood, “Gill monument defaced in the name of activism,” The Recorder (Greenfield, MA), Oct. 9, 1999, 4, PVMA-HD. 2. Hubbard, Narr., 85–86. 3. A thorough survey of remembrance practices at and around Deerfield is provided by Michael C. Batinski, Pastkeepers in a Small Place: Five Centuries in Deerfield, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 4. John Phelps, poem beginning “An old New England village” (1930), reproduced by hand on poster, “Northfield Mass. Est 1673,” n.d., NPL. 5. 250th Anniversary Celebration of the Town of Northfield, Mass., June 22, 23, and 24, 1923, n.p., n.d., 91, NPL. 6. The Connecticut River’s headwaters are at Fourth Connecticut Lake in northern New Hampshire, close to the Canadian border (to use modern Euro-American geographical names). From there it flows south, forming the border between New Hampshire and Vermont, then moving through central/western Massachusetts and Connecticut, and eventually emptying into Long Island Sound at Old Saybrook and Old Lyme. W. D. Wetherell, ed., This American River: Five Centuries of Writing About the Connecticut (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2002); Connecticut River Watershed Council, The Connecticut River Boating Guide: Source to Sea (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2007); Michael Tougias, River Days: Exploring the Connecticut River from Source to Sea (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club, 2001). 7. Those tributaries are the Deerfield River, Green River, Fall River, and Miller River. 8. On possible historical toponymy, see Margaret M. Bruchac, “Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery: Indigenous People in the Connecticut River Valley” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2007), 15; Margaret Bruchac and Peter Thomas, “Locating Wissatinnewag: John Pynchon’s Influence on Pocumtuck Diplomacy,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 34, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 56–82. For a response, Lion G. Miles, “Locating ‘Wissatinnewag’: A Second Opinion,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 35, nos. 1–2 (2007): 142–144.

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9. Though patterns of mobility and shifting community relations make it difficult to spatially fix these with stability or precision, nearby Native groupings included Agawam (Springfield); Nonotuck (Amherst / Hadley / South Hadley / Northampton); Pocumtuck (Deerfield); Sokoki or Squakheag (Northfield, MA; Hinsdale, NH; Brattleboro, VT); Woronoco (Westfield); and eastward ties to Quaboag (Brookfield). 10. On Amoskeag, see Victoria B. Kenyon and Donald W. Foster, “The Smyth Site (NH 38–4): Research in Progress,” New Hampshire Archaeologist 21 (1980): 45–49; Donald W. Foster, Victoria B. Kenyon, and George P. Nicholas II, “Ancient Lifeways at the Smyth Site NH 38–4,” New Hampshire Archaeologist 22, no. 2 (1981): 1–17; on the nearby Neville site, see Dena F. Dincauze, “The Neville Site: 8000 Years at Amoskeag,” New Hampshire Archaeologist 18 (Dec. 1975): 2–4. On Nemasket, see Michael J. Maddigan, Nemasket River Herring: A History (Charleston, SC: Natural History Press, 2014), esp. “The Early History of the Nemasket Herring,” 35–40. 11. Thomas Morton, The New English Canaan (Boston: Printed for the [Prince] Society, 1883), 138. 12. Robert Paynter and Elizabeth S. Chilton, “Connecticut River Valley, Massachusetts; Ancient and Historic Archaeology in the Connecticut River Valley,” in Archaeology in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Francis P. McManamon (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), 118–122; on the falls specifically, see Michael S. Nassaney, “The Significance of the Turners Falls Locality in Connecticut River Valley Archaeology,” chap. 14 in The Archaeological Northeast, ed. Mary Ann Levine, Kenneth E. Sassaman, and Nassaney (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999). Also Elizabeth S. Chilton, “ ‘towns they have none’: Diverse Subsistence and Settlement Strategies in Native New England,” in New York State Museum Bulletin No. 496, Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: A.D. 700–1300, ed. John P. Hart and Christina B. Rieth (Albany: New York State Museum, 2002), 289–300; Elizabeth S. Chilton, “Mobile Farmers and Sedentary Models: Horticulture and Cultural Transitions in Late Woodland and Contact Period New England,” chap. 6 in Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Pre-Columbian North America, ed. Susan Alt (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010); Siobhan Hart, Elizabeth Chilton, and Christopher Donta, “Before Hadley: Archaeology and Native History, 10,000 BC to 1700 AD,” chap. 2 in Cultivating a Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts, ed. Marla R. Miller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Elizabeth S. Chilton, “So Little Maize, So Much Time: Understanding Maize Adoption in New England,” in Current Northeast Paleoethnobotany II, ed. John P. Hart (Albany: New York State Museum, 2008), 53–58. 13. Margaret M. Bruchac, “Earthshapers and placemakers: Algonkian Indian stories and the landscape,” chap. 5 in Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice, ed. H. Martin Wobst and Claire Smith (New York: Routledge, 2005); Lisa T. Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 17, 20–21; Lisa Brooks, Donna Roberts Moody, and John Moody, “Native Space,” chap. 20 in Where the Great River Rises: An Atlas of the

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notes to pages 208–210

Connecticut River Watershed in Vermont and New Hampshire, ed. Rebecca A. Brown (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England / Dartmouth College Press, 2009), 133–137, esp. 133. 14. From an account book by William Pynchon, contextualized in “An Agawam Fragment,” chap. 9 in Gordon Day, In Search of New England’s Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day, ed. Michael K. Foster and William Cowan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 98–101. As Day notes, there are extremely scant archival records about linguistics in the Connecticut River Valley, this fragment being one. These cyclical calendars varied from tribal group to tribal group; for one example from areas northeast of the Pocumtucks (for whom a comparable historical listing is not extant), see “Months of the Year,” in Indian Good Book, Made by Eugene Vetromile, S.J., Indian Patriarch, For the Benefit of the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, St. John’s, Micmac, and Other Tribes of The Abnaki Indians (New York: Edward Dunigan & Brother, 1857), 440–441. 15. On Native adoption of European hooks and lines, see William Wood, New England’s Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 107–108. 16. Ibid., 107. 17. On “beaver time,” see Dietland Müller-Schwarze, The Beaver: Its Life and Impact, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), chap. 8. 18. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 69; Wood, New England’s Prospect, 43. 19. “The West Indies Trade,” chap. 2, and “The Lead Mine at Tantiusque,” chap. 5 in PP, vol. 2: 147–194, 253–273. 20. David M. Powers, Damnable Heresy: William Pynchon, the Indians, and the First Book Banned (and Burned) in Boston (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), esp. chap. 3, “Beaver Pelts and Jaw Harps.” 21. Strother E. Roberts, “The Commodities of the Country: An Environmental Biography of the Colonial Connecticut Valley” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2011), 270–297. 22. Indian Deeds of Hampden County: Being Copies of All Land Transfers from the Indians Recorded in the County of Hampden: Massachusetts, and Some Deeds from Other Sources Together with Notes and Translations of Indian Place Names, ed. Harry Andrew Wright (Springfield, MA, 1905), 74–75. 23. Peter A. Thomas, “In the Maelstrom of Change: The Indian Trade and Cultural Process in the Middle Connecticut River Valley: 1635–1665” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1979); Robert S. Grumet, “Pocumtuck-Squakheag Country,” in Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today’s Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 96–101.

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24. On a local case, see Alice Nash, “Quanquan’s Mortgage of 1663,” in Miller, ed., Cultivating a Past, 25–42. For a continent-wide account of this spectrum, see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 25. On usufruct rights in the Northeast, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 62–65. 26. Wright, ed., Indians Deeds of Hampden County, 34, 61, 38. 27. PP, vol. 2, 283–288 (1659–1660). 28. Chauk alias Chavque, sachem of Pacomtuck, “Deed of Pacomtuck land granted by Chauk to Dedham residents,” Feb. 24, 1666/67, accession no. L98.012, scan of original and transcript hosted on American Centuries website, http://www.americancenturies.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=5716 (accessed June 29, 2012). 29. Not many of the Dedham residents actually moved to Pocumtuck; the proprietors sold off large numbers of their shares to more local (Connecticut River Valley– area) settlers. Richard I. Melvoin, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), esp. chap. 2, “ ‘Some Controversey,’ and New Proprietors,” and chap. 3, “ ‘Make a Toune of It.’ ” Also Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), esp. 37–39. 30. Brooks, The Common Pot, 21–23, esp. 22; on River Natives’ communications and interactions with Mohawks in this fraught time, see PP, vol. 1, 46, 50–51, 53–72. 31. PP, vol. 1, 79–80 (March 5, 1668/69). 32. Ibid., 136–137 (July 2, 1675). 33. On earlier Pocumtuck-Narragansett ties, see Proceedings of the United Colonies, Sept. 12, 1648 (1648.09.12.00), YIPP. 34. PP, vol. 1, 138–139 (Aug. 4, 1675), 139–140 (Aug. 6, 1675), 140 (Aug. 7, 1675). 35. Ibid., 142 (Aug. 7, 1675). 36. Ibid., 143 (Aug. 12, 1675). 37. Ibid., 147 (Aug. 19, 1675). 38. Kyle F. Zelner, A Rabble in Arms: Massachusetts Towns and Militiamen during King Philip’s War (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 39. “The Examination & Relation of James Quannapaquait,” Jan. 24, 1675/76, unpublished transcription courtesy of YIPP. 40. PP, vol. 1, 156–157 (Oct. 5, 1675), 157–159 (Oct. 8, 1675). 41. For Pynchon’s Providential interpretation of the mounting conflict, see esp. ibid., 164–165 (Oct. 20, 1675). 42. On Reede’s news in Hatfield, see Bodge, SIKPW, 244. 43. April 8, 1676, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, From 1665 to 1678; With the Journal of the Council of War, 1675 to 1678, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (Hartford: F. A. Brown, 1852), 432.

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notes to pages 214–217

44. “An Agawam Fragment,” 99. 45. Letter, John Russell to the Council at Connecticut, May 15, 1676 (with military postscript from William Turner, John Lyman, and Isaac Graves), in Bodge, SIKPW, 244. 46. Letter, John Russell, March 16, 1676, in Bodge, SIKPW, 236. 47. Letter, John Russell, William Turner, et al., April 29, 1676, in Bodge, SIKPW, 242. 48. The concept of “food security” arises from contemporary development, agricultural, and anthropological discourses but has major applications to earlier time periods. 49. Archaeologists have recently explored the exact nature of these fortifications: J. Edward Hood and Rita Reinke, “The Fortification of Hadley in the Seventeenth Century,” in Marla R. Miller, ed., Cultivating a Past, 68–90. 50. PP, vol. 1, 84–85 (April 10, 1670). 51. Letter, John Allyn for the Council of Connecticut to Pessicus, Wequaquat, Wanchequit, Sunggumachoe and the rest of the Indian Sachems up the River about Suckquackheage, May 1, 1676; and Termes propownded to all Indians that surrender themselves to the English, in The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 439–440. 52. William Hubbard wrote that the colonial troops “gave the Enemy a Camizado in the wigwams” at the falls, after the Natives had spent the previous night feasting. Hubbard, Narr., in “A table showing the Towns and places which are inhabited by the English in New-England.” See also “Camisado,” in Thomas Wilhelm, A Military Dictionary and Gazetteer. Comprising Ancient and Modern Military Technical Terms, Historical Accounts of All North American Indians, as well as Ancient Warlike Tribes; Also Notices of Battles from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, with a Concise Explanation of Terms Used in Heraldry and the Offices Thereof (Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersly, 1881), 84. 53. Letter, William Turner, April 25, 1676, in Bodge, SIKPW, 238, Mass.Arch. 68:228. 54. Letter of William Turner to the General Court, Oct. 27, 1670, printed in Bodge, SIKPW, 233. 55. Petition of Mrs. Mary Turner, April 24, 1676, in Bodge, SIKPW, 237. 56. James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 131–133; “Capt. William Turner and His Men, and the ‘Falls Fight,’ ” chap. 17 in Bodge, SIKPW. 57. Letter, John Russell, May 22, 1676, 1 CW 1:74 (Colonial Wars collection, transcriptions on file at MPMRC; originals in Connecticut State Library, Connecticut Archives: Colonial Wars, Series 1, 1675–1775). 58. Letter from the Council of Connecticut, May 20, 1676 (1676.05.20.00), YIPP. 59. PP, vol. 1, 167 (Aug. 15, 1676). 60. Entry of June 22, 1676, in The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 455.

notes to pages 217–218

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61. On a June 1676 report of Native movement toward the Wachusett hills, see Peter Ephraim’s Report to the Massachusetts Council on the Allegience of the Narragansett, June 1, 1676 (1676.06.01.00),YIPP. 62. “Menowniett’s examination, August, 1676,” in The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 471–472, orig. in 1 CW 1:108, transcriptions in MPMRC; Erik Mason, “The Pocumtuck Diaspora,” Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship program essay (1992), PVMA-HD; James Spady, “ ‘As if in a Great Darkness’: Native American Refugees of the Middle Connecticut River Valley in the Aftermath of King Philip’s War,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 23, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 183–197; Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, “Wattanummon’s World: Personal and Tribal Identity in the Algonquian Diaspora, c. 1660–1712,” in Actes du Vingt-Cinquième Congrès des Algonquinistes, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1994), 212–224. 63. Bruchac, “Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery,” esp. section 4.2.2, “Relocations after King Philip’s War,” and section 4.3, “Native Family Histories in the Valley and Points North.” 64. A Court Martial Held At Newport, Rhode Island, In August and September, 1676, For the Trial of Indians, Charged With Being Engaged in King Philip’s War (Albany: J. Munsell, 1858), 7–9. 65. His account testified to a number of wartime actions, including information that the Dutch had supplied ammunition and that Natives had buried arms around Pocumtuck. “Menowniett’s examination, August, 1676.” 66. Eugene Winter, “The Smyth Site at Amoskeag Falls: A Preliminary Report,” New Hampshire Archaeologist 18 (Dec. 1975): 5–8, discusses the “1676 surface” of soil, which it characterizes as the date “when the Pennacook left the area,” 6. This latter characterization may deserve further critical scrutiny, as excavators at the time may have channeled dominant colonial mythologies that assumed the postwar removal/withdrawal of local Native populations. On the other hand, the nearby 1676 colonial attack on Peskeomskut, along with a 1676 colonial seizure of one hundred plus Natives at the Cocheco River (not far to the east, on the New Hampshire seacoast), followed by their sale into slavery, are strong evidence that such sites were becoming notably dangerous for Algonquians in this period and during the supposed “peace” that followed. 67. John Stebbens, petition, [1678], orig. in Mass.Arch. 69 (Military, 1676–1680), 208; printed in George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts: The Times When and the People By Whom It Was Settled, Unsettled and Resettled: With a Special Study of the Indian Wars in the Connecticut Valley, vol. 1 (Greenfield, MA: E. A. Hall, 1895), 109; Mary Prince, “John Stebbins lived Deerfield’s history,” Daily Hampshire Gazette Bicentennial Edition, June 11, 1976, B-13, B-14, PVMA-HD. 68. “Escape of Jonathan Wells,” in Daniel White Wells and Reuben Field Wells, A History of Hatfield Massachusetts, 1660–1910 (Springfield, MA: F. C. H. Gibbons, 1910), 463–466; “Reverend Hope Atherton’s Story,” in Francis M. Thompson, History of

408

notes to pages 219–221

Greenfield: Shire Town of Franklin County, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (Greenfield, MA: T. Morey and Son, 1904), 49–51. 69. Quentin Stockwell, “Quentin Stockwell’s Relation of His 1677 Captivity and Redemption,” in Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid, ed. Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 35–48; C. Alice Baker, “Historical Paper,” in History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. 1870–1879, vol. 1 (Greenfield, MA: E. A. Hall, 1890), esp. 100. 70. Bodge, SIKPW, 131. 71. Hubbard, Narr., 39–40. Treat’s company included “Mohegin or Piquod Indians” along with English soldiers, 39. 72. Ibid., 40. For other examples, see Cotton Mather, article 10, “Harm Watch’d and Catch’d by the Indians, And Several Rare Instances of Mortal Wounds upon the English, not proving Mortal,” in Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of our Lord, 1698. In Seven Books (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702). 73. “Robert Dutch,” Antiquarian Papers [Ipswich] 2, no. 26 (Dec. 1881): 1–2. 74. Moses Craft et al., petition, April 30, 1678, printed in Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, 189; discussed in Melvoin, New England Outpost, 127. 75. Peter Fritzsche, “Ruins,” chap. 3 in Stranded in The Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Midas Dekkers, The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins, trans. Sherry MarxMacdonald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001). 76. Richard I. Melvoin, “The Deerfield Town Book 1670–1707: A Transcription from the Microfilm,” July 10, 1981, 18, PVMA-HD. Some original settlers declined to participate in the second wave of settlement, breaking much social continuity in Deerfield. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. 5 (1674–1686), ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston: William White, 1854), esp. entries of Oct. 22, 1677, 171; May 27, 1681, 321; May 27, 1682, 360; June 4, 1685, 482. 77. Michael D. Coe, The Line of Forts: Historical Archaeology on the Colonial Frontier of Massachusetts (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006). 78. David R. Proper, “The Fireplace at Memorial Hall, Deerfield, Massachusetts: ‘Picturesque Arrangements; Tender Associations,’ ” Foodways in the Northeast, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 1982, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1984), 114–129, esp. 115; Timothy Dwight, Letter II, Travels; in New-England and New-York, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: S. Converse, 1821), 63. 79. Laura Hill, “Monument, stone mark the Bloody Brook battle,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 21, 1987, 10, PVMA-HD; Arthur J. Krim, “Early Massachusetts Monuments,” Massachusetts Historical Commission Newsletter (Fall 1981), 11, PVMA-HD.

notes to pages 221–224

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80. Edwin M. Bacon, The Connecticut River and the Valley of the Connecticut: Three Hundred and Fifty Miles from Mountain to Sea; Historical and Descriptive (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907), 129. 81. John Warner Barber, Historical Collections, Being a General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, &c., Relating to the History and Antiquities of Every Town in Massachusetts, with Geographical Descriptions. Illustrated by 200 Engravings (Worcester, MA: Warren Lazell, 1844), 247–248. 82. “Appendix” and remarks of E. Hoyt, in Edward Everett, An Address Delivered at Bloody Brook, in South Deerfield, September 30, 1835, In Commemoration of the Fall of the “Flower of Essex,” At That Spot, In King Philip’s War, September 18, (O.S.) 1675 (Boston: Russell, Shattuck, & Williams, 1835), 38, 40. 83. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24, esp. 7. 84. On what was being physically commemorated in the valley during this period, see Kevin M. Sweeney, “Gravestones,” in William Hosley and Gerald Ward, eds., The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635–1820 (Hartford: Wadsworth Athenaeum, 1986), 485–523; Kevin M. Sweeney, “Where the Bay Meets the River: Gravestones and Stonecutters in the River Towns of Western Massachusetts, 1690– 1810,” Markers III: The Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies (1985): 1–46. 85. Mark A. Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” WMQ, 3rd series, 58, no. 2 (April 2001); David D. Hall, “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series, 92 (1980): 21–44; David D. Hall, “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall,” chap. 5 in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 86. Samuel Sewall, entries of Sept. 1–3, 1716, “Diary of Samuel Sewall,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 7, 5th series (Boston: Published by the Society, 1882), 100–101. 87. John Williams, The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion. A Faithful History of Remarkable Occurrences, in the Captivity and the Deliverance of Mr. John Williams; Minister of the Gospel, in Deerfield, Who, in the Desolation which befel that Plantation, by an Incursion of the French & Indians, was by Them carried away, with his Family, and his Neighbourhood, unto Canada. Whereto there is annexed a Sermon Preached by him, upon his Return, at the Lecture in Boston, Decemb. 5. 1706 (Boston: B. Green for Samuel Phillips, 1707), 5, 6, 8–9. 88. Thomas Marie Charland, Histoire des Abénakis d’Odanak (1675–1937) (Montréal: Éditions du Lévrier, 1964); Gordon Day, “The Identity of the St. Francis Indians,” in Day, In Search of New England’s Native Past, 263–277. 89. Williams, The Redeemed Captive, 20–21; Haefeli and Sweeney, eds., Captive Histories, 109–111. 90. Williams, The Redeemed Captive, 24.

410

notes to pages 224–226

91. John Williams, “Reports of Divine Kindness: Or, Remarkable Mercies Should be Faithfully Published, For the Praise of God the Giver. Sermon Preached at Boston Lecture, Decemb. 5, 1706,” in Williams, The Redeemed Captive, 97. 92. Ibid., 102. On the preeminence of the 1704 Deerfield events in local collective remembrance, see Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). 93. Herbert Cornelius Andrews and Sanford Charles Hinsdale, Hinsdale Genealogy: Descendants of Robert Hinsdale of Dedham, Medfield, Hadley and Deerfield, with an account of the French family of De Hinnisdal (Lombard, IL: A. H. Andrews, 1906), 73–74. 94. On landscapes of violence and the “metaphor of the palimpsest”—“an artifact that, beneath its dominant text, retains other, less discernible forms of expression”— see Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 275. 95. Emerson W. Baker and James Kences, “Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Essex County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692,” Maine History 40, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 159–189. 96. Thomas Pownall, A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America as are contained in the (Annexed) Map of the Middle British Colonies, &c. in North America (London: J. Almon, 1776). The toponym “Fighting Falls” was also used by William Winterbotham, An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the United States of America, and of the European Settlements in America and the West-Indies, vol. 2 (New York: Tiebout and O’Brien for John Reid, 1796), 11. 97. Ralph M. Stoughton, History of the Town of Gill, Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1793–1943 (Published by the Town as a Bicentennial Project, 1973), 33. 98. Letter, Samuel Sewall to Brother [Stephen Sewall?], dated Aug. 20, 1716 [regarding Sept. 1716 travels], box 1, folder 17, Curwen Family Papers, AAS; William Bentley Papers, Book and Curio Lists, 1802–1819, box 5, folder 9, AAS. 99. Luther Barker Lincoln, An Address Delivered at South Deerfield, August 31, 1838, On the Completion of the Bloody Brook Monument, Erected in Memory of Capt. Lothrop and His Associates, Who Fell At That Spot, September 18, (O.S.) 1675 (Greenfield, MA: Kneeland & Eastman, 1838), 7–8. 100. Kevin M. Sweeney, “River Gods and Minor Related Deities: The Williams Family and the Connecticut River Valley, 1637–1790” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986); Hosley and Ward, eds., The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635–1820. 101. Robert Blair St. George, “Artifacts of Regional Consciousness in the Connecticut River Valley, 1700–1780,” in St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 335–356; Philip Zea, Useful Improvements, Innumerable Temptations: Pursuing Refinement in Rural New England, 1750–1850 (Deerfield, MA: Historic Deerfield, 1998).

notes to pages 227–231

411

102. Barnard Family Papers and Burke Family of Bernardston Papers, PVMA-HD; Lucy Cutler Kellogg, “Major John Burke the Founder of Bernardston,” from Annual Meeting 1897, in Proc.PVMA, vol. 3, 428–433; Mass.Arch. 114:597, 605, 609. 103. Land deed, Robert Blare to John Burke, [April 18, 1737], in Burke Family of Bernardston Papers, PVMA-HD. 104. At a Conference Held at Deerfield in the County of Hampshire (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1735). 105. Bodge, SIKPW, 250; Justin Perkins Kellogg, Notes on Some of the Descendants of Joseph Kellogg of Hadley (Printed for Private Circulation, 1898); Sylvester Judd and Lucius M. Boltwood, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst and Granby, Massachusetts (Northampton, MA: Metcalf, 1863), 46–47; Joseph Kellogg, “When I was Carried to Canada, c. 1740,” in Captive Histories, ed. Haefeli and Sweeney, 181–187. 106. At a Conference Held at Deerfield; Brooks, The Common Pot, 24–37; Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 138–142. 107. Ezra Stiles [“Birthday Reflections”], April 5, 1765, Misc. Papers, f. 360, ES Memoir BDR, Stiles Papers, BRBML. 108. Stiles recorded the death in May 1736 of Mehuman Hinsdale, “twice captivated by the Indians.” Stiles, ITN IV f.6 (Sept. 1787), 165, Stiles Papers, BRBML. 109. Stiles, ITN I f.3 (Oct. 6, 1760), Stiles Papers, BRBML. 110. Stiles, ITN IV f.6 (Sept. 1787), 166, 193, Stiles Papers, BRBML. 111. Entry of Sept. 24, 1787, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., vol. 3, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 282. 112. Entry on “Pieces of Indian Pottery Found at Deerfield,” under “Indian Curiosities,” in [Josiah] Meigs, “Catalogue of Articles in the Museum of Yale College,” Aug. 1796, Yale Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, MS 1258, series 1, box 13, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. On Stiles’s involvement in Indigenous collecting and implications for reinterpretation and repatriation of objects, see Christine M. DeLucia, “Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: Indigenous Material Culture and Early American History-Making at Ezra Stiles’ Yale Museum,” MS presented to Five College History Seminar (Amherst, MA), March 9, 2017. 113. “Stockbridge: The New England Patriots,” chap. 3 in Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); “Exodus,” chap. 5 in David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 114. For Stiles’s comments on Shays’s Rebellion, see The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 253–255. 115. Histories of African-American enslavement at Deerfield have begun to be revisited in substantive ways recently; see Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association,

412

notes to pages 231–233

“African American Historic Sites of Deerfield, Massachusetts: Map & Guide,” African Americans in Early Rural New England Project (2012). 116. George Sheldon, “Old Time Traffic and Travel on the Connecticut,” in Proc. PVMA, vol. 3, 117–129, esp. 119–122. 117. John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State: New England 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 5, “Fish, the People, and Theodore Lyman: The Moderate Approach,” and 83–84; David L. Deen, “Fish,” in Brown, ed., Where the Great River Rises, 111–118. 118. Jesse Bruchac, “Gluskonba’s Fish Trap (Klosk8ba Adelahigan),” in Dawn.Vcs., 361–370; also Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 46. On a case in Wabanaki country, see Lisa T. Brooks and Cassandra M. Brooks, “The Reciprocity Principle and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Understanding the Significance of Indigenous Protest on the Presumpscot River,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 3, no. 2 (2010): 11–28. 119. Barry O’Connell, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), xxvii–xxviii; Brooks, The Common Pot, 163; Barry O’Connell, “ ‘Once More Let Us Consider’: William Apess in the Writing of New England Native American History,” chap. 7 in Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997). 120. On potential reasons for the Apes(s) family’s being in this place, see Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017); Margaret Bruchac, “Hill Town Touchstone: Reconsidering William Apess and Colrain, Massachusetts,” Early American Studies 14, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 712–748. 121. G. T. C. (anonymous), “The Fight of the Falls,” New-England Magazine 9 (July– Dec. 1835): 181–189; republished in The Rover: A Weekly Magazine of Tales, Poetry, and Engravings, Also Sketches of Travel, History and Biography 5, ed. Lawrence Labree (May 17, 1845): 133–137. 122. Mary E. Allen, “Old Deerfield,” New England Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, n.s., 7 (Sept. 1892–Feb. 1893): 33–46, esp. 45; modified copy in Mary Allen, box 1, f. 6, Allen Family Papers, PVMA-HD. 123. Program, “Celebration of the 160th Anniversary of Lathrop’s Battle,” South Deerfield, Sept. 30, 1835, PVMA-HD. An extensive collection of Bloody Brook clippings and memorabilia is located in WARS 8-I, Bloody Brook Memorial, PVMA-HD. 124. “The Substance of the Speech of the Hon. Edward Everett, Representative from Massachusetts, Delivered in the House of Representatives, on the Bill for the Removal of the Indians, Wednesday, May 19, 1830,” in Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians, Delivered in the Congress of the United States, April and May, 1830 (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), 255–299; Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting:

notes to pages 233–236

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Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 44–45. 125. Everett, An Address Delivered at Bloody Brook, 29. 126. “When Edward Everett Spoke / Reminder of a Great Day at Bloody Brook Sixty-seven Years Ago,” Greenfield Recorder, May 28, 1902, 1, PVMA-HD. 127. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 1 (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 94–99. 128. Allen, “Old Deerfield,” 46. 129. Lincoln, An Address Delivered at South Deerfield, 8–11. 130. John Warner Barber, Massachusetts Historical Collections, Being A General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, &c., Relating to the History and Antiquities of Every Town in Massachusetts, with Geographical Descriptions. Illustrated by 200 Engravings (Worcester, MA: Door, Howland, 1839). The Bloody Brook monument is on 247. Barber also illustrated the falls, 254. On Barber and his context, see Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 130–144; Christine M. DeLucia, “Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands,” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 467–502. 131. Historic Deerfield collections, HD 83.001, box, 1840–1850, Flynt Center of Early New England Life / Historic Deerfield. Deborah McDermott, “Museum displays box; Deerfield scene depicted on its exterior,” The Recorder [Greenfield, MA], Feb. 24, 1983, object files, Flynt Center / Historic Deerfield. 132. “A Visit,” Gazette and Mercury (Greenfield, MA), Aug. 29, 1837, Item L01.008, and “Civilization rebuked by the savage,” Sept. 5, 1837, via American Centuries digital collections, PVMA, http://www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage. jsp?itemid=13077; Marge Bruchac, “Abenaki Connections to 1704: The Sadoques Family and Deerfield, 2004,” in Captive Histories, ed. Haefeli and Sweeney, 262–278, esp. 270. 133. Barber, Massachusetts Historical Collections, 252; John Warner Barber, The History and Antiquities of New England, New York, and New Jersey (Worcester, MA: Dorr, Howland, 1841), 275. 134. Recent geologic studies have located other notable landscape features in the Turners Falls sandstone. See Richard D. Little, “Lithified Armored Mud Balls of the Lower Jurassic Turners Falls Sandstone, North-Central Massachusetts,” Journal of Geology 90, no. 2 (March 1982): 203–207; Richard D. Little, Dinosaurs, Dunes, and Drifting Continents: The Geology of the Connecticut River Valley, 3rd ed. (Northampton, MA: TigerPress, 2003). 135. Julius B. Robinson, “Turners Falls—Its Present Development / The Town of Far-Shining Light and of Far-Reaching Power,” Western New England 2, no. 8 (Sept. 1912), 235.

414

notes to pages 237–239

136. On the process, see, e.g., Edward Hitchcock, [MS “notes for a naming ceremony”], ca. 1846[?], Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Papers, box 9, folder 9, via Amherst College Digital Collections, https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:509816. 137. Edward Hitchcock, Reminiscences of Amherst College, Historical, Scientific, Biographical and Autobiographical: Also, of Other and Wider Life Experiences. (With Four Plates and a Geological Map.) (Northampton, MA: Bridgman & Childs, 1863), 268–269 on Turners Falls, 234–243 on the Mettawompe project. Karen Halttunen, “Mountain Christenings: Landscape and Memory in Edward Hitchcock’s New England,” in New England Celebrates: Spectacle, Commemoration, and Festivity, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife 2000, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 2002), 166– 177; Robert L. Herbert, “The Sublime Landscapes of Western Massachusetts: Edward Hitchcock’s Romantic Naturalism,” Massachusetts Historical Review, 12 (2010): 70–99; Robert L. Herbert, preface to “The Complete Correspondence of Edward Hitchcock and Benjamin Silliman, 1817–1863,” typescript, via “Edward and Orra Hitchcock,” Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, https://www.amherst.edu/library/ archives/holdings/hitchcock. Renaming landforms in this manner was not a uniquely New England process; see Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 138. Boston Daily Courier, Dec. 23, 1833, 1; Independent Inquirer [Brattleboro, VT], Dec. 28, 1833, 1; Vermont Phoenix, Sept. 25, 1835, 1. Even after successfully rebranding the falls, Hitchcock worried about the site’s capacity to sustain human attentions. A “real city” needed to arise in their vicinity, otherwise “this spot will lose most of its scenographic interest.” Hitchcock, Reminiscences of Amherst College, 269. 139. Orra White Hitchcock, plate, “Turner’s Falls,” 1841, Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Papers, box 11, folder 20, via Amherst College Digital Collections, https:// acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:55280; Robert L. Herbert et al., Orra White Hitchcock: An Amherst Woman of Art and Science (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011). 140. Christine A. Modey, “Josiah D. Canning,” in Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Eric L. Haralson (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998), 62–64. 141. Josiah D. Canning, The Harp and Plow (Greenfield, MA: M. H. Tyler, 1852). 142. Ibid., 137. 143. Notes, 45–46, and poem “Legend of the Isle,” 22, in ibid. 144. Penciled note on front page of copy in Slate Library (Gill, MA), consulted Jan. 22, 2011, and “Lament of the Cherokee,” 171–172, in ibid. 145. Letters, Henry E. Turner to Postmaster at Deerfield and to the Town Clerk, both April 24, 1868, WARS 8-I, King Philip’s War, Falls Fight—Sheldon’s Notes etc., PVMA-HD. 146. Letter, Henry E. Turner to George Sheldon, May 1, 1868 (acknowledging Sheldon’s response of April 30, 1868), WARS 8-I, King Philip’s War, Falls Fight— Sheldon’s Notes etc., PVMA-HD.

notes to pages 239–243

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147. The association first issued a public appeal in local newspapers in 1869. Herbert C. Parsons, “Fifty Years of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association,” Proc. PVMA, vol. 6, 554–565. 148. “Preliminary Steps and Organization of the Association,” Proc.PVMA, vol. 1, 5–11, esp. 6. 149. Rev. Allen Hazen, “Some Account of John Williams, First Pastor of Deerfield,” in Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 121–122. 150. Alan C. Swedlund, Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840–1916 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 109–113. 151. Sheldon’s interest in and treatment of Native artifacts and human remains is examined throughout Bruchac, “Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery,” particularly in section 6.2, “George Sheldon of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.” 152. “Field Meeting—September 19, 1888. Report,” in Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 383. 153. Batinski, Pastkeepers in a Small Place, 151. 154. “History of Deerfield: news clips from printing in Gazette and Courier (Greenfield, MA) Nos 1–132 (16 Feb.1885–Jan.1888),” George Sheldon Papers, PVMA-HD. 155. George Sheldon, “The Pocumtuck Confederacy,” Field Meeting—1888 (at Whately), in Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 407. 156. Ibid., 390, 408. 157. “Stories, Anecdotes and Legends / Collected and Written Down by Deacon Phinehas Field,” Field Meeting—1871, in Proc.PVMA, vol. 1, 59–65, esp. 59–60; Illustrated Guide to Northfield (East Northfield, MA: The Bookstore, n.d. [ca. 1890–1910?]), 27. 158. “Address by George Sheldon,” Field Meeting—1897 (at Northfield), in Proc. PVMA, vol. 3, 440–446, esp. 444–445. 159. Briann G. Greenfield, “Old New England in the Twentieth-Century Imagination: Public Memory in Salem, Deerfield, Providence, and the Smithsonian Institution” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2002), 83; Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), esp. chap. 4, “Highboys and High Culture: Adopting an American Aesthetic in Deerfield, Massachusetts.” 160. [George Sheldon], Field Meeting—1871, in Proc.PVMA, vol. 1, 59. 161. “Report,” from Annual Meeting—1883, Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 97. 162. “Relics from Indian Grave” (entry no. 60 in the Indian Room inventory) included items donated by Timothy M. Stoughton of Gill, “found in a group of graves, on a high point of land on the donor’s farm, about half a mile north of Turners Falls, in 1881,” in Catalogue of the Collection of Relics in Memorial Hall, Deerfield, Mass., U.S.A. Gathered and Preserved by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 2nd ed. (Deerfield, MA: Published by the Association, 1908), 29. Other items collected from around the falls included no. 116, “Indian Hammer” from “Turners Falls Battle Ground” from

416

notes to pages 244–246

Albert Smith of Gill, 29; no. 9, “Barrel of an Old Musket” washed out below the “Turners Falls Battlefield” from Charles D. Lyons of Greenfield, 18. No. 250 was Sarah Coleman’s footwear, “The Captive Shoe,” 22–23. No. 44 was a bayonet (or dagger) “Dug up at Bloody Brook” from George Reynolds, 142. No. 254 was “Relics from Beers Battlefield at Northfield” from George Sheldon, 36. The PVMA published multiple catalogues of their museum holdings, each edition updated to reflect new acquisitions. 163. I am grateful to Aaron Miller for ongoing conversations about rethinking antiquarian labels and attributions (accurate and less-accurate), in the context of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum at Mount Holyoke College. 164. The label described it as “Indian Birch Bark Bottle. Picked up at South Deerfield, Mass., after the ‘Bloody Brook’ massacre in 1675 when Capt. Lathrop and 76 men were killed by Indians.” Item 2004.36a-b, collections of PVMA, via American Centuries digital collections, http://www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=17473. I thank Suzanne Flynt and Sheila Damkoehler for passing along information on this item. On historical contexts of mokuks in the Greater Northeast, see Allyson LaForge, “Cultural Transformations through Souvenirs: The Anishinaabe Miniature Mokuk,” chap. 2 in “Burl Bowls and Birchbark Baskets: Decolonizing Indigenous Material Culture in the Native Northeast” (bachelor’s thesis, Mount Holyoke College, 2016). 165. On Wilder and the disinterment of the “Fort Neck” burials (Charlestown, RI), see “Notice of Inventory Completion: University of Massachusetts, Department of Anthropology, Amherst, MA,” Oct. 22, 2004, FR Doc 04–25923, Federal Register 69, no. 225, Nov. 23, 2004. On the wider context of this regional collecting and implications for current practices, see Margaret Bruchac, “Lost and Found: NAGPRA, Scattered Relics, and Restorative Methodologies,” Museum Anthropology 33, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 137–156. 166. No. 96, “Portrait of Gen. George A. Custer”; no. 98, “Two Eagle Feathers taken by the donor from the scalp lock of a Sioux warrior after the Battle of Little Big Horn”; no. 100, “Campaign Undress Shirt. Worn by General Custer on his last campaign in the Black Hills. Given after his death by Mrs. Custer to an orderly, from whom it was procured by the donor”; no. 144, “Cartridge. Taken from the belt of an Indian killed in the Custer Fight, 1876,” from William O. Taylor of Shelburne. Catalogue of the Collection of Relics in Memorial Hall, 21, 32. 167. George Sheldon, A Guide to the Museum of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (Deerfield, MA, 1908), 18. 168. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), esp. pt. 8, “The Last Stand as Ideological Object, 1876–1890.” 169. Peske-ompsk-ut; or, The Falls Fight. A Series of Random Sketches Showing a Glimpse of The Early History of Turners Falls, Which Appeared in “The Turners Falls Reporter,” during the Months of January and February, 1875 (Turners Falls, MA: Printed at the “Reporter” Job Office, 1875), esp. 1.

notes to pages 246–249

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170. Ibid., 1–2. 171. On a perhaps comparable pestle from Narragansett context, see Howard M. Chapin, “Indian Implements Found in Rhode Island,” Rhode Island Historical Society Collections 17, no. 4 (Oct. 1924): 114. 172. Peske-ompsk-ut; or, The Falls Fight, 2. 173. Edward Pearson Pressey, History of Montague: A Typical Puritan Town (Montague, MA: New Clairvaux Press, 1910), 61. Lithics remain there today, viewable upon request in glass cases on the second floor, accompanied by minimalistic labels. The Carnegie librarian said that the provenance was largely unknown. Site-visit, Jan. 21, 2011. 174. Joseph A. Citro and Diane E. Foulds, “Stone Boy,” in Curious New England: The Unconventional Traveler’s Guide to Eccentric Destinations (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), 294; Joseph A. Citro, “The Petrified Indian,” in Green Mountains, Dark Tales (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 169– 171; A Compendium of Facts Connected with the Petrified Indian Boy, Found by George A. Parsons, Near Turner’s Falls, Mass., January 19, A.D. 1871 (Middlebury, VT: Register Job Office, 1871). “A Distinguished Arrival,” Boston Daily Journal, March 4, 1871, 2; “Owner of ‘Petrified Indian,’ ” Boston Evening Transcript, Oct. 23, 1905, 5; “A Chip of the Old Block,” Boston Journal of Chemistry 5, no. 11 (May 1871): 128. 175. “A Big Local Fake Recalled. The ‘Petrified Indian Boy.’ Made in This City, Buried Near Turners Falls and Sold to a Shelburne Falls Man for 100 Barrels of Whisky— Exhibited in Boston Until Fraud Was Exposed,” Springfield Sunday Republican, Jan. 31, 1904, 16. 176. “Commemorating the Settlement and History of Falls Fight Township,” in Proc.PVMA, vol. 3, 89–115. 177. George Sheldon and E. Buckingham, “The First Field Meeting—1870,” in Proc. PVMA, vol. 1, 12–14, esp. 12. 178. “President Sheldon’s Response,” Field Meeting—1876, Proc.PVMA, vol. 1, 332–336, esp. 335. 179. Rev. John F. Moors, “Mrs. Eunice Williams,” Field Meeting—1884, Proc. PVMA, vol. 2, 174. 180. Rev. J. F. Moors, “Historical Address. Delivered at Turner’s Falls, at the Bicentennial Celebration of the ‘Falls Fight,’ before the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association,” Gazette and Courier (Greenfield, MA), June 5, 1876, 1, PVMA-HD; Moors’s remarks also published in County Times, June 2, 1876, 1, PVMA-HD. 181. “J.D. Canning’s Poem,” Field Meeting—1876, Proc.PVMA, vol. 1, 358–362. 182. Rev. Henry H. Barber, “The Lay of the Falls Fight May 19, 1676,” July 9, 1905, MSS in Barber Family Papers, PVMA-HD, and discussed in “Report,” Field Day— 1905, Proc.PVMA, vol. 5, 86. Fanny B. Shippee, poem, “Turner’s Falls Fight, May 19, 1676,” n.d., PVMA-HD. “The Falls Fight. / Original Ode by Mrs. L.W. Ells,” County Times, June 2, 1876, 1, PVMA-HD.

418

notes to pages 249–252

183. “Mrs. Lucy Cutler Kellogg’s Unveiling Speech,” Field Meeting—1899, Proc. PVMA, vol. 4, 74–77, esp. 76–77. 184. Rev. Allen Hazen, “Dedicatory Address,” Field Meeting—1884, Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 157. 185. Daniel Denison Slade, “Memorial Stones,” Field Meeting—1884, Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 185–188, esp. 186. 186. Thaddeus Graves, “Address of Welcome,” Field Meeting—1889, Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 439. 187. “Response of Hon. George Sheldon,” Field Meeting—1889, Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 439. 188. “Deerfield Represented by President George Sheldon and Miss C. Alice Baker,” Proc.PVMA, vol. 3, 195–196. On the language of the “common pot” and “dish with one spoon” in Indigenous contexts, see Lisa T. Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 189. “Report,” Field Meeting—1900, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 116. 190. On Stoughton and his lands, see Julius B. Robinson, “Turners Falls—Its Present Development,” 235; Julius B. Robinson, “The Stoughton Estate,” in “Industries of Turners Falls / What Busy and Enterprising Citizens Are Doing,” Western New England 2, no. 8 (Sept. 1912), 249; Frances Stoughton Pratt and Calvin Stoughton Locke, “Stoughtoniana,” Dedham Historical Register 6, no. 3 (July 1895): 81–86. 191. George Sheldon, “Captain William Turner,” Field Meeting—1900, Proc. PVMA, vol. 4, 120, 133. 192. “Report,” Field Meeting—1900, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 116. 193. Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Field Day at Greenfield, Mass. July 26, 1905, to dedicate a memorial stone and tablet in honor of Captain William Turner and his men who were killed May 19, 1676 on the retreat after the “Falls Fight,” n.p., n.d., PVMA-HD; Lucy Cutler Kellogg, “Turner Square, Monument, and Nash’s Mills,” in Hearth Stone Tales: A Condensed History of Greenfield, Massachusetts (Hartford: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1936), 11. 194. “Deerfield Memorial Stones,” Dec. 9, 1904, compiled with text of J. M. Arms Sheldon, “Report of the Committee on Monuments,” repr. from Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 241–250, esp. 241–242. 195. “Report,” Annual Meeting—1900, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 82. 196. “Address of Ralph M. Stoughton,” Field Meeting—1900, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 140–151, esp. 149–150. Ralph M. Stoughton later authored History of the Town of Gill, Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1793–1943 (Published by the Town as a Bicentennial Project, 1973). 197. Sadie R. Maxwell, “Poem,” Field Meeting—1899, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 77–79, esp. 78. 198. John Milton Earle, Report to the Governor and Council, Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth, Under the Act of April 6, 1859 (Boston: William White, 1861).

notes to pages 253–256

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Individuals and family groups in the “Appendix”: Bakeman in Northampton, lv; Corbin in Springfield, lvi; Esau in Warren, lvi–lvii; Henry, Nichols, and Shelley in Stockbridge, lvii; Oliver in Brookfield, lix; Gigger in Greenfield, lxxiv; Gigger in Barre, lxxiv; Burr in Springfield, lxxvii; Jackson in West Brookfield, lxxvii. See also Margaret Bruchac, “Native Presence in Nonotuck and Northampton,” in A Place Called Paradise: Culture & Community in Northampton, Massachusetts, 1654–2004, ed. Kerry W. Buckley (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 18–38. 199. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 210; Christopher J. Thee, “Massachusetts Nipmucs and the Long Shadow of John Milton Earle,” New England Quarterly 79 (2006): 636–654.

Chapter 6. Power and Persistence along a Changing River 1. Rev. John F. Moors, “Dedicatory Address,” Field Meeting—1880, Proc.PVMA, vol. 2, 43. On the fraught transition from agrarian ways to market capitalism, see J. Ritchie Garrison, Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). 2. “Report,” Field Meeting—1900, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 118. 3. “Curator’s Report,” Annual Meeting—1901, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 155. 4. Rev. Frank W. Pratt, “The Old Home Spirit,” Old Home Week—1901, Proc. PVMA, vol. 4, 216. 5. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Problem of the West,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), esp. 216. 6. “Mr. Barnard on the Indians,” Old Home Week—1901, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 219. 7. “Address of General Francis H. Appleton,” Field Day—1905, Proc.PVMA, vol. 5, 103–114, esp. 108–109. Also Mary E. Miller, “Connecticut River. Quinnehtuk, the Indians Called It,” Annual Meeting—1895, Proc.PVMA, vol. 3, 283–284. 8. Harriet A. Tidd, “Riverside Linked To Turners Historically; Site of Big Fight,” n.p., n.d., PVMA-HD. 9. Micah A. Pawling, ed., Wabanaki Homeland and the New State of Maine: The 1820 Journal and Plans of Survey of Joseph Treat (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); entry on “Joseph Attean,” Penobscot Culture & History of the Nation website, Penobscot Nation Cultural and Historic Preservation Department, http://www. penobscotculture.com; Henry D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 10. Julius B. Robinson, “Turners Falls—Its Present Development, / The Town of Far-Shining Light and of Far-Reaching Power,” Western New England 2, no. 8 (Sept. 1912), 229, 242. 11. W. B. Durant, “Turners Falls, Mass.,” in Western New England Magazine 3, no. 7 (July 1913), 308. 12. On rivers as energy systems, see Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

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notes to pages 257–262

13. “Historic Spots. Marked with Placards—200 flags for Old Soldiers,” Field Meeting—1901, Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 232–236, esp. 232. 14. “Old Home Week,” and “Deerfield’s Historical Ride,” in Proc.PVMA, vol. 4, 192–193, 221–231, esp. 231. 15. Elbridge Kingsley, “The Bloody Brook Massacre,” wood engraving, n.d., PVMA-HD. Elbridge Kingsley, “Wood-Engraving Direct from Nature” and “Originality in Wood-Engraving” (Los Angeles: Ruskin Art Club, 1890), 23–28, esp. 27–28; Catalogue of the Works of Elbridge Kingsley (Compiled & Arranged for Mt. Holyoke College, 1901), no. 293, 40. 16. Photo, n.d., Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD; Postcards, n.d., Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. 17. Herbert S. Streeter, Porter Dickinson, and Thomas A. Edison Company, Ononko’s Vow [Deerfield: 1910], videorecording, PVMA-HD. David Proper, “Program Notes To Accompany ‘Ononko’s Vow,’ ” Lesson 8, American Centuries website, http://www. americancenturies.mass.edu/classroom/curriculum_5th/lesson8/program_notes. html (accessed Jan. 11, 2011). 18. “Deerfield Moving Pictures. ‘Ononko’s Vow,’ a Colonial Tale, Represented at the Nelson and Bijon Theaters,” Springfield Daily Republican, Oct. 4, 1910, 7; Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 104. 19. Ononko’s Vow has been classified within the “Western” genre: see Larry Langman, A Guide to Silent Westerns (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 315. 20. Advertisement for “Bloody Brook ‘Tomahawk,’ ” [1910], Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. Irmarie Jones, “ ‘Bloody Brook Tomahawk’ sought by Deerfield librarian,” Greenfield Recorder, [March?] 23, 1990, PVMA-HD. 21. Pageant programs: Margaret MacLaren Eager and Village Improvement Association, “Old Deerfield Historical Pageant: on the grounds of the Allen Homestead, Deerfield, Mass.” [Deerfield: 1910]; “Pageant of Old Deerfield: on the grounds of the Allen Homestead, Deerfield” [Deerfield: The Society, 1913]; “The Pageant of Old Deerfield 1916: given by the people of the community on the grounds of the Allen homestead, Deerfield, Massachusetts” ([Deerfield]: Dr. P. G. Davis and Margaret MacLaren Eager, 1916), PVMA-HD. See also Angela Goebel Bain, “Historical Pageantry in Old Deerfield: 1910, 1913, 1916,” in New England Celebrates: Spectacle, Commemoration, and Festivity, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2000, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 2002), 120–136. 22. 250th Anniversary Celebration of the Town of Northfield, Mass., June 22, 23, and 24, 1923, n.p., n.d., NPL, 11, 91, 96. Northfield interested George Sheldon immensely: he published, along with Josiah Howard Temple, an extensive town history, A History of the Town of Northfield, Massachusetts, for 150 Years, with An Account of the Prior Occupation

notes to pages 262–263

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of the Territory by the Squakheags: and with Family Genealogies (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1875). 23. “Report. Field Day—Dedication of Memorial Stones,” and N. P. Wood, “Report of the Committee on Memorial Stones,” in Proc.PVMA, vol. 3, 435–438, 448–452, esp. 437. Photographs of the stones have been framed and matted and are now on display in the history room of the NPL. See also color photographs in scrapbook, “Historical Monuments in Northfield, Massachusetts,” n.d., NPL; and color photograph album with captions, J. Wiggin, “Northfield Historic Monuments” (June 2004), NPL; and the hand-drawn map, V.E.L., “Northfield: A Bird’s Eye View: Historical, Recreational” (May 1, 1975), NPL, which shows the markers’ locations. 24. On a guide to “motoring” that identified historical points by the falls, see “Ghosts of Indians Hover Over Charm Of Factory Hollow / Between Wooded Hills on Quiet Byroad That Runs from Greenfield to Turners Falls Lies Picturesque Spot—Fall River Rushes Past Ruin of Old Mill Recalling Former Days of Industrial Activity,” Union and Republican (Springfield), June 12, 1927, PVMA-HD. 25. Rufus Choate, “The Importance of Illustrating New-England History by a Series of Romances Like the Waverley Novels,” delivered at Salem (1833), in Samuel Gilman Brown, The Works of Rufus Choate with a Memoir of His Life, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1862), 319–346, esp. 327. For the Northfield mention of Choate, see “Report. Field Day—1897,” 436. 26. Illustrated Guide to Northfield (East Northfield, MA: The Bookstore, n.d. [ca. 1890– 1910?]), 28–29. Among landmarks listed were a spot near Four-Mile Brook where arrowheads and chips from toolmaking had been unearthed in 1856; a bluff named Fort Hill; and a large corn grinder still said to be at the entrance to Lovers’ Retreat (“the pounder which belonged to it having been taken to the museum at Deerfield”). Similar descriptions of artifacts are given in “Picturesque Northfield,” in “Supplement to Windham County Reformer. Historic Features of a Grand Old Town. Sketches of its Citizens and Public Institutions. Progressive Improvements. Modern Northfield,” compiled by J. H. Walbridge (Reformer Publishing, 1899), NPL. On driving tours, see “Drives About Northfield,” chap. 5 in Illustrated Guide to Northfield. See also commemorative program and its “Historical Sketch” by Elmer F. Howard, in 250th Anniversary Celebration of the Town of Northfield, Mass., June 22, 23, and 24, 1923, NPL; also “Scrapbook, Northfield 1673– 1923,” NPL. Northfield became a central place for Christian camp gatherings and conferences, which influenced some of the town activities; see Ann Maria Mitchell, “Old Days and New in Northfield,” New England Magazine 16, no. 6 (Aug. 1897): 671–689, esp. 689. 27. Peter Weis, “NMH, DLM, and the D Word,” NMH Magazine, Spring 2008, http://www.nmhschool.org/nmh-dlm-and-d-word (accessed July 4, 2012); Kathryn A. Askins, “Bridging Cultures: American Indian Students at the Northfield Mount Hermon School” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 2009). 28. Joel Pfister, The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); David W. Messer, Henry Roe Cloud: A Biography

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notes to pages 263–268

(Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2010), esp. chap. 6. I am grateful to Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Ned Blackhawk, and members of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America for discussions on the significance of Henry Roe Cloud and his presence at largely stillcolonial institutions. 29. Askins, “Bridging Cultures,” 114. 30. Christina Tree and William Davis, An Explorer’s Guide: The Berkshire Hills & Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2011), 13. On the “Pioneer Valley” as a 1930s tourism-driven creation, see Brian MacQuarrie, “A fossil-fueled future for Pioneer Valley? Dinosaur tracks could bring tourists,” Boston Globe, April 18, 2009. The earliest use of “Pioneer Valley” in the Globe was March 1939 (as listed in a search of the Boston.com online historical archive, June 2012). 31. Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1937). On Deerfield, 223–226. 32. Ibid., 225–226; Charles B. Hosmer, Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926–1949, vol. 1 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 126. 33. Briann G. Greenfield, “Old New England in the Twentieth-Century Imagination: Public Memory in Salem, Deerfield, Providence, and the Smithsonian Institution” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2002), 87–126; “Charles Hosmer’s 1969 Interview with Henry and Helen Flynt,” Aug. 1, 1969, PVMA-HD; Heritage Foundation Quarterly, beginning 1, no. 1 (May 1962), PVMA-HD; Bart McDowell, “Deerfield Keeps a Truce with Time,” National Geographic, June 1969, 780–809. 34. Henry N. Flynt, “From Tomahawks and Arrows to Atomic Bombs,” Delaware Antiques Show (1969), 87–93; Samuel Chamberlain and Henry N. Flynt, Frontier of Freedom: The Soul and Substance of America Portrayed in one Extraordinary Village, Old Deerfield, Massachusetts (New York: Hastings House, 1952). 35. William T. Arms, “Falls Fight 283 Years Ago Tonight Started Indian Downfall in County,” Gazette, May 18, 1959, PVMA-HD. 36. Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990); Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), esp. chap. 1, “Indian Country: August 1953.” 37. Bob Eaton, King Philip’s War 1675, PVMA-HD. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. Ibid., 48. 40. Steve Pfarrer, “Artist captures folklore of New England Indians,” n.p., n.d., PVMA-HD. 41. The verse is from Psalm 121:1, known as “A Song of Degrees.” 42. “Freedom’s Frontier Peace Memorial,” South Deerfield, MA. 43. Dedicated Aug. 21, 1983.

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44. Marker photograph, n.d., Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. The marker appears to be the “plain Sandstone Slab . . . which is supposed to mark the spot where the ‘Flower of Essex’ were buried,” mentioned in George W. Solley, “Major Robert Treat,” Proc.PVMA, vol. 5, 62. Also Tom and Brenda Malloy, “Gravemarkers and Memorials of King Philip’s War,” Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies 21, ed. Gary Collison (2004): 40–65, esp. 47–48. 45. Geoff Richelew, “Massacre militia among first U.S. veterans; Slab honoring Bloody Brook dead in state of deterioration,” The Recorder (Greenfield, MA), Nov. 11, 1991, 2, Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. 46. Laura Hill, “Monument, stone mark the Bloody Brook battle,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 21, 1987, 10, Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835– 1991, PVMA-HD. 47. Barbara Jacobs, “Deerfield Doings: Replace Or Restore?” Greenfield Recorder, Sept. 13, 1969, 14, Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD; Austin Billings et al., “To the Sons and Daughters of Franklin County,” Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. 48. Copy of undated document, Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. 49. Jacobs, “Deerfield Doings: Replace or Restore?” 50. Michael J. de Sherbinin, “Bloody Brook: The crowd shrank to 35,” Amherst Record, Aug. 30, 1975, Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. 51. See special section on “Northfield: 300th Anniversary,” in Greenfield Recorder, May 25, 1973, NPL; Dorothy C. Pollen, “Northfield Marking Third Century of Progress,” in “Northfield: 300th Anniversary,” B-2. 52. A photograph of the marker rededication on April 29, 1973, identifies her as Mrs. Ernest Deal, accompanied by her mother, Mrs. Marie St. Pierre. Northfield’s 300th Anniversary: Official Souvenir Tercentenary Program, Northfield, Massachusetts, May 26 through June 3, 1973, NPL. 53. Photo caption, “Land Mark,” in “Northfield: 300th Anniversary.” For other photographs of the events, see Northfield’s 300th Anniversary: Official Souvenir Tercentenary Program. 54. “Other Celebrations,” in “Northfield: 300th Anniversary.” Arthur Fitt published All About Northfield: A Brief History and Guide (Northfield, MA: Northfield Press, 1910). 55. Kelly Sieger, “Bloody Brook is still remembered,” Bulletin, Aug. 2, 1987[9?], Wars 8-I, King Philip’s War, Bloody Brook Memorial, 1835–1991, PVMA-HD. 56. My understanding of repatriation histories, processes, and challenges in the river valley have been shaped by a number of sources and conversations. For discussion of significant steps and outcomes, see Margaret M. Bruchac, “Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery: Indigenous People in the Connecticut River Valley” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2007), esp. section 8.2, “Decolonizing the

424

notes to pages 272–273

Five College Collections.” See also repatriation documents (on Five College committee meetings and Mount Holyoke’s role, 1990s–2000s), on file at Mount Holyoke College; public remarks by Robert Paynter, representing University of Massachusetts Amherst, at the meeting of the National NAGPRA Review Committee, Amherst, MA, March 2015; Rae Gould, “NAGPRA, CUI (‘Culturally Unidentifiable’ Human Remains), and Institutional Will,” presentation at Native American and Indigenous Studies Association meeting, Austin, TX, May 28–31, 2014. For other insights, I wish to acknowledge Marge Bruchac, Rae Gould, Robert Paynter, Julie Wood, Sonya Atalay, Lenore Reilly, Aaron Miller, and the Mount Holyoke College repatriation working group, as well as museum staff members, anthropologists, and community members in other locations for clarifying information. Details of certain aspects of regional repatriation are made available via databases within the National NAGPRA website, http://www.nps.gov/ nagpra. 57. The history of professional/academic archaeology’s involvement in the valley, including UMass Amherst links with heritage organizations, is deep. For one instance of an advisory role, see Dena Dincauze, “Report to the Northfield Historical Commission on the 1976 Archaeological Field School Program,” Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, copy on file in NPL. 58. Siobhan M. Hart, “High Stakes: A Poly-Communal Archaeology of the Pocumtuck Fort, Deerfield, Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009), esp. pt. 3, “Stakeholders, Community-Based Archaeology and Poly-Communal Alternatives.” 59. Philip Zea, “From the President: The Beaten Path to Authenticity,” introduction to “Archaeology” special issue, Historic Deerfield 10, no. 1 (Autumn 2009), front cover text. 60. This resulted in publications like Native Peoples and Museums in the Connecticut River Valley: A Guide to Learning, from the Five College Public School Partnership Program (Historic Northampton, 1992). 61. Pocumtuck, A Native Homeland. Historic Deerfield Walking Tour (Historic Deerfield, 2006). I acknowledge Marge Bruchac’s role in its development. 62. It was expressly paired with other walking tour brochures focused on the English colonial landscape, giving visitors the sense of a multilayered place that could be entered and narrated in several ways. See Deerfield: An English Settlement, 1690–1730. Historic Deerfield Walking Tour (Historic Deerfield, 2005). Conversation with Claire Carlson, Historic Deerfield, Jan. 27, 2011. 63. Consider the audiotapes used in docent training, like Eric Johnson, “Native American Land Use and Settlement,” Jan. 30, 1992 (Deerfield: Historic Deerfield, Inc., 1992), PVMA-HD; Claire Carlson, “Introduction to Deerfield’s Native American histories,” May 22, 2001 (Deerfield: Historic Deerfield, 2001), PVMA-HD. 64. Marge Bruchac, “Abenaki Connections to 1704: The Sadoques Family and Deerfield, 2004,” in Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704

notes to pages 273–276

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Deerfield Raid, ed. Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), esp. 273. 65. Haefeli and Sweeney, eds., Captive Histories; and Kevin Sweeney and Evan Haefeli, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); William A. Davis, “A Raid to Remember,” Boston Globe, Feb. 22, 2004, M16. 66. John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 67. Bruchac, “Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery,” 259–263. 68. Quoted in Sarah Schweitzer, “A Language Change: Objections to Some Blunt Landmarks from 1704 Indian Raid Lead to Editing,” Boston Globe, June 20, 2004, B1; Trudy Tynan, “Mass. Museum Looks to Cover Up Words,” Associated Press, June 25, 2004. I thank Tim Neumann for insights on PVMA, Nov. 2014. 69. Conversation with Claire Carlson, Historic Deerfield, Jan. 27, 2011. 70. Grace Friary, quoted in William A. Davis, “Historic Deerfield Travel and the Environment: A Bastion of Colonial Life Is Under Siege Once More,” Boston Globe, Feb. 4, 1990, B1. 71. Susan Howe, “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings,” in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Windsor, VT: Awede, 1987); Susan Howe, “Writing Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” in The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Douglas Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 199–204. For critical readings of “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings,” see Elisabeth Ann Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 119–122; Linda Reinfeld, “Susan Howe: Prisms,” chap. 4 in Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), esp. 128–130. 72. Howe, “Writing Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” 200. 73. “Extract from a Letter (dated June 8, 1781) of Stephen Williams to President Styles,” in Susan Howe, Singularities (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), 5. The letter had been published by the PVMA in Proc.PVMA, vol. 1, 357–358. 74. Peter Nicholls, “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 586–601, esp. 596–597. 75. Martín Espada, “The River Will Not Testify,” in A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen: Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 80–82, esp. 80. 76. Ibid., 82. 77. Brian Kiteley, The River Gods (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press / FC2, 2009); Howard Waite, Northern Quest (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010). 78. Martin Church, “Targeting of monument,” letter to the editor, Recorder, Oct. 19, 1999, PVMA-HD. 79. On Peltier’s indictment and conviction, see the documentary by Michael Apted, Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story (Santa Monica, CA: Artisan Home

426

notes to pages 277–278

Entertainment, 2004). The “Free Leonard Peltier” slogan has been used in myriad locations and contexts in the United States and abroad. Tlingit artist Jesse Cooday created an art piece called Happy Anniversary, in which he overwrote a portrait of Columbus with the slogan. See Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, The Submuloc Show / Columbus Wohs: A Visual Commentary on the Columbus Quincentennial from the Perspective of America’s First People (Phoenix, AZ: Atlatl, 1992), 28. 80. Tim Cresswell, “Heretical Geography 1: The Crucial ‘Where’ of Graffiti,” chap. 3 in In Place / Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31–61, 180–183, esp. 38–40. 81. Janet Bond Wood, “Gill monument defaced in the name of activism,” The Recorder (Greenfield, MA), Oct. 9, 1999, 4, PVMA-HD. 82. Jennifer Gilbert, “The Sixties Communes: What If the Past Just Won’t Be History?” Valley Advocate, Nov. 12, 2007, http://www.valleyadvocate.com/blogs/home. cfm?aid=4137 (accessed July 6, 2012); Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 87–88; Robert Surbrug, Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). 83. This name and its precise location has occasioned debate. See “The Original Research and Opinion on the Location of ‘Wissitinnewag’ by Howard Clark, Senior Researcher for the Nolumbeka Project, Inc.,” blog entry, Jan. 1, 2014, www.wissatinnewag.blogspot.com (accessed May 27, 2015). 84. On her cultural work, see Monique Fordham, “The Politics of Language and the Survival of Indigenous Culture: From Suppression to Reintroduction in the Formal Classroom,” Equity & Excellence in Education 31, no. 1 (April 1998): 40–47. 85. Kevin Sweeney, professor of history and American Studies at Amherst College, attested that areas around the falls (Riverside, Canada Hill, the Mackin Site) were homes to a series of Indigenous communities. Kevin Sweeney, “Thoughts on the Mackin Site,” n.d. Other support came from the United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc. (USET), an intertribal organization of twenty-four federally recognized tribes. It called for the Department of the Interior to commence substantive consultations with tribal communities in order to prevent destruction of an important area. USET Resolution No. 2001:24, “Calling Upon the State of Massachusetts to Protect an Indian Burial Site,” passed Nov. 2, 2000. Both documents posted on Friends of Wissatinnewag website, http://wissatinnewag.org (accessed Sept. 3, 2011), hereafter abbreviated as FOW. 86. Letter, Gilles O’Bomsawin (chief for the Odanak Band) to Congressman John Olver, Senator John Kerry, and Senator Edward Kennedy, Sept. 8, 2000, FOW. 87. “Skeleton Found in Greenfield Believed Indian Killed in 1676,” Springfield Union, July 7, 1964, FOW. Letter, Anna Marie Mires (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Massachusetts) to [Brona Simon] (Massachusetts Historical Commission), Dec. 16, 1999, FOW; Fred Contrada, “State orders work at sand pit halted / American

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Indians believe the area is a burial site for victims of the Turners Falls massacre of 1676,” Union News (Springfield, MA), Dec. 18, 1999, A1, A10, FOW. 88. Richard G. Wilkinson and Martin C. Solano (Department of Anthropology, SUNY at Albany), “Analysis of cremated human remains from the Mackin Site (19FR12),” FOW. 89. Contrada, “State orders work at sand pit halted.” 90. On Fordham and this mobilization, see “A Great Abenaki Warrior,” in David E. Morine, Two Coots in a Canoe: An Unusual Story of Friendship (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2009), esp. 196–198. 91. “About Us,” FOW, http://thefow.org/cgi/fow/aboutus.html (accessed July 6, 2012). 92. Karen P. Chynoweth, “Turners Falls set for reconciliation with Indians,” The Recorder (Greenfield), May 18, 2004, 1, 7, PVMA-HD. 93. Timothy Binzen, “The Turners Falls Site: An Early PaleoIndian Presence in the Connecticut River Valley,” BMAS 66, no. 2 (2005): 46–57; Brian Ballou, “Sacred Site diverts expansion of runway; ‘Ceremonial hill’ found in Montague,” Boston Globe, Jan. 8, 2009, Metro/B1; “Sacred Stone Site Diverts Expansion of Massachusetts Airport,” May 17, 2009, The Megalithic Portal, http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article. php?sid=2146413562 (accessed July 6, 2012); Arn Albertini, “Turners Falls Airport expansion stalls,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Sept. 13, 2010, C1. 94. Determination of Eligibility Notification, National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, for The Turners Falls Sacred Ceremonial Hill Site, submitted by John C. Silva, May 25, 2007. 95. James W. Mavor, Jr., and Byron E. Dix, Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilization (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1989). On areas close to the falls, see Mike Eldred, “Mysterious Whitingham site may be Native American ‘henge,’ ” Deerfield Valley News Online, Aug. 13, 2009, http://www.dvalnews. com/printer_friendly/3179491 (accessed July 6, 2012). 96. A film brought the topic to public consciousness by examining contested interpretations around the falls related to these features: see Theodore Timreck, The Great Falls: Discovery, Destruction and Preservation in a Massachusetts Town, DVD (Wellesley, MA: Hidden Landscapes, 2010). It was screened at the 2009 meeting of the Northeastern Anthropological Association’s annual meeting and followed by a panel discussion, “An Open Forum on Native Americans, Archaeologists, and Sacred Places,” Program, 49th Annual Meeting of the NEAA, Rhode Island College, March 13, 2009. On Timreck’s motivations, see Callum Borchers, “Local Film Producer Helps Change View of History,” Wellesley Patch, Aug. 23, 2010, http://wellesley.patch.com/articles/local-filmproducer-helps-change-view-of-history (accessed July 6, 2012). 97. Arn Albertini, “Turners Falls Airport expansion stalls,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Sept. 13, 2010, C1. 98. Ibid.

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notes to pages 281–284

99. Paul Robinson and Doug Harris, comments on Turners Falls in “Nipsachuck: A Place of Ceremony and War during King Philip’s War, 1675–1676,” public lecture, Nov. 10, 2011, RIHS. 100. Arn Albertini, “Turners airport work gets green light,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Dec. 13, 2010, C1. 101. Kevin McBride, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, et al., “Technical Report: Pre-Inventory Research and Documentation Project, Battle of Great Falls / Wissantinnewag-Peskeompskut (May 19, 1676),” for Department of the Interior, National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, GA-2287–14– 012 (April 2016); Chris Curtis, “Archaeologist may study Turners Falls history,” The Recorder (Greenfield), Jan. 9, 2015; “National Park Service Awards $1.3 Million in Battlefields Preservation Grants,” press release, National Park Service, July 22, 2014, http://www.nps.gov/news/release.htm?id=1617 (accessed May 27, 2015). 102. The Nolumbeka Project, http://nolumbekaproject.blogspot.com (accessed May 27, 2015). 103. Howard Mansfield, “Four Centuries of King Philip’s War,” in Turn and Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart (Rockport, ME: Down East, 2010), 160. In conjunction with the 2004 revisitation of the 1704 Deerfield events, a digital multimedia reinterpretation of the falls massacre developed, employing a multiperspectival and at times lightly fictionalized or speculative approach. Bruchac was involved in this historical storytelling: see “Assault on Peskeomskut,” Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704, http://1704.deerfield.history.museum (accessed July 6, 2012). 104. Mansfield, Turn and Jump, 170. 105. Diane Baedeker Petit, press release, “Jump Starting Succession: NRCS helps Friends of Wissatinnewag restore native grasses at burial site, Greenfield,” June 29, 2006, United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Massachusetts. 106. The origin of these marks is presently unknown. They are not similar to graffiti found at the Great Swamp site; personal communication with Patricia Rubertone, Jan. 22, 2011. 107. Four miles to the west on the outskirts of Greenfield, the monument’s counterpart—the roadside boulder and historic sign marking the ostensible location of Turner’s death—lingers in near obscurity. This marker stands in the town of Greenfield, on Nash’s Mills Road. It lies fast by the roadside, moved from the site of its dedication (where the Turners Square Park has since been razed), and near a municipal swimming pool. Interest in Turner’s biography endures, as in a recent study by Larry Cadran, The Courage of Conviction: The Story of William Turner (Salt Lake City: American University & College Press, 2001). Irmarie Jones, “New book reveals history of Turner before battle at the falls,” Recorder, n.d., PVMA-HD. 108. “Fallen officer will finally be remembered,” The Recorder (Greenfield, MA), May 10, 2004, 6, PVMA-HD.

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109. Tynan, “Mass. Museum Looks to Cover Up Words.” 110. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 11: Marx and Engels: 1851–1853 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 103. 111. William B. Browne, The Mohawk Trail: Its History and Course with Map and Illustrations, Together with an account of Fort Massachusetts and of the early Turnpikes over Hoosac Mountain (Pittsfield, MA: Sun Printing, 1920); Kenneth Wapner, “Uncovering an Ancient Pathway,” Backpacker (Dec. 1994): 110–111; Robert I. Quay, “Mohawks, Model Ts, and Monuments: The Formulation of an Unlikely Regional Identity in Western Massachusetts” (bachelor’s thesis, Williams College, 2004). Site-visits to Mohawk Trail, Oct. 23–24, 2009, Jan. 2–31, 2011, Jan. 15, 2017. The mascot debate in Turners Falls precipitated a wave of media coverage, e.g., Miranda Davis, “About 120 Turners Falls High School students walk out to protest mascot vote,” The Recorder (Greenfield), Feb. 15, 2017, http://www.recorder.com/Turners-HighSchool-students-walk-out-in-protest-of-mascot-removal-8118568 (accessed April 11, 2017). 112. From an account book by William Pynchon, contextualized in “An Agawam Fragment,” chap. 9, in Gordon Day, In Search of New England’s Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day, ed. Michael K. Foster and William Cowan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 99–100. 113. Bill Davis, “Bringing Back Magnificence: 30 Years of Bald Eagle Restoration,” Massachusetts Wildlife 61, 12–25. 114. On efforts to restore anadromous fish populations around the falls and on the Connecticut River more generally, see John McPhee, The Founding Fish (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 38–42; Mark Zaretsky, “After 40 years of stocking Connecticut rivers, salmon program being scaled back,” Register Citizen, June 10, 2013, http://www.registercitizen.com/general-news/20130610/after-40-years-of-stockingconnecticut-rivers-salmon-program-being-scaled-back (accessed May 27, 2015).

Chapter 7. Algonquian Diasporas 1. Paula Peters, “ ‘We missed you,’ ” Cape Cod Times, July 14, 2002. On the 2002 events, see also Max Carocci, “Written out of history: Contemporary Native American Narratives of Enslavement,” Anthropology Today 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 15–19; Lakilah Harrigan, “Pequots, Bermudians renew connections,” Royal Gazette (Bermuda), June 17, 2002, 1, 5. 2. Joyce E. Chaplin, “Enslavement of Indians in Early America: Captivity without the Narrative,” chap. 2 in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 45–70, esp. 45. 3. Dawn Dove, “Introduction” to Narragansett section of Dawn.Vcs., 496–497.

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4. Jace Weaver, “The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges,” American Indian Quarterly 35, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 418–463, and The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); for paradigmatic critiques, also see Paul Cohen, “Was There an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (Dec. 2008): 388–410. 5. Scholarship on Indigenous enslavement in North America has expanded significantly in the past decade-plus through studies like Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); James Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Max Carocci and Stephanie Pratt, eds., Native American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and African Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Blackhawk critiqued the absence of Indigenous discussion in Atlantic World history and historiographical failures to connect Native peoples’ co-involvement in the slave trade, in “ ‘Dey take Indian for slave’: Visions of enslavement in Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger,” Atlantic Studies 7, no. 1 (March 2010): 27–32. While the “Black Atlantic” and African slave trade have received extensive scholarly and public attention in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), there is not yet a Native counterpart to these efforts, or even a comparable mapping, as in David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Latin American studies of Indigenous enslavement constitute a parallel historiography. 6. The most notable consideration of New England Native presence in Bermuda and the relation between archives and tradition is Kathleen Bragdon’s concise “Native Americans in Bermuda,” Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History 10 (1998): 53–68. Bragdon researched and published the piece before any of the formal reconnection gatherings had taken place. The essay also examines the influence of U.S. federal recognition pressures on identity formation. 7. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 18.

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8. Walter Johnson, “The Carceral Landscape,” chap. 8 in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empires in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 9. Among others, the emerging field of black feminist archaeology has been influential on my thinking about placemaking by enslaved people of color; e.g., Whitney L. Battle-Baptiste, “ ‘In This Here Place’: Interpreting Enslaved Homeplaces,” in Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Akinwumi Ogundiran and Toyin Falda (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 233–248. 10. Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, remarks at “Indigenous Enslavement and Incarceration in North American History” conference, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition, Yale University, Nov. 15, 2013; Mohegan Tribe, Mohegan Language Project, Mohegan-English Dictionary, http://moheganlanguage.com/ Documents/Mohegan_English_Dictionary.pdf (accessed June 24, 2015); personal correspondence with Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel and Stephanie Fielding, June 28, 2015. 11. Coll Thrush, “The Iceberg and the Cathedral: Encounter, Entanglement, and Isuma in Inuit London,” Journal of British Studies 53:01 (Jan. 2014): 59–79; Peter C. Mancall, “ ‘Collecting Americans’: The Anglo-American Experience from Cabot to NAGPRA,” chap. 10 in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 192–216. 12. Nancy E. van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 13. On these earlier captivities, see Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). I thank Neal Salisbury for discussion about his ongoing research into Tisquantum. Captured 1614, an exhibition and related film produced in conjunction with the upcoming four hundredth anniversary of Plymouth colony, has fostered public conversation on these events and divergent tribal-colonial perspectives. 14. Michael L. Fickes, “ ‘They Could Not Endure That Yoke’: The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637,” New England Quarterly 73, no. 1 (March 2000): 58–81; Kevin A. McBride, “Cultural Genocide and Enslavement of Native Peoples in Southern New England During the Seventeenth Century,” report, n.d., on file at MPMRC. 15. Pierce had been aiming for Bermuda with his Pequot cargo but is believed to have deposited them at Providence Island instead. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 172; Alden T. Vaughan, “Introduction: Indian-European Encounters in New England: An Annotated, Contextual Overview,” in New England Encounters: Indians & Euroamericans, ca. 1600–1850, ed. Vaughan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 32n30.

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16. Several studies examine aspects of Native (and African) slavery in New England pertinent to this era. Margaret Ellen Newell’s Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015) attempts a regional synthesis, with close attention to changing legal frameworks for bondage. While the book discusses several of the episodes also treated in my book, including Richard Waldron and Tangier, it does not reference my 2012 article “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast after King Philip’s War,” Journal of American History 98 no. 4 (March 2012): 975–997, which recounts new research on those topics. See also the recent studies by Catherine S. Manegold, Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 94–96; Wendy Anne Warren, “Enslaved Africans in New England, 1638–1700” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2008), and Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016); Bernard J. Lillis, “Forging New Communities: Indian Slavery and Servitude in Colonial New England, 1676–1776” (bachelor’s thesis, Wesleyan University, 2012), esp. chap. 1, “ ‘We Cannot Come Home Again’: Indian Captivity in the Aftermath of King Philip’s War.” Ambitiously synthetic though now somewhat dated histories are Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States (1913; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1969); Barbara Olexer, The Enslavement of the American Indian (Monroe, NY: Library Research Associates, 1982), esp. 74–76. 17. John A. Sainsbury, “Indian Labor in Early Rhode Island,” New England Quarterly 48, no. 3 (Sept. 1975): 378–393; “Indian Slaves of King Philip’s War” and “Note on the Transaction of Roger Williams and Others in Selling Indians into Slavery,” Publications of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1 (1893): 234–240. 18. May 17, 1677, 1 CW 1:125 (Colonial Wars, Series I, 1675–1775, Connecticut State Library, transcripts at MPMRC); Letter from James Noyes to John Allyn, Oct. 1676 (1676.10.00.00), YIPP; Letter from Rev. James Fitch, Norwich, to Capt. John Allyn, March 13, 1675/76, 1 CW 1:46. 19. Edward Palmes, Jan. 29, 1675/76, in The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, From 1665 to 1678; With the Journal of the Council of War, 1675 to 1678, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (Hartford: F. A. Brown, 1852), 403. 20. Report on Status of Surrenderers Living at Shetucket, May 4, 1678 (1678.05.04.00), YIPP; Letter to James Fitch regarding Pawbequeens, Aug. 13, 1677 (1677.08.13.00), YIPP; Jan. 1686–87, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, May, 1678–June, 1689, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (Hartford: Case, Lockwood, 1859), 225; Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 193–194; John W. DeForest, History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford: Wm. Jas. Hamersley, 1851), 306–307. 21. Oct. 1686, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, May, 1678–June, 1689, 202n.

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22. Allegra di Bonaventura, “ ‘Their Children’s Children,’ ” chap. 13 in For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England (New York: Liveright, 2013); Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “Pauper Apprenticeship in Narragansett Country: A Different Name for Slavery in Early New England,” Slavery/Anti-Slavery in New England, 2003 Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 2005): 56–70, and “Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Early Rhode Island,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 137–173; Glenn W. LaFantasie and Paul R. Campbell, “Narragansett Country: Indians, Whites, and Land in Rhode Island: An Historical Narrative” (1978), typescript, RIHS, 201–202; Newell, Brethren by Nature. 23. Letter, Roger Plaisted and George Broughton to Richard Waldern and Lieut. Coffin, Oct. 16, 1675, printed in Hubbard, Narr., 23. (Hubbard’s narrative is split into sections, and 23 is in the latter section on “Pascataqua to Pemmaquid.”) On the Newichawannock attacks, 22–24; on Portsmouth, 19–20, 22, 25. 24. Colin G. Calloway, “Wanalancet and Kancagamus: Indian Strategy and Leadership on the New Hampshire Frontier,” Historical New Hampshire 43 (Winter 1988): 264–290, esp. 270–271; for depositions regarding murder and liquor charges, see Mass.Arch. 30: July 30, 1668, 154; Oct. 15, 1668, 155; Oct. 15, 1668, 155A; Oct. 14, 1668, 156; Oct. 20, 1668, 157; Aug. 18, 1668, 158; Oct. 27, 1668, 160; Oct. 29, 1668, 161; Oct. 27, 1668, 162; Oct. 30, 1668, 163; and Oct. 31, 1668, 163A. Emerson Baker, “Trouble to the Eastward: The Failure of Anglo-Indian Relations in Early Maine” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1986), 143–146, 129, 137; and History of Concord, New Hampshire: From the Original Grant in Seventeen Hundred and Twenty-Five to the Opening of the Twentieth Century. Prepared Under the Supervision of the City History Commission, ed. James O. Lyford (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1903), 79–81. 25. Calloway, “Wanalancet and Kancagamus,” 272–273. 26. Ibid., 271. 27. Baker, “Trouble to the Eastward,” 189, 192–193; Kenneth M. Morrison, The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euroamerican Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 89. 28. “Capt. Samuel Mosely and His Company,” in Bodge, SIKPW, 59–78. 29. Calloway, “Wanalancet and Kancagamus,” 273–274. On the court’s authorization to Henchman, Sept. 30, 1675, see Mass.Arch. 30:178. On the request to Wonalancet asking if he would meet with Gookin and Eliot to settle a peace, Oct. 1, 1675, see Mass.Arch. 30:179. For Samuel Namphow’s relation of his journey in search of Wonalancet, Oct. 12, 1675, see Mass.Arch. 30:182; also Wilson Waters, History of Chelmsford, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA: Printed for the Town by the Courier-Citizen Company, 1917), 106–107. On the northern region as an area of refuge, see also Lisa Brooks, “ ‘Every Swamp is a Castle’: Navigating Native Spaces in the Connecticut River

434

notes to pages 299–302

Valley, Winter 1675–1677 and 2005–2015,” Northeastern Naturalist 24, special issue no. 7, “Winter Ecology: Insights from Biology and History” (2017): H45–H80. 30. On this map, its representational strategies, and its functions as a colonial memorial device, see Matthew H. Edney and Susan Cimburek, “Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard’s ‘Narrative’ of King Philip’s War and His ‘Map of NewEngland,’ ” WMQ 61, no. 2 (April 2004): 317–348. 31. Treaty signed at Piscataqua River, Cocheco, July 3, 1676, printed in George Wadleigh, Notable Events in the History of Dover New Hampshire from the First Settlement in 1623 to 1865 (Dover: [The Tufts College Press], 1913), 80–81. 32. Joseph Pierre Anselme Maurault, Histoire des Abenakis, Depuis 1605 jusqu’à Nos Jours (Sorel, QC: Imprimé à l’atelier typographique de la “Gazette de Sorel,” 1866), 5. 33. Hubbard, Narr., “from Pascataqua to Pemmaquid,” 27. 34. Waldron describes the event in a letter from Bloody Point, on reverse of Nicholas Shapleigh, Sept. 6, 1676, collection 77, Autographs of Special Note, box 2/42, Collections of Maine Historical Society. Shapleigh’s account largely confirms Waldron’s. 35. Hubbard, Narr., “from Pascataqua to Pemmaquid,” 28. 36. Ibid., 27–28; Baker, “Trouble to the Eastward,” 202–203; Calloway, “Wanalancet and Kancagamus,” 275. 37. Richard Waldron, Nicholas Shapleigh, and Thomas Daniel, “Letter relating to the Indians captured in the sham fight,” Dover, Sept. 10, 1676, in Provincial Papers. Documents and Records Relating to the Province of New-Hampshire, From the Earliest Period of Its Settlement: 1623–1686, 357–358; original in Mass.Arch. 30:218. 38. “Indians left to ye council to dispose of by death, &c,” Sept. 16, 1676, in Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1674–1686, vol. 5, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston: William White, 1854), 115. 39. Richard Waldron to Major Gookin, “Another letter relating to the Indians captured in the sham fight,” Cochecho, Nov. 2, 1676, original in Mass.Arch. 30:226, printed in Provincial Papers. Documents and Records, 360. 40. Glenn W. LaFantasie and Paul R. Campbell, “Narragansett Country: Indians, Whites, and Land in Rhode Island: An Historical Narrative” (1978), 194–195, typescript, RIHS; Howard M. Chapin, Sachems of the Narragansetts (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1931), 63–68; Elisha R. Potter, “The Early History of Narragansett; With an Appendix of Original Documents, Many of Which are Now for the First Time Published,” in Collections of the Rhode-Island Historical Society III (Providence: Marshall, Brown, 1835), 173. 41. Sewall, entry of Oct. 5, 1676, Diary of Samuel Sewall, vol. 1, 23. 42. William D. Williamson, The History of the State of Maine; From Its First Discovery, A.D. 1602, to the Separation, A.D. 1820, Inclusive (Hallowell, ME: Glazier, Masters, 1832), 545. 43. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of our Lord, 1698, bk. 7

notes to pages 302–303

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(London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702), 55. Lepore devoted a handful of sentences to the northeastern Wabanaki region, Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 62, 177. The most comprehensive survey is Emerson Baker’s “Trouble to the Eastward.” Mary Beth Norton surveyed Wabanaki-English clashes on the Maine frontier, focusing on effects on the 1690s Salem witchcraft hysteria: In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witch Crisis of 1692 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). For extended discussion of Native-settler relations around the Piscataqua, and regional commemorations, see Christine M. DeLucia, “The Memory Frontier: Geographies of Violence and Regeneration in Colonial New England and the Native Northeast after King Philip’s War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2012), esp. chaps. 7–8. 44. On “fugitive geographies” and related phrases, in contexts of other borderlands and resistances, see Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Rachel Adams, “Fugitive Geographies: Rerouting the Stories of North American Slavery,” chap. 2 in Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 45. Lepore, The Name of War, pt. 3: “Bondage,” esp. chap. 6, “A Dangerous Merchandise,” 150–170. 46. John Cotton to Increase Mather, March 20, 1676/77, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 8, 4th series (Boston: Published for the Society, 1868), 233. Olexer, The Enslavement of the American Indian in Colonial Times, contends (without direct citation) that Nanuskooke, evidently another name for Wootonekanuske, and her son were “sold in Barbados for one pound each to a rice planter” (2005 ed., Columbia, MD: Joyous Publishing), 64. 47. “James Quanapohit’s Relation,” Jan. 24, 1675–76, in J. H. Temple, History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts. Preceded by an Account of Old Quabaug, Indian and English Occupation, 1647–1676; Brookfield Records, 1686–1783 (Boston: Rand Avery, 1887), 112–118, esp. 113. On other Natives sent to Barbados (as in the testimony of one who “came in in the winter after wuscapaug fight, whose companions were sent to Barbadoes”), see letter, Rev. James Noyes to John Allyn, Oct. 1676, printed in The Wyllys Papers: Correspondence and Documents Chiefly of Descendants of Gov. George Wyllys of Connecticut 1590–1796, in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, vol. 21 (Hartford: Published by the Society, 1924), 256, also via YIPP (1676.10.00.00). 48. Massachusetts Council Order to Major Gookin regarding Spies, Aug. 28, 1676 (1676.08.28.00), YIPP. 49. “Governor John Leverett’s Certificate that Capt. Thomas Smith is duly authorized to transport certain Indians to any of his Majesty’s dominions or those of any other Christian Prince, and there sell them as Slaves” (Sept. 12, 1676); “Governor Josiah Winslow’s Certificate that Capt. Thomas Smith is legally empowered to transport and sell into perpetual slavery certain Indian Captives” (Aug. 9, 1676), Henry Stevens Transcripts, vol. 2, JCBL.

436

notes to page 304

50. There were several Thomas Smiths resident in Boston around this time; on the biography, will, and estate inventory of a likely candidate (a “Mariner,” d. 1688), whose funeral was attended by Sewall, see Anna Glover, Glover Memorials and Genealogies. An Account of John Glover of Dorchester and His Descendants. With a Brief Sketch of Some of the Glovers Who First Settled in New Jersey, Virginia, and Other Places (Boston: David Clapp & Son, 1867), 104–107. Smith produced a well-known self-portrait; see Max Cavitch, “Interiority and Artifact: Death and Self-Inscription in Thomas Smith’s SelfPortrait,” Early American Literature 37, no. 1 (2002): 89–117; Sally M. Promey, “Mirror Images: Framing the Self in Early New England Material Piety,” in Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, ed. Wilfred M. McClay (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007). For a fictional treatment of Smith that imagines he burned the Sea Flower following its slaving voyage, see Gary D. Schmidt, Trouble (New York: Clarion Books, 2008), 241–243. 51. For a published compendium of key documents and overview of archival holdings on Bermuda’s early colonial period, see A. C. Hollis Hallett, Bermuda Under the Sommer Islands Company 1612–1684, Civil Records, Vol. III ca. 1620–1684/85 (Personal Deeds, Bonds, &c. of Settlers Registered with the Secretary) (Bermuda: Juniperhill Press and Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, 2005). Detailed yearly listing of slave sales in Bermuda, as recorded in the Bermuda Archives, are in chap. 7, “Negroes, Indians, Mullatos, Slaves,” 258–332. 52. The most comprehensive survey of colonial Bermuda’s history is Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which discusses these factors—see esp. 62, 94, 102–103, 227–228. (The 1675 ban is discussed on 103.) See also Jarvis, “ ‘In the Eye of All Trade’: Maritime Revolution and the Transformation of Bermudian Society, 1612–1800” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1998), esp. section on “The Regulation of Slaves,” 270–284. Pervasive racial mixing and liberties accorded to slaves in Bermuda particularly worried Heydon, who endeavored to curtail both. Jarvis reports that in 1681, Heydon prevented Solomon Robinson and the pink Hopewell from landing Native slaves from Massachusetts and King Philip’s War. Jarvis speculated Heydon brought them to Barbados instead. See 277, esp. n48. 53. Following the ban on slave importation, the Bermuda Council met in August 1676 to consider the fate of “severall slaves as Indians & Negroes come into ye Country, contrary to ye Companys Law.” They approved a measure authorizing the sheriff to seize them. See “At a Councell Table 17th August 1676,” and “A Law for making all Negroes, Indians and Mallattoes that shall be brought into the Island to be fforfeited, and to prevent Conspiracy by them, and that their Testimony in such case shall be taken one against the other. Enacted by the Bermuda Company 1674,” both in Sir John Henry Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers

notes to pages 304–306

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Islands 1511–1687, Compiled from the Colonial Records and Other Original Sources, vol. 2: 1650–1687 (London: Longmans, Green, 1879), 442–443, 404–405. On other developments in Bermuda’s economy from this period, and free and enslaved peoples’ labors in building the colony, see also by Michael J. Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680–1783,” WMQ, 3rd series, 59, no. 3 (July 2002): 585–622; “The Binds of the Anxious Mariner: Patriarchy, Paternalism, and the Maritime Culture of Eighteenth-Century Bermuda,” Journal of Early Modern History 14, nos. 1–2 (June 2010): 75–117; “ ‘The Fastest Vessels in the World’: The Origin and Evolution of the Bermuda Sloop, 1620–1800,” Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History 7 (1995): 31–50. 54. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 26. 55. Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616–1782 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), esp. 56–66 on “Indian” indentures and slaves, and table 2, “Indian Indentures, ca. 1636–1661,” 57. Bernhard notes about the seventeenth century, “Two households, one in St George’s and one on St. David’s, had nothing but Indians as slaves. . . . That two Indian men at this time bore the name Philip suggests a memory of the late King Philip, the Wampanoag ruler who died in King Philip’s War in 1675,” 63. For critique of historiographical assumptions that Bermuda’s form of slavery was benevolent, see Cyril Outerbridge Packwood, Chained on the Rock: Slavery in Bermuda (New York: Eliseo Torres & Sons, 1975). 56. “By the late eighteenth century Indians disappear as a separate racial category of servants or slaves in Bermuda wills and inventories,” Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 62. Jarvis notes that Indian slaves were “always a small minority in Bermuda. Their numbers and proportion of all slaves (as listed in Bermuda probate inventories) peaked between 1700 and 1709, when they accounted for a fifth of all slaves listed, but thereafter declined sharply”: In the Eye of All Trade, 102. 57. Jarvis, “ ‘In the Eye of All Trade’ ” (diss.), 279–280; William Zuill, Sr., “The Maligan Family,” Bermuda Historical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 243–249. Other locations for these displays were Cobbler’s Island off Spanish Point, Mangrove Bay, Stokes Point, and Ordnance Island. See Smith’s Parish, Bermuda Architectural Heritage Series, vol. 5 of the Historic Buildings Book Project (Hamilton: Bermuda National Trust, 2005), 88. 58. Berkeley relocated to Newport, Rhode Island, in the meantime, putting him in the midst of Narragansett and Wampanoag areas. George Berkeley, A Proposal For the better Supplying of Churches In Our Foreign Plantations, And For Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity, By a College to be erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda (London: H. Woodfall, 1725), esp. 6, 10; Edwin S. Gaustad, “The Dean of Derry and the Somer Islands,” chap. 2 in George Berkeley in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 19–51. 59. Virginia Bernhard, “Bids for Freedom: Slave Resistance and Rebellion Plots in Bermuda, 1656–1761,” Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (Dec. 1996): 185–208.

438

notes to pages 306–308

60. For a sample assessment of Bermuda by an antislavery group, see appendix G, in Report of the Committee of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, Read at The General Meeting of the Society, Held on the 25th Day of June 1824, Together with an Account of the Proceedings Which Took Place at That Meeting (London: Richard Taylor, 1824), 144–146. 61. Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas, esp. 48–49. The portrait of Minors is between 48–49. 62. Helen M. Fessenden, “Childhood Memories of Bermuda in the ‘70s,” Bermuda Historical Quarterly 5, no. 1 (Jan.–March 1948): 22–38, esp. 22. 63. For a sampling of mentions of the shipping of Philip’s son as a slave to Bermuda, see Egbert Guernsey, History of the United States of America, Designed for Schools. Extending from the Discovery of America by Columbus to the Present Time; with Numerous Maps and Engravings, Together with a Notice of American Antiquities, and the Indian Tribes (New York: Cady and Burgess, 1851), 116; Benson J. Lossing, A Pictorial History of the United States. From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Hartford: T. Belknap, 1868), 128; J. A. Doyle, History of the United States. Freeman’s Historical Course for Schools (New York: Henry Holt, 1876), 117; George H. Tilton, A History of Rehoboth Massachusetts. Its History for 275 Years, 1643–1918. In Which Is Incorporated the Vital Parts of the Original History of the Town, Published in 1836, and Written by Leonard Bliss, Jr. (Boston: Published by the Author, 1918), 82. 64. Guernsey, History of the United States, 116. 65. George W. Ellis and John E. Morris, King Philip’s War: Based on the Archives and Records of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island and Connecticut, and Contemporary Letters and Accounts. With Biographical and Topographical Notes (New York: Grafton Press, 1906), 268. 66. Account discussed in Collections of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, vol. 13 (Worcester: The Society, 1894), 105. 67. For correspondence between Edward Hale and Anna Maria Outerbridge (ca. 1903) and between Virginia Baker and Anna Maria Outerbridge (ca. 1912), see Anna Maria Outerbridge papers on King Philip’s War prisoners and Boer War prisoners, Ber.Arch., esp. letter, Hale to Outerbridge, Jan. 19, 1903. Hale tried to calculate backward from the reported King Philip descendant to the birth dates of Philip’s family to see if the link would be historically plausible. 68. Paul Davis, “Edward Everett Hale’s house in South Kingstown up for grabs,” Providence Journal, Jan. 2, 2015. 69. Virginia Baker, “Glimpses of Ancient Sowams. Reminiscences of the Aborigines—their Sayings and Doings,” Publications of the Rhode Island Historical Society, n.s., 2 (Providence: Printed for the Society by Standard Printing, 1894), 196–202; Virginia Baker, “Weetamoe: A New-England Queen of the Seventeenth Century,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 54, no. 215 (July 1900): 261–266; Virginia Baker, Massasoit’s Town Sowams in Pokanoket: Its History, Legends and Traditions (Warren, RI: the author, 1904).

notes to pages 308–311

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70. Letter, Virginia Baker to Anna Maria Outerbridge, Oct. 21, 1912, in Outerbridge papers, Ber.Arch. 71. Letter, Virginia Baker to Anna Maria Outerbridge, July 8, 1912, in Outerbridge papers, Ber.Arch. 72. “Last of Cape Rulers. Melinda and Lottie Mitchell, Descendants of King Philip and the Eighth Generation from Massasoit, Now Reside in the Woods of Plymouth—They Occupy Land on the Shores of Lake Assawompsett, Where Their Ancestors Dwelt and Died—The Sisters Conduct Their Own Farm and Do Nearly All the Work,” Boston Daily Globe, Aug. 4, 1901, 32; William S. Simmons, “From Manifest Destiny to the Melting Pot: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mitchell, Wampanoag,” in Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant, Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 44, ed. William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 131–138. 73. Russell G. Handsman, “Landscapes of Memory in Wampanoag Country—and the Monuments upon them,” in Patricia E. Rubertone, ed., Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 185–186. 74. Massasoit Monument Association, Dedication of the Massasoit Memorial at Warren, R.I., Oct. 19, 1907 (Warren, RI: Gazette Press, 1907); Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 62. 75. F. Van Wyck Mason, “Bermuda’s Pequots,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin 39 (Feb. 26, 1937): 616–620; “Historical Note” in “Francis van Wyck Mason novels: Guide,” MS Am 2295, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University, http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou00183 (accessed June 13, 2012). 76. Ibid., 618–619. 77. Ibid., 620. 78. Bragdon, “Native Americans in Bermuda,” 53. 79. “They Sentenced Themselves for LIFE—On a Tiny Island,” advertisement from the Bermuda Trade Development Board, Bermudian Magazine, March 1934, 42; “The march of progress: ‘Wind of Change’ Blows Through East End,” Bermuda Mid-Ocean News, June 5, 1965, 6. All Bermudan newspaper/periodical citations are from the microfilm versions in the Bermuda National Library, Hamilton, BM. 80. Steven High, “The Tourism Politics of Base Location in Bermuda,” chap. 2, in Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 43–65; documentation in the St. David’s Island Committee Board of Arbitrators, 1940–1944, papers, Ber.Arch. 81. “St. David’s Contribution To A Great Cause: Historical Past Sacrificed For Future Security,” The Bermudian 22, no. 9 (Nov. 1941): 21–23. The Bermudan press

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extensively covered the base negotiations, construction, and effects on residents. See “U.S. Defence Base Sites Announced / Airfield Will Be On Longbird Island with Naval Base Established on St. David’s,” Royal Gazette and Colonist Daily, Nov. 19, 1940, 1; “250 To Be Driven From Homes For U.S. Naval Base in Bermuda,” Royal Gazette and Colonist Daily, Dec. 28, 1940; Elizabeth Taylor, “ ‘Boom Town’: Uncle Sam’s Invasion of the East End has Aroused the Capital from Its Age-Long Doze,” The Bermudian 12, no. 1 (March 1941): 9–10; Ronald John Williams, “Anglo-American Outpost: Britain Shares Bermuda with the United States,” The Bermudian (Jan. 1941): 18–22, 35; Ronald John Williams, “ ‘Rolling Along’: A base for the United States in Bermuda is a milestone in Anglo-American amity,” The Bermudian 11, no. 8 (Oct. 1940): 12. 82. E. A. McCallan’s Life on Old St. David’s, Bermuda (1948; Hamilton, BM: Bermuda Historical Society, 1986) was one of the most probing accounts of how this base affected St. David’s. See also Terry Tucker, “ ‘I Put the Glass on It,” review of E. A. McCallan, Life on Old St. David’s, Bermuda, in Bermuda Historical Quarterly 6, no. 1 (Jan.– March 1949): 26–27; E. A. McCallan diaries (1936–1958), 9 vols., esp. Diary 3, PA 633, Ber.Arch.; E. A. McCallan, draft MS of Life on Old St. David’s, Ber.Arch. 83. William Maxwell, “The King of St. David’s,” New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1941: 35–39; “Individuals Roundabout—The ‘King’ of St. David’s,” The Bermudian (Dec. 1940): 14–15, 38; “Individuals Roundabout: ‘Cap’n’ Joe Powell,” The Bermudian 12, no. 2 (April 1941): 13, 36–38. 84. Bragdon, “Native Americans in Bermuda,” 58–59; “Tracking Indians in St David’s,” Royal Gazette, July 17, 1978; “Mexican Indians were slaves in Bermuda, claims historian,” Royal Gazette(?), April 7, 1980, 7; P. M. Foggo, letter to the editor, Royal Gazette, July 21, 1978; Philip Rabito-Wyppensenwah, letter to the editor, Royal Gazette(?), July 22, 1978. The historical letters are referenced in “Exploding that Mohawk Myth,” Bermuda Now! 1, no. 8, Jan. 12, 1981, 28–30: “Phillip has found letters kept by Mrs. Augusta Minors that link her to a famous Wampanoag chief, Sachem (King) Metacom (or King Philip, as the English called him). . . . [F]ive 17th century letters that Phillip discovered at the home of 95-year-old Mrs. Minors in St. David’s make it apparent that the pair were shipped here—and she is a descendant,” 29. 85. Jean Foggo Simon, “St. David’s Island Indian Reconnection Festival: How It Was Organized and How It Succeeded,” Drums Along the Ohio, Winter 2002–2003, 6, 11; Jean Foggo Simon Collection, MSS 314, MPMRC Archives. Some disagreement has arisen among the various parties involved in the reconnection organizing. See Jessie Moniz, “Brinky’s proud of his unique heritage,” Royal Gazette Online, July 4, 2011, http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20110704/ISLAND02/707049945 (accessed June 13, 2012); Moniz, “A St David’s story waiting to be told,” Royal Gazette Online, Feb. 16, 2015, http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20150216/ISLAND04/150219798 (accessed June 26, 2015). 86. Harrigan, “Pequots, Bermudians renew connections”; James A. Ziral, “People of the Great Spirit,” The Bermudian (May 1992): 62–84; Karen Florin, “ ‘Wherever the

notes to pages 312–315

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Fates Lead Us’: Tribe’s Mega-powwow Helps Pequot Descendants in Bermuda Reconnect,” The Day, Aug. 22, 2003, 1. On academic and popular history interest, see Ethel Boissevain, “Whatever Became of the New England Indians Shipped to Bermuda to be Sold as Slaves?” Man in the Northeast 21 (Spring 1981): 103–114; “Anthropologist dips into the unique St. David’s melting pot,” Royal Gazette, Aug. 25, 1987, 18; Kathleen Bragdon, “Native Americans in Bermuda,” report, on file at MPMRC. 87. Ira Philip, “Pow Wow honours memory of Alice Lopez,” Royal Gazette, June 26, 2011, http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20110626/ISLAND09/706259957/–1/ island04 (accessed Aug. 1, 2011). 88. St. Clair “Brinky” Tucker, St. David’s Island, Bermuda: Its People, History and Culture (Winnipeg, MB: Hignell Book Printing, 2009), 144; Katie Mulvaney, “Making connections,” Providence Journal, June 10, 2008; conversation with Lorén Spears, Nuweetooun School and Tomaquag Museum, Dec. 13, 2010. On the school’s mission, in relation to dominant U.S. schooling systems, see Lorén Spears, “From ‘Pursuit of Happiness: An Indigenous View of Education,’” in Dawn.Vcs., 550–554. 89. Tucker, St. David’s Island, Bermuda, esp. 5, 20–21, 23, 40. Site-visit to St. David’s Island, Aug. 10, 2010. For information on the island’s histories, I acknowledge conversations with Brinky Tucker, Ronnie Chameau, Rick Spurling, Aug. 2010. 90. On recent DNA work, see Jill B. Gaieski et al., “Genetic Ancestry and Indigenous Heritage in a Native American Descendant Community in Bermuda,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 146, no. 3 (Nov. 2011): 392–405. Gaieski also completed doctoral research on identities in St. David’s, as yet unpublished: “The St. David’s Island Project: An Ethnogenesis in Process,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013). 91. “Where Is the Other Half of Bermuda’s History?” Bermuda Mid-Ocean News, Aug. 16, 1969, 16; also “Bermuda’s Museums Are in a Mess,” Bermuda Mid-Ocean News, Aug. 16, 1969, 16. On the tourist industry’s development, including heritage elements, see Duncan McDowall, Another World: Bermuda and the Rise of Modern Tourism (London: Macmillan Education, 1999), and “From ‘Pesthole’ to ‘Nature’s Fairyland’: The Aesthetic and Practical Origins of Bermuda’s Tourism 1800–1914,” Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History 8 (1996): 115–158. 92. An exhibition on “The Slave Trade” at the Commissioner’s House at the Bermuda Maritime Museum (now called National Museum of Bermuda) demonstrates these challenges, slipping between “black and white” language and attempts to include Indigenous peoples in the telling. For instance, see panel on “Slavery in Bermuda,” which discusses how “whites and blacks influenced each other’s cultural lives, shaping the face of modern-day society.” For mention of Native Americans, see panel on “From Servitude to Enslavement.” Site-visit, Aug. 15, 2010. 93. Graham Foster, The Hall of History: Bermuda’s Story in Art (2009), descriptive panel, viewed Aug. 15, 2010, National Museum of Bermuda. 94. Brochure, African Diaspora Heritage Trail / Officially Designated a UNESCO Slave Route Project (Bermuda: Island Press, n.d.—second run).

442

notes to pages 315–316

95. We Arrive sculpture, created by Chesley Trott (2009), commemorating slaves freed from the American brigantine Enterprise in 1835, viewed Aug. 25, 2010. Sarah (Sally) Bassett sculpture, dedicated Feb. 9, 2009, viewed Aug. 20, 2010. See three-part brochure series produced by the Commission for Unity and Racial Equality (CURE), 400 Years of Bermuda’s Race Relations (Bermuda: Bermuda Press, Jan., Nov. 2009). 96. Carter House Museum, Southside Road, St. David’s Island, visited Aug. 28, 2010; conversations there with Ronnie Chameau and Richard Spurling; “Historic eastern landmark reopens,” Royal Gazette, Aug. 17, 2001; oral history documentary produced by Lucinda Spurling, St. David’s: An Island Near Bermuda (Afflare Films, 2004). 97. Elaine Weintraub, Lighting the Trail: The African American Heritage of Martha’s Vineyard (Oak Bluffs, MA: African-American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, 2005); Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham, Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004); on the Boston and Nantucket Black History Trails, see guides at the Museum of African American History, http://www.afroammuseum.org (accessed Aug. 1, 2011). 98. Vanasse Hangen Brustlin (VHB), “Wilbour Woods, Little Compton, RI,” report prepared for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (2003), on file at Brownell Library—Little Compton Free Public Library. The VHB report indicates that the Wootonekanuski boulder references “a Native American who has yet to be identified” (p. 4), suggesting ignorance of Philip’s wife’s name in the present, though her identity was well known by antiquarians in earlier years: Samuel Gardner Drake, Biography and History of the Indians of North America (Boston: O. L. Perkins, 1834), n13. Site visit to Wilbour Woods, June 5, 2011. See also Patricia E. Rubertone, “Monuments and Sexual Politics in New England Indian Country,” in The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects, ed. Barbara Voss and Eleanor Casella (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 99. James Hewins, “A Few of the Homes of Medfield, and What Their Names Signify,” in Collections of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, vol. 13 (Worcester, MA: The Society, 1894), 97–105, esp. 98. 100. Paul Davis, “Rhode Island DOT Officials Discuss Indian Slavery Plaque,” and “Narragansett Indian official against Roger Williams plaque,” Providence Journal, March 8, 22, 2011. 101. Entry on James Keith, in James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of The First Settlers of New England, Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May, 1692, on the Basis of Farmer’s Register, in Four Volumes, vol. 3 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1861), 4; on Keith’s correspondence regarding the captives, see Lepore, The Name of War, 152. 102. The Reverend James Keith Parsonage, also called the Keith House, is preserved and interpreted by the Old Bridgewater Historical Society in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts (OBHSMA). On townspeople’s memories of Native presence and sites, see “King Philip’s War” file, OBHSMA. On local tradition that some Native prisoners spent time in the jail at Bridgewater in Aug. 1676, see Celebration of the Two-Hundredth

notes to pages 316–320

443

Anniversary of the Incorporation of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, At West Bridgewater, June 3, 1856; Including the Address by Hon. Emory Washburn, of Worcester; Poem by James Reed, A.B., of Boston; and the Other Exercises of the Occasion (Boston: John Wilson and Son, 1856), 15, 51 on Keith’s intercession. 103. Letters, Barbara M. Libby to Evelyn [?], March 4, 1982, and March 29, 1982, OBHSMA. 104. I am grateful to Norma Keim of the Old Berwick Historical Society (South Berwick, ME) for showing me around the Newichawannock and Cocheco areas and sharing her own researches into some of these events and possible landscape locations, June 17, June 25, 2009. 105. On Jamaica: “Among the 600 householders in our Jamaica sample, 421 owned black slaves, 145 had white servants, and 51 had Indian servants or slaves, some of whom had come from New England, captured in King Philip’s War,” Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 269–270; on Indian slaves’ unwillingness to work there, 74. 106. On Native prisoners taken to Fayal in the Azores, some of whom were brought back to New England in 1677, see petition of Aug. 3, 1703, by Bernard Trott asking to be paid for his services in freeing them, and compensating him for the “sd. Indians Passage & Victualls to Boston,” Mass.Arch. 30:492; Petition of Bernard Trott to Joseph Dudley, Oct. 2, 1704 (1704.10.02.00), YIPP; Emma Lewis Coleman, New England Captives Carried to Canada Between 1677 and 1760 During the French and Indian Wars, vol. 1 (1926; Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2008), 138–139; “Petition of Bernard Trott,” in Documentary History of the State of Maine, Containing the Baxter Manuscripts, vol. 23, ed. James Phinney Baxter (Portland, ME: Fred L. Tower, 1916), 1; Bruce J. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 153. 107. Gookin, Hist.Acct., 449. 108. “Testimony of Daniel Tookumwompbait & Thomas Wauban,” Oct. 2, 1686, in Sidney Perley, The Indian Land Titles of Essex County Massachusetts (Salem: Essex Book and Print Club, 1912), 10, 11–12; Emerson W. Baker II, “Salem as Frontier Outpost,” in Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory, ed. Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 35. 109. Jerome S. Handler, “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 8, no. 4 (Jan. 1969): 38–64, esp. 57–58; Handler, “Amerindians and Their Contributions to Barbadian Life in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 35, no. 3 (1977): 189–210; Handler, “Aspects of Amerindian Ethnography in 17th Century Barbados,” Caribbean Studies 9, no. 4 (Jan. 1970): 50–72; Linford D. Fisher, “ ‘Dangerous Designes’: The 1676 Barbados Act to Prohibit New England Indian Slave Importation,” WMQ 71, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 99–124.

444

notes to pages 320–322

110. Maurice Silingsby, The Death-Touch: or the Scout of the Wichewonnock. An Historical Drama, in Five Acts (Dover, NH: “The Red Men,” 1876). Overall the drama maintained strongly anti-Indian rhetoric. 111. John Christian Hopkins, Carlomagno (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2003), esp. 255. 112. On the Tangier group, see series of documents in Records of the Navy Board and the Board of Admiralty, UKNA: Thomas Hamilton to [London], Dec. 16, 1675, folio 167, ADM 106/311; Hamilton to [London], Oct. 31, 1675, folio 165, ADM 106/311; Hamilton to [London], Oct. 3, 1675, folio 154, ADM 106/311; Hamilton to [London], Jan. 24, 1676, folio 8, ADM 106/318; Hamilton to [London], Jan. 24, 1676, folio 10, ADM 106/318; Hamilton to [London], June 18, 1676, folio 12, ADM 106/318; Hamilton to [London], Aug. 6, 1676, folio 18, ADM 106/318; John Shere, list of seventy-nine named slaves belonging to the Bagnia at Tangier and ten Indians delivered into his custody by Sir Palmer Fairborne, Feb. 20, 1677, ADM 106/328/27; also YIPP documents, transcriptions, and annotations associated with 1675.11.17.00, 1675.12.16.00, 1676.04.29.00. I thank Paul Grant-Costa for ongoing discussions of these episodes following our mutual immersions in these sources. Lepore briefly mentions Tangier (The Name of War, 170) but does not appear to follow these archival trails forward. Wendy Anne Warren likewise briefly mentions the episode in “Enslaved Africans in New England, 1638–1700” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2008), 43, and in Warren, New England Bound, 83. 113. “A List of Slaves Belonging to His Majesty’s Bagnio at Tangiers,” Feb. 20, 1677 (1677.02.20.00), YIPP. YIPP editors speculate these may have been Hassanamesit Natives captured in Aug. 1675, but their precise identities have not yet been confirmed. 114. John Eliot to Robert Boyle, Nov. 27, 1683, in “Eliot’s Letters to Boyle,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, For the Year 1794, vol. 3 (1794; repr. Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1810): 182–183. 115. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (2002; repr. New York: Anchor Books, 2004), esp. pt. 1, “Tangier,” 23–42; E. M. G. Routh, Tangier: England’s Lost Atlantic Outpost, 1661–1684 (London: J. Murray, 1912); E. M. G. Routh, “The English Occupation of Tangier (1661–1683),” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n.s., 19 (1905): 61–78; Samuel Pepys, The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys, ed. E. Chappell (London: Printed for the Navy Records Society, 1935); Stephen Saunders Webb, Lord Churchill’s Coup: The Anglo-American Empire and the Glorious Revolution Reconsidered (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 77–80. 116. Josiah Burchett, A Complete History Of the most Remarkable Transactions at Sea, from the Earliest Accounts of Time To the Conclusion of the Last War with France. Wherein Is given an Account of the most considerable Naval-Expeditions, Sea-Fights, Stratagems, Discoveries, And Other Maritime Occurrences that have happen’d among all Nations which have flourished at Sea (London: Printed by W. B. for J. Walthoe, 1720), 405; Colley, Captives, 32.

notes to pages 322–328

445

117. “Tangier From the Ruins of the English Mole,” photograph in Budgett Meakin, The Land of the Moors: A Comprehensive Description (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901), 86. 118. Jerome S. Handler, “The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 1 (March 2009): 1–26; see also Handler, “Plantation Slave Settlements in Barbados, 1650s to 1834,” chap. 6 in In the Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean History and Legacy, ed. A. Thompson (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002), 121–158. 119. Stephen W. Silliman and Natasha Leullier Snedeker, “Archaeological Investigations on St. David’s Island, Bermuda,” final report submitted to Bermuda National Trust, National Museum of Bermuda, and St. David’s Islanders and Indian Community (Aug. 2014). I acknowledge conversations with Stephen Silliman on these topics on several occasions, 2012–2015. Michael Jarvis is also presently pursuing related issues on Smith’s Island: Jarvis et al., Smith’s Island Archaeology Project—Bermuda 2012– 2017, http://smithsislandarchaeology.blogspot.com (accessed April 10, 2017). 120. “Lost at Sea Memorial: Full List of Names,” Bernews: Bermuda’s Multimedia News & Culture Magazine, March 28, 2010, http://bernews.com/2010/03/lost-at-seamemorial-full-list-of-names (accessed July 12, 2011).

Conclusion 1. Public meeting on Nipsachuck project, July 10, 2012, Blackstone Valley Historical Society, Lincoln, RI. 2. Patricia E. Rubertone, book review of King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676, by James D. Drake (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), in The Journal of American History 87, no. 4 (March 2001): 1463–1464. 3. For one perspective, see Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, “Take Down the Confederate Flags, but Not the Monuments,” The Atlantic, June 25, 2015. In conjunction with the debate about the Confederate flag, a New England article revisited the symbolism of the Massachusetts state flag, which derives from the Puritan representation of an Indian. Yvonne Abraham, “It’s no Confederate flag, but our banner is still pretty awful,” Boston Globe, June 25, 2015. 4. Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 3. 5. Letter from Father Jean Enjalran to——, Sillery, Oct. 13, 1676, in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610–1791. Vol. LX. Lower Canada, Illinois, Iroquois, Ottawas 1675–1677, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, OH: Burrows Brothers, 1899), digitized ed., http://moses. creighton.edu/kripke/jesuitrelations/relations_60.html (accessed April 10, 2017). 6. Judith H. Dobrzynski, “Profits from Casino Help an Indian Tribe Reclaim Its History,” New York Times, Sept. 1, 1997; Kevin A. McBride, “Monhantic Fort: The

446

notes to page 329

Pequot in King Philip’s War,” in Native Forts of the Long Island Sound Area, ed. Gaynell Stone (Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological Association / Nassau County Archaeological Committee, 2006), 321–334; Kevin A. McBride, “Monhantic Fort: The Mashantucket Pequots in King Philip’s War,” n.d., research files, MPMRC; John M. Kelly, “Flint at the Fort: Investigating Raw Material Scarcity and Locations of Lithic Activity at Monhantic Fort” (master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2011); conversations and site-visits with Kevin McBride and Jason Mancini, Sept. 2009, Feb. 2011, Oct. 2011. 7. Doc. 327, June 28, 1676, 485–487; Doc. 330, Nov. 1, 1676, 489; Doc. 333, March 6, 1676/77, 490–491, in Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Indian Deeds: Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620–1691 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2008); Ann Marie Plane, “Putting a Face on Colonization: Factionalism and Gender Politics in the Life History of Awashunkes, the ‘Squaw Sachem’ of Saconet,” in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816, ed. Robert S. Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 140–165. 8. Shepard Krech III, ed., Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum (Bristol: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1994), esp. 167–185. 9. Ramona L. Peters, “Consulting with the Bone Keepers: NAGPRA Consultations and Archaeological Monitoring in the Wampanoag Territory,” in Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States, ed. Jordan E. Kerber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 32–43. 10. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), 61.

Index

Page numbers in italic type refer to illustrations. 300–301, 322; and epidemics, 125; floating islands, 35; homeland, ties to, 11; lobster hunting, 34; mobile farmers, 207; mobility, places of, 34; place-names, toponymic transformation of, 220; reciprocity and sustainability, 34; refugee crisis, 299, 301; settler colonialism, struggles with, 6–7; “sham fight,” 300, 317; survivance of, xvii, 8; as vagabonds, characterization of, 400n134; as vanquished, 252. See also individual tribes Allen, Mary E., 234 Allen, Zachariah, 151–153, 195 Alliance to Save South County, 178 American Antiquarian Society, xi, xiii, xvi–xvii, 81, 95, 239–240 American Battlefield Protection Program (ABPP), 192–193, 194–195, 281 American Indian Movement (AIM), 96, 105 American Revolution, 24, 75, 85, 146, 230–231

Abenaki Nation of Odanak, 278 Abenakis, 8, 102, 110, 116, 223, 228, 236, 267, 281–282, 328 abolitionism, 306 Adams, Dwight, 156–158, 160 Africa, 291, 305, 309, 324 African Diaspora Heritage Trail, 315 Africans, 231, 295 Ahawton, William, 40 Akimel O’odham, 92 Alcatraz Island, 96 Alden, Timothy Jr., xi–xiii, xv–xvii, 71, 329 Algonquians, xi–xii, xv–xvi, 14–15, 31, 32, 36–39, 44, 47, 52, 56, 69, 71, 78, 83–84, 91–92, 95, 105, 107, 114–115, 122, 127, 131, 135–136, 149–150, 172, 186, 197, 211–212, 224, 230, 236–237, 240, 242, 244, 246, 281, 285, 293, 294, 297, 298, 300, 308, 309, 310, 327–329, 407n66; adapting behavior of, 224; deceased relations, mourning of, 294; diaspora of, 11, 217, 278, 281, 289–290, 301, 317, 320, 323–324; enslavement of, 294–297,

447

448

American West, 80 Americas, 293, 324 Amherst College, 271 Ammons, Gideon, 157–158, 162–163, 196 Amoskeag Falls, 21–22, 34, 72, 207, 218, 298 Anchors of Tradition (Hazard), 170 Andrews, Edith, 100 Andros, Edmund, 58 Anglo-Americans, 13, 153, 166, 171, 241, 252, 264, 272–273; antiquarian research, 154, 322; Bloody Brook, and collective remembrances, 235–236; and captivity, 242; colonial dead, thwarted burial of, 219; commemorative landscapes, 225– 226; English settlers, casualties of, 220; filiopietism of, 89; hegemony, challenge to, 254; hegemony of, 6; heterogeneity, clinging to, 154; “home” grounds of, 206; Indigenous homelands, ignorance of, 181; King Philip’s War, psychological effect on, 227; land, affiliation to, 181; landmanagement activities of, 221; local historicity, interest in, 145–147, 168– 169; Native-settler violence, 75, 146, 268; place-claims of, 171; Yankees, as iconophilic, 151. See also Swamp Yankees, Yankees anticolonialism, 276 antiquarians, 5, 21–22, 230, 242–244, 251–252, 254, 266, 277, 322; colonial past, revivals of, 256; heritage, marketing of, 256–257; Native-settler violence, memorializing of, 268; place-sense, importance of, 5–6; regional landscapes, characteristics of, 6 Apaches, 23, 78

index

Apes, Candace, 232 Apes, William, 232 Apes(s), William, 76–77, 232 Apostle Eliot Preaching to the Indians, The (mural), 91–92 Appadurai, Arjun, 11 Appeal to the Great Spirit (sculpture), 87 Aquidneck Island, 126, 137, 145, 217 Aquinnah Wampanoag, xii, 71, 96, 100, 106, 279 Arapahoe, Bertha, 85 Arapahoe, David, 85 Arapahos, 327 Arawaks, 317 Arbella (ship), 37–38 Archive Fever (Derrida), 13 Archive of Place, The (Turkel), 17 archiving, 13; and political power, 13; settler colonialism, 13–14 Arizona, 92 Arms, Marsha, 265–266 Arms, William, 265–266 Arnold, Harry, 89 Aroostock Band of Micmacs, 393n55 Arthur, Chester A., 81 Ashpelon, 250 Atalay, Sonya, 20 Atherton, Hope, 218, 274–275 Atherton Company, 138–139 Atlantic slave trade, 290 Atlantic World, 10, 23–24, 289–291, 294, 313–314, 323–324, 328 “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” (Lowell), 93–94 Attin, Sylvia, 85 Awashonks, 47, 316, 329 Azores, 317 Babcock, Charles, 386–387n142 Baker, Virginia, 308–309 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 116, 373n96

index

Barbados, 303, 317–318, 323, 436n52 Barber, John Warner, 73, 234–235, 236 Barre (Massachusetts), 252 Bassett, Sarah (Sally), 315, 442n95 Bastoniak, 32, 43, 48–49, 52, 58, 66, 115, 117, 297 Battle of Little Bighorn, 244 beaver, 43, 45, 124, 198, 205, 207–209, 210–211, 225, 256 Bedford (New Hampshire), 140 Bedford, F., 83 Beers, Richard, 45, 212, 219, 262–263, 284 Beers Historical Park, 270 Beers massacre, 212–213 Belcher, Jonathan, 228, 262 Belknap, Jeremy, 18, 70, 72 Berkeley, George, 306 Bermuda, 11, 289–290, 303, 308, 311, 315, 322–324, 431n15, 441n92; emancipation in, 306; Indian slaves in, 304–307, 437n56; Indigenous memoryscapes in, 312–313; Indigenous peoples in, 309–310; Indigenous presence in, 314; King Philip’s relations in, 307; memorial placemaking in, 291; and New England, 312; public memoryscapes in, 314; racial mixing in, 436n52; slave insurrections, 305–306; slave trade, involvement in, 314 Bermuda Company, 306 Bermuda Maritime Museum, 441n92. See also National Museum of Bermuda Bermúdez, Juan de, 304 Bernard, Erilda, 85 Bernardston (Massachusetts), 227. See also Fall Town (Massachusetts) biculturalism, 106–107 Blackstone, William, 38

449

Blackstone Valley Historical Society, 192, 325 Blare, Robert, 227 Bloody Brook, 229, 257, 262, 308; as colonial mass grave, 225; commemorative marker at, 221–222, 226, 268; local memoryscapes, 257; massacre at, 212, 218, 227, 232, 235, 243–44, 246; monument at, 232–235, 236, 257, 260–261, 269 Bodge, George, 383n96 Bombay (Mumbai) (India), 322 bondage. See slavery Boston (Massachusetts), 22, 29, 38, 42–49, 54–55, 57–58, 63–64, 67, 75–79, 81, 88, 93–94, 97–98, 103, 105, 116–117, 137, 170, 175, 198, 215, 224, 226, 228, 247, 255, 300–301, 315; Boston Common, Native executions on, 53; “Boston Week,” 87; “City Upon a Hill” reference, 89; fire in, 60–61; “Freedom Trail,” 114; Indian Archer weathervane, 69–70; Native peoples, as dwelling place for, 32, 66, 68, 85, 87, 95–96; as “Perfect City,” 89, 99; public memoryscapes in, 114; as urban utopia, 85. See also Shawmut Boston Art Club, 83 Boston Asylum for Indigent Boys, 81 Boston Citizenship Committee, 80 Boston Harbor, 84, 112; as “harbor of shame,” 97 Boston Harbor Islands (BHI), 98–99, 344n2 Boston Harbor Islands Partnership, 100 Boston Harbor Project, 97 Boston Indian Council (BIC), 95–96 Boston Townships, 232 Bourn, Augustus, 160

450

Bousquet, Don, 180–181 Boyd, Colleen, 144 Boyden, Frank, 265 Boyle, Robert, 321 Bradford, William, 36, 126 Brookfield (Massachusetts), 212, 252 Brothertown, 149, 150–151, 154–155, 231 Brown, John III, 183 Brown, Theodore Dennis, 121–122, 171–172 Brown, W. A. S., 75 Brown University, 387n152 Bruchac, Marge, 281–282, 428n103 Bulfinch, Charles, 76 Bull, Jireh, 170 Bumstead, Jeremiah, 69 Bumsteed, Jeremiah, 58 Bunker Hill Monument, 166 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 95, 109 Burke, John, 227 Burnt Swamp, 196 Butler, Eva, 172 Byrd, Jodi, 23 Cádiz (Spain), 317, 320–321 Callender, John, 138 Calloway, Colin, 1 Cambridge (Massachusetts), 40, 42, 49, 50–51, 53, 57, 59, 77 camizado, 215 Canada, 24, 102, 105, 242, 247, 252 Canning, Josiah D., 237–239, 246, 248 Canonchet/Nanuntanoo, 214, 267, 279, 301 Canonicus, 126, 128, 136, 387–388n153 Cape Cod (Massachusetts), 289 carceral landscapes, 291 Carcieri, Donald, 187–188 Carcieri v. Salazar, 188–189 Caribbean, 291, 320; chattel slavery in, 305; pink cottage syndrome, 314

index

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 263 Carlomagno (Hopkins), 320 Carmichael, George Jr., 156 Carolinas, 291, 304 Carpenter, George, 156 Carter House Museum, 315 Casavant, P. Victor, 91 Casey, Edward, 3, 18 Catapezet, 136, 378n40 Chace, Jonathan, 162 Chafee, John, 182 Chaplin, Joyce, 290 Chapman, Edward, 140, 142 Chapman, Samuel, 140 Charles II, 128, 136, 165, 321–322 Charlestown (Rhode Island), 176, 183, 188 Chaubunagungamaug, 109 Chechaubabeto, 198 Cheeshahteaumuck, Caleb, 110–111 Cherokees, 76, 263, 322–323 Cheyennes, 327 Chickasaws, 76 Chickataubut, 36, 45 Chickwallop, 210 Childs, Samuel, 222, 225 Choate, Rufus, 262 Chocktaws, 76, 263 Christianity, 38–39, 41, 236 Church, Benjamin, 78, 152 Ciscoe Brough, Zara (Princess White Flower), 94, 174–175 Cistercian Brothers, 184–185 Civil War (English), 61 Civil War (U.S.), 10, 79, 240, 327 Clarke, John G., 152, 164–165, 167–168 Clean Water Act (1972), 97 Cleveland (Ohio), 95 coastal zones: as liminal, 33 Coginaquint, 164 Cohoize, Betty, 147

index

Cohoize, Toby, 147 Colbert, Emeline Thomas, 174 Cold War, 265 Coleman, Sarah, 242–243, 250 collaboration: as loaded term, 9 colonialism, 4, 14, 77, 83, 96, 99, 108, 172, 252, 271, 328; imperial debris, 123–124; Indigenous primitiveness, colonial notions of, 249; landscape, appropriation of, 6; public protests against, 96–97 colonial period: chorographic rituals in, 223; colonial monuments, multiple gazes on, 264; colonial narratives, questioning of, 276; modernity, effect on, 1–2; rights, negotiating of, 3; terrain, struggle over, 3; violence of, 1, 199–200, 284 Colonial Revival, 195, 267, 270, 384n110, 392n37 colonial settlers, 229; “Indian Wars,” and colonial imagination, 4–5; Native prisoners-of-war, as slaves and servants, 4; psychological turmoil of, 220 colonization, xiii, 40, 181, 183 Colrain (Massachusetts), 232 Columbus, Christopher, 179, 293 Columbus Quincentenary, 181 Comer, Steve, 100 Commission for Unity and Racial Equality (CURE), 442n95 Committee on Marking Historical Sites, 168 “common pot,” 250 Commuck, Joseph, 151 Commuck, Thomas, 149–151 concentration camps, 101–102, 104 Concord (Massachusetts), 89. See also Musketaquid Confederacy (Southern), 327

451

Connecticut, 44, 121, 127–128, 131, 133, 136–140, 165, 178, 214, 216, 232, 309, 328, 387n152 Conway (New Hampshire), 13 Coombs, Linda, 106–107 corn, xi–xii, xvi–xviii, 17, 21, 34–35, 39, 45, 47–48, 51–52, 55, 71, 164–165, 170, 178, 198, 205, 207–208, 210, 212–214, 216, 228, 246, 267, 274, 296, 300, 314–315 Cotton, John, 303 Covering Up History (exhibition), 273 Creeks, 76, 263 Cresswell, Tim, 276 culture, 11, 44, 47, 96, 99, 172, 243; malleability of, 8; print culture, 2, 4, 63–64, 78, 150, 152, 156, 162, 171, 205, 218, 235–236, 240–241, 312. See also material culture Cumberland (Rhode Island), 185–187, 195–196 Curley, James Michael, 87 Curtis, Ephraim, 48 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 81–82 Custer, George Armstrong, 244–245 Cutter, Laura Eliot, 92 Dallin, Cyrus E., 87–88, 96, 106, 309 Daniels, Thomas, 299 Dawes Severalty Act (1887), 156 Dawnland, 24, 33, 35, 44, 207, 294, 305, 324 Day, Gordon, 270 Day of Mourning, 96–97 de Bry, Theodor, 107 decolonization, 29, 190–191, 323 decolonizing methodologies, 19–20 Dedham (Massachusetts), 211 Deerfield (Massachusetts), 220, 227–231, 236, 239–240, 244, 267, 272, 274, 284, 428n103; as cultural

452

Deerfield (cont) mecca, 254–255; as haunted, 264; historical pageants, 261–262; Old Home Week, 257; tercentenary of, 273. See also Historic Deerfield, Pocumtuck Deerfield Academy, 265 Deerfield assault (1704), 204–205, 221, 223, 261 Deer Island, 22, 31, 33, 35, 37, 43, 51, 57, 80, 92, 97, 100, 103–105, 109, 111, 114, 170, 280, 323, 330; antimobility of, 32; forced removal of Natives to, 29–31, 49–50, 52–53, 75–76, 89, 91, 101; as fractured landscape, 115; intentional isolation, as space of, 32; “open space” on, 30; resettlement of, 64; Zuni presence on, 81, 83 Deer Island Memorial/Sacred Run and Paddle, 106, 109–110, 116–117, 330 Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant, 29, 97–98, 111, 114–115 Deetz, James, 18 Delaware Tribe of Indians, 100 Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma, 100 Deliverance (ship), 304 Deloria, Philip, 69 Demos, John, 1, 273 Denison, Frederic, 160–161, 387n152, 387–388n153 Denison, George, 296 Denver (Colorado), 95 Derrida, Jacques, 13 Desire (ship), 295 detribalization, 155–163, 165, 172, 176, 189 Detroit (Michigan), 95 Dickinson, Nathaniel, 263 dispossession, 3, 174, 197, 239, 248, 255, 290, 311, 327, 329

index

Dorchester (Massachusetts), 66 Doughton, Thomas, 95 Dove, Dawn, 20–21, 79, 290 Dove, Paulla, 189 Drake, James, 325 Drowne, Shem, 69–70 Dupré, Judith, 113 Dutch, Robert, 219 Dyer, Elisha, 160 Earle, John Milton, 85, 252–253 Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, 323 East India Tea Company: doubled identities, 69 Eaton, Robert, 266–267 “ecological Indian”: stereotype of, 179 Edison, Thomas, 260 Eliot, John, 39–40, 50, 65, 75–76, 87, 89, 91, 127, 298, 302, 317, 321; Eliot Bible, 41, 92; “Eliot Oak,” 92–93, 112–113 Ellis, Pam, 110 encomienda system, 293 Endecott, John, 36 England, 91, 294, 304 English America, 167. See also AngloAmericans, Yankees Enjalran, Jean, 328 Enterprise (ship), 442n95 environmentalism, 176 Espada, Martín, 275–76 “Eulogy on King Philip” (Apess), 76– 77, 232 Europe, 104, 153, 290, 324 Everett, Edward, 233, 308 Evers, Stephen, 113 Falls Fight, 203, 227, 230, 246, 266. See also Great River falls Fall Town (Massachusetts), 227, 232. See also Bernardston (Massachusetts)

index

Farm and Trades School, 81 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 114 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 279–280 Fielding, Stephanie, 293 Figurehead: Memorial for Those Lost at Sea (sculpture), 324 filiopietism, 89, 93, 226 Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, 108 Florida, 371n75 “Flower of Essex,” 212–213 Flynt, Helen, 264–265 Flynt, Henry, 264–266 Flynt, Suzanne, 273 Flynt Center of Early New England Life, 273 food security, 406n48 Foote, Kenneth, 105 Fordman, Monique, 277–278 Fort Ninigret, 160–161, 164–165, 190 Foster, Graham, 314 Foster, John, 132, 298 Foxwoods casino, 178–179 Franklin County, 206, 250, 280 Freeman, Frederick, 77–79 Friends of Wissatinnewag, Inc., 277– 278, 281–282 Frobisher, Martin, 36, 294 “From Cave Life to City Life”: The Pageant of the Perfect City, 84–86 fur-trading economy, 210; beaver pelts, 208; overhunting, 209 gaming, 8, 177–183, 396n85. See also tribal casinos Gay Head (Martha’s Vineyard), 390– 391n31 genocide, 105, 198 geography of war: contestation over, 282

453

Gilbert Stuart House, 168 Gill (Massachusetts), 237–238, 246, 277 Gill-Montague Regional School Committee, 284 Gilmore, Fred, 256 Gimbee, Lucy, 65, 89 Gluskap, 33 Gookin, Daniel, 38–39, 44–45, 47, 50, 55, 57, 75–76, 108, 298, 302–303 Gorham (Maine), 140–141 Gorham Manufacturing Company, 169 Gorton, Samuel, 128 Gould, Rae, 94, 116 graffiti, 276; significance of, 277 Grafton (Massachusetts), 94 Graves, Thaddeus, 249–250 “Gray Champion, The” (Hawthorne), 93 Gray-Nessatako, Lloyd, 105 Great Depression, 87, 89, 264 Great Falls Discovery Center, 277 Great River falls, 208, 229, 236, 238– 239, 282, 323, 426n85; damming at, ecological downsides of, 231–232; dispersal of Natives, 217–218; massacre at, 215–218, 222, 227, 248, 252, 278–279; and memory, 255; memoryscape of, 277; as multitribal locale, 207; Native refuge, place of, 213; poetry at, 274–276; reconciliation ceremony, 278–79, 281; settler colonialism, expansion of, 227; Yankee memoryscapes, 251 Great River valley, xii, 206, 227–228, 231, 239, 241, 250, 255, 285–286; as contested borderlands, 219, 221; corn planting, 207; dinosaur prints, 236; historic sites, marking of, 249; Indigenous material culture, dispersal of, 230; Indigenous

454

Great River valley (cont) presence in, 232; as Indigenous space, 229; industrialization in, 256; middle-ground space of, 229; as Native space, 236; Native use rights, 210–211, 229; reservation system, avoidance of, 229; Yankee memoryscapes, 251 Great Sioux Reservation, 79 Great Sioux War, 246 Great Swamp, 21, 94, 124, 130, 135, 140, 145, 147, 152, 157–158, 160, 164, 171, 196–200, 217, 229, 249, 251, 277, 323, 387–388n153; amateur digs at, 183; as contested, 122; decolonizing gestures at, 190–191; as ecological site, 189–190; land use, contestations over, 182; massacre at (1675), 23, 121–122, 131, 133–134, 139, 143, 182, 187–189, 213, 215, 227, 300; as memorialized, 122–123, 173; as exotic venue for non-Natives, 176; as potent signifier, 174–175; as sacred Native site, 146; significance of, 190; as site in flux, 125; tribal homelands, as place of, 125 Great Swamp commemorations: Massacre Ceremony, 174; Memorial Pilgrimage, 175, 191 Great Swamp Fight Site, 164–167, 169–170; ownership of, 168 Great Swamp Wildlife Management Area, 190 Green, Samuel, 59 Green, Samuel Abbott, 81 Greene, Millen, 161–162 Greenfield (Massachusetts), 236, 251– 252, 255, 278, 428n107 Greenland, 35 Griswold Cotton Mill, 256

index

Hadley (Massachusetts), 213 Hahawton, William, 66 Haiti, 320 Halbwachs, Maurice, 17 Hale, Edward Everett, 308 Hale, Jeremiah, 316 Hall of History: Bermuda’s Story in Art (mural), 314 Halttunen, Karen, 10 Hamilton, Thomas, 320–321 Handler, Jerome, 323 Harbor Islands Partnership: Draft General Management Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement, 99, 101; Final Environmental Impact Statement, 99; General Management Plan, 99, 102–103; Indigenous objections to, 101–103 The Harp and Plow (Canning), 238 Harris, Doug, 279–281, 325 Harris, Tolleration, 143 Harris, William, 143 Hartford (Connecticut), 95, 175, 214 Hartman, Saidiya, 291 Harvard College, Indian College at, 41–42, 58, 110–111, 113–114, 142, 348n44; land acquisitions, involvement in, 59 Harvard University, 114, 143; Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 81, 95, 110 Hassanamesits, 88 Hassanamisco, 94, 109, 116; Hassanamisco marker, 89 Hassanamisco Indian Reservation, 88 Hassanamisco Nipmuc, 100 Haudenosaunees, 298, 310 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 93 Hazard, Caroline, 169–171, 251 Hazard, Rowland G., 166–168, 251 Hazard, Thomas George Jr., 392n37

index

Henchman, Daniel, 45, 50, 57, 64 Henchman, Thomas, 298 Heritage Foundation, 265 heritage tourism, 144 Heydon, John, 304, 436n52 Hinsdale, Mehuman, 222, 224–225 Historical, Natural History and Library Society of South Natick, 93 Historic Deerfield, 206, 234, 251, 264– 265, 270, 272–274. See also Deerfield (Massachusetts) history: call for (re-) localization of historical scholarship, 10; and memory, 12–13; notion of trace and historical trauma, 16; remembrance of, as taking place, 2 A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts (Sheldon), 240, 274 History of Massachusetts (Hutchinson), 307 Hitchcock, Edward, 236–237, 238; toponymic colonialism of, 237 Hitchcock, Edward Jr., 244, 270–271 Hitchcock, Orra White, 237, 238 Holbrook, Hollis, 89, 91, 113 Holst, Nancy Allen, 395n77 Holyoke (Massachusetts), 284 homelands, xiv, 1, 6, 11, 30, 32–34, 36, 40–45, 47, 64, 69, 85, 87, 91, 95–96, 104, 108, 111, 125–126, 130, 135, 148– 149, 155–157, 172, 183–184, 186–187, 205–206, 213, 221, 229, 239, 244, 252, 256, 262, 270, 273–274, 280– 281, 289, 295–297, 315, 326–329; erasing of, 197; and mobility, 37; and Swamp Yankees, 181 “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings” (Howe), 274–275 Hopewell (ship), 436n52 Hopkins, John Christian, 320 Hornblower, Henry II, 106

455

Horr, George, 251 Houghton, Henry, 80 Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, 393n55 Housatonics, 231 Howe, Susan, 274–276 Hubbard, William, 4, 60, 63–64, 83, 132–133, 203, 219–220, 251, 298– 299, 406n52 Hudson River Valley, 208 Hull, John, 53, 142 Hunt, Thomas, 294 Hunting, Samuel, 51, 300 Hutchinson, Thomas, 307 Iacoomes, Joel, 110 Iceland, 35 immigration, 153; and assimilation, 154 indentured servants, 6, 231, 304–305 Indian Appropriations Act (1871), 80 Indian Council (Narragansett), 157 Indian Enfranchisement Act, 88 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) (1988), 178, 182 Indian Great Awakening, 149 Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy (Mitchell), 309–310 Indian Island (Penobscot), 109, 370n70 Indian Melodies (Commuck), 149–150 “Indian relics.” See Indigenous objects, material culture Indian Removal Act (1830), 233 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) (1934), 188–89, 266 Indian schools, 263 Indian Training School (Arizona), 92 Indian tribes: termination, policy toward, 266 “Indian Wars,” 10, 60, 68, 94, 153, 197, 205, 223, 244, 265, 289–290

456

indigeneity, 8, 11, 100, 237, 273, 309, 310; and bondage, 291; and modernity, 85 Indigenous Atlantic, 33–34 Indigenous landscapes, 18, 197, 281; protection of, 279–280 Indigenous objects, 246, 387n152; appropriation of, 74–75; collecting of, 247, 271–272; as inert curios, 230; of King Philip’s War, 242–244, 253; “Petrified Indian Boy” as New England Cardiff Giant, 247; vernacular poetry, as vehicles for, 247 Indigenous peoples, 22, 29, 35, 101, 106, 115, 124–126, 153, 181, 286, 301, 317, 320, 329; captives, 302; colonization of, xiv; continuance and reinvention, 151; dispersal of, 10, 23, 42, 289–290; enslavement of, 290– 291, 303, 323; gatherings, as reorientation, 109; home, conception of, 71; homelands, erasing of, 197; “Indian problem,” 78; intermarriage of, 7–8; language loss, 8; lifeways of, 208; material culture, dispersal of, 230; and memory, 12; memoryscapes of, 312; mobility of, 48; and place, 11; and placemaking, xvi; and research, 19–20; resistance movement, 1; settler memoryscapes, challenging of, 96; territorial dispossession of, 1–2; “time out of mind,” 15; and toponyms, 277; as vanquished, belief in, xv, xvii, 6, 8, 12, 21, 65–66, 78, 85, 99, 154–155, 167, 171, 191, 195, 236, 247–248, 252, 308, 395n77; viability of, mainstream views, 266. See also individual tribes, Natives indios, 293, 294 Inuits, 36, 294

index

Ireland, 36 Irish Americans, 105; tribal communities, collaboration with, 100 Isham, Norman Morrison, 392n37 Ismail, Moulay, 322 Jackson, Andrew, 76, 79–80 Jacobs, Sarah Sprague, 75–76, 91–92 Jacoby, Karl, 23 Jamaica, 306, 317, 318–319 James, Frank (Wamsutta), xii, 96 James, J. C., 168 James-Perry, Elizabeth, 71 Jamestown Colony, 36, 304 Japanese American relocation centers, 104 Jarvis, Michael J., 436n52, 437n56 Jenks, John Whipple Potter, 387n152 Jennings, Stephen, 219 Jesuits, 223, 328 Jethro’s Tree, 90 John Carter Brown Library, 169 John Eliot Speaks to the Natick Indians (mural), 89, 91 John Russell Cutlery Company, 256 Johnson, Walter, 291 Joseph Allen Skinner Museum, xiv Kahnawake, 228, 273 Kattenanit, Job, 51–52 Keith, James, 316, 442–43n102 Kellogg, Joseph, 228 Kelman, Ari, 327 King, Martin Luther Jr., 199 King Philip’s Crossing (plaza), 6–7 King Philip’s War, xi–xii, xvi, 3–4, 11, 13, 20, 23–25, 29–30, 41, 53, 57–58, 60, 62, 64–66, 68–70, 74, 77–81, 83, 89, 93, 97, 99, 101, 114, 122, 129, 135, 139–140, 142–143, 149, 151–154,

index

158, 164–165, 169, 176, 184, 187, 189, 191–192, 195–199, 203, 212, 216, 220–225, 228, 240–241, 257, 263, 278, 280, 282, 284, 289, 293, 295, 305, 308–309, 316–317, 325– 328, 436n52; Anglo-American memories of, 147, 227; beaver wars, 205; Bloody Brook assault, 204; cult of, 5; Deerfield raid, 204–205; effect of, 1, 6; Falls assault, 204; graphic novel about, 266–267; and language’s relation to violence and race, 14; and place, 10; relics from, 242–244, 253; remembrance of, 14–15; territorial authority, questions of, 10; as war of self-defense, 248; as watershed, 1, 177 King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England (Drake), 325 Kingsley, Elbridge, 257 King William’s War, 68, 257 Knight, Sarah Kemble, 144, 180 Koontz, Claudia, 16 Ktsi Amiskw, 208 Kwinitekw River/Valley, xii, 44–45, 52, 109, 133, 204, 209, 220, 231, 234, 235, 243, 266, 299 Lake, Thomas, 54–55, 57, 63 Lakota, 246 landscape: ceremonial landscapes, 279–280; as historical artifacts, 17; as immutable, 16; material trace, 17; and memory, 15 language: war, remembrance of, 14 Lathrop, Thomas, 221 Lathrop, William, 212–213, 222, 233–234, 257, 260–261 Lawrence, George, 254 Lay, Abigail, 139 Lefroy, John Henry, 307

457

Lepore, Jill, 2, 14–15, 135, 444n112 Leverett, John, 48 Leyden (Massachusetts), 265–266 Linde, Simon, 66 Little Ice Age, 208 London Company, 304 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 92 longue durée, xvi, 23, 34, 125, 172, 186–187, 280 Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell), 93 Los Angeles (California), 95 Lowell, Robert, 93–94 Luedtke, Barbara, 33 MacDonald, Douglas, 103 Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather), 62–63, 302 Magunkaquog, xvi, 40, 51–52, 59, 64, 73 Mahicans, 231 Maine, xi, 4, 30, 109–110, 176, 208, 227, 297, 301 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act (1980), 393n55 Málaga (Spain), 294 Maligan, William, 305 Manifest Destiny, 244, 246 Mansfield, Howard, xvii, 282 Mansion People. See River Gods Marchant, W., 168 Margaret (ship), 320 Marsh, James Rumney, 51–52. See also Quanopohit, James Marshall, Samuel, 140 Marshall, Thomas, 140 Martha’s Vineyard, 33, 315. See also Noepe Martineau, Harriet, 233–234 Marx, Karl, 284 Masconomet, 38, 46 Mashantucket Pequots, 178, 183, 198, 312, 328–329

458

Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, 100; museum of, 193 Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, 100, 179, 279, 289 Mason, F. Van Wyck, 309 Massachusetts (colony/ commonwealth), 31, 35, 47, 64, 74– 76, 78, 80, 88–89, 91, 97, 112–113, 121, 139–140, 165, 185, 206, 211, 216–217, 226, 231, 233, 270, 278, 281, 284, 309, 436n52; colonial veterans, land grants of, 227; immigration, concern over, 254–255; Native population in, 252–253; state flag, symbolism of, 445n3; tourism in, 264 Massachusetts (tribe), xvi, 8, 31–32, 37, 41–42, 44–46, 65, 68, 125–26, 264, 273, 297, 303; place-meanings, 112–13 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 30–31, 37–38, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 53, 70, 101; General Court, 49, 54, 56–57, 64; and Indigenous peoples, 89; and tercentenary, 87; Tercentenary Commission, 88–90 Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs, 104, 271 Massachusetts Highway Department, 277 Massachusetts Historical Collections (Barber), 234–235 Massachusetts Historical Society, xvii, 72–73, 114, 239, 240; “Bowl of Sachem Philip,” 70–71; Native heritage items, appropriation of, 74–75 Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), 29, 97–98, 103–104, 114 Massasoit, 35, 47, 96, 387–88n153

index

Massasoit (statue), xiii, 309 material culture, xx, xxi–xxii, xxv, 2, 52, 87, 143, 173, 212; dispersal of, 230; material culture studies, 3; material objects, collecting of, 270–271; material trace, and language, 17. See also culture materiality, xxi, 9, 15–16, 18, 269; and memory, 108 Mather, Cotton, 60–63, 302 Mather, Increase, 4, 41–42, 59–61, 219–20, 303 Maushop (giant), 33, 37, 41, 84, 115 Maverick, Samuel, 38 Maxwell, Sadie, 252 Mayer, Henry, 51 Mayflower (ship), 35 Mayflower II (replica), 96 McBride, Kevin, 193, 400n130 McCann, Gary, 104 Melnik, George, 269 Melville, Herman, 329 memorialization, xvii, 62, 64, 94, 105– 106, 135, 140, 186, 203, 236–237, 266, 268, 284, 308, 316; as collective, 326; as contentious, 327; geography of war, contestation over, 282 Memorial Pilgrimage Ceremony, 191 memory, xviii, 2–3, 12, 117, 146, 242, 255, 324; as antihistory, 12; collective memory, 16–17; of devastation, and regeneration, 22; and heritage, 30; and history, 12–13; knowledge, as form of, 4; and landscape, 15; and materiality, 108; materials of, 13; memory boom, 12; memory houses, xvii; memory studies, 18; and place, xv, 226; and placemaking, 270; public memory, 151; and remembrance, 250; and silence,

index

379n52; silencing of, 275; and tradition, 9; transmission of, 227; weedlike quality of, 23 memoryscapes, xv, 16, 19, 37–38, 75, 89, 97, 116, 171, 198–99, 225, 251, 257, 268, 270, 277, 312–13, 326, 328; built environment, 197; decolonizing of, 323; and monuments, 326; of Native bondage, 316–17; and poetry, 206; public memoryscapes, 114, 314; settler colonialism, xvi, 96; and space, 3; and survivance, 121–22; “time out of mind,” 3 Menemesit, 52, 116, 133, 213 Menowniett, 217 Metacomet Country Club, 6 Metacom / Metacomet, xiv, 4, 96. See also Philip, King Metropolitan District Commission, 97 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 265 Miantonomo, 45, 126–128, 134, 214, 301, 387–388n153 Middle Passage, 291, 314, 323 Ming, Bill “Mussey,” 324 Minors, Clement, 139 Minors, Jacob, 307 Mishawum, 38 mishoonash, 29, 32, 34, 38, 49, 106– 110, 115–117, 330, 370n70 mita system, 293 Mitchell, Charlotte, 309 Mitchell, Melinda, 309 Mitchell, Zerviah Gould, 309–310 Moby-Dick (Melville), 329 modernity, 84; and indigeneity, 85 Modoc, 78 Mohawks, 69, 204–205, 211, 221, 228, 301 Mohawk Trail, 284 Mohegan Indian Tribe, 100

459

Mohegans, 6, 8, 48, 121, 128, 131, 133–134, 178, 183, 192, 219, 296, 328–329, 378n40; surrenderers, group of, 296 Mohegan Sun casino, 178 Mohicans, 228 Momontague, Robert, 66 Monhantic Fort, 328 Montague (Massachusetts), 277, 279; reconciliation ceremony at, 278, 281 Moody, Dwight Lyman, 263 Moon Island, 97 Moore, Frank, 85 Moors, John F., 248 Morton, Thomas, 36–37, 207 Mosely, Samuel, 219–220, 298 Mount Hermon School for Boys, 263, 266 Mount Holyoke College, xiv, 271 Mount Hope, xi, xiii, xv–xvi, 129, 133– 134, 152, 212, 307–308, 329 Mrozowski, Stephen, 108 Muhheconneuk Intertribal Committee on Deer Island (MICDI), 97, 100– 101, 103–105 multiculturalism, 100–101 Munro, Wilfred, 153–154, 167–168, 197 Museum of Fine Arts, 87–88 Museum of Science, 111 museums, 273; public history practices, 272; and tribal peoples, 172–73 Musil, Robert, 113 Musketaquid, 89–90. See also Concord (Massachusetts) Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Lepore), 2, 14–15, 135 Nantucket (Massachusetts), 33, 315 Narragansett Ballads (Hazard), 169 Narragansett Church: and arson, 182

460

Narragansett Dawn, The (magazine), 121, 171–172 Narragansett Historical Register, 171 Narragansett Indian Tribe, 100, 277; reconciliation ceremony, 278–279, 281 Narragansetts, 8–9, 35, 44–46, 77, 94, 121–122, 124, 134, 137–138, 144, 146– 147, 150–151, 164, 168–170, 192, 196, 205, 212–213, 229, 244, 249, 279, 290, 297–298, 301, 316, 379n56, 387–388n153; archaeological work, tribal consultations about, 183–184; Christianity, incorporating elements of into lifeways, 149; detribalizing of, 155–163, 172, 176, 189; “disappearance” of, 167, 191; dispossession of, 174; Europeans, interactions with, 125–127; and gaming, 396n85; intertribal and intercolonial warfare, embroiled in, 127–130; land, resecuring of, 177; land use, issues over, 188–189; lawsuit of, 176; memoryscapes of, 171, 197–199; as moribund people, 155; nation of, as extinct, 395n77; past-keeping practices, dismissal of, 161–162; place-marking, by antiquarians, 160; place-ties among, 181; political ebb of, 171; political legitimacy, debates about, 176–177; political mobilization of, 175; prominence of, 374–375n11; remembrances of, 135–136; sovereignty, issues over, 148, 187– 189; tobacco products, selling of, 187–188; traumatic loss, sites of, 172; tribal casino, debate over, 177–183 Narragansett Townships, 140–141, 227, 232 Narragansett Tribe of Indians, 177

index

Narragansett watershed: “Save the Bay” activists, 21 Narrative (Hubbard), 132–133 Natick (Massachusetts), 29, 39–40, 46, 48–52, 64–65, 76, 89, 91–93, 95, 109, 112–113, 170, 211 Natick Historical Commission, 113 Natick Nipmucs, 100 National Day of Mourning, xii–xiii, 96 National Museum of Bermuda, 314 National Museum of the American Indian, 107 National Park Service, 30, 98–99, 101– 102, 279, 344n2; American Battlefield Protection Program (ABPP), 192–193, 195 National Register of Historic Places, 279, 389n14 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (1990), 183, 271 Natives, 9, 40–41, 44, 45, 227; agency of, 294; Christianization of, xvi, 38– 39, 84, 263, 306; colonial past, 266; colonial trading with, 228; communities as non-places, 322; dispersal of, 217–218; dispossession of, 6; English, alliances with, 228; English captives, taking of, 219; enslavement of, 293, 295, 296, 297, 304, 314, 320, 322–323; English space, claim to, 226; environmentalists, collaboration with, 100; homelands of, 43, 184, 186–187, 273; Irish Americans, collaboration with, 100; landmarking of, 16; memorial placemaking of, 236; memoryscapes of, xv, 225; memory-transmission, 218; multiple temporalities of, 84; Native space, 265; Native space, and English space, claim to, 226;

index

pantribal uprisings, 46–47; and place, 11, 272; place-connections, as “time out of mind,” 11; and survivance, xvii; and swamps, 122, 123; trading relationships with, 208, 210–211; urban centers, relocation to, 95; urbanization among, 198; wilderness concept as nonsensical, 34. See also Indigenous peoples Naumkeag, 36. See also Salem (Massachusetts) Navajo, 78 Nevis (Leeward Islands), 317 New Bedford (Massachusetts), 95 New England, xi, xv, 6, 17–18, 39–40, 44, 56–57, 60, 62–63, 77–78, 83–84, 94–96, 100, 105, 108, 127, 133, 136, 142, 147–148, 153, 155, 172, 175, 178, 195, 205–206, 211, 215, 219, 222, 225, 228–229, 234–235, 238, 251, 254–255, 277–278, 282, 289, 295, 298–299, 306–308, 317–318, 322– 323, 327, 329, 371n75, 384n110; archiving, and territorial authority, 13; Bermuda, link with, 312; English military dominance in, 4; history, teaching of in, 20–21; iconophobia in, 356n138; mythologies of, 262; Native captives, 297, 303; Native captives as domestic labor, 296; Native peoples in, 364n6; “original sin” of, 93; praying towns in, 30; psychological turmoil in, 220; settler colonialism, 24; St. David’s, linking to, 313 New France, 52, 205, 211, 221, 228, 328. See also Québec New Hampshire, 4, 227, 270, 297, 299, 320 New Hampshire Historical Society Museum, 108

461

New Haven (Connecticut), 128, 229– 230 New London (Connecticut), 95 Newport (Rhode Island), 126, 137, 217 New York, 24, 95, 175, 211, 291, 306 New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, 168 Niantics, 8, 122, 134, 136–137, 212 Nine Men’s Misery, 184–187; memorialization of, 397n92. See also “Pierce’s Fight” Ninigret, 134 Ninigret II, 148 Nipmucks, 102, 170, 175, 281, 298 Nipmucs, xvi, 8, 31–32, 41–42, 44, 47– 48, 76–77, 85, 89, 94–95, 100, 102, 105, 107–108, 116, 129, 136, 192, 303; federal recognition, struggle with, 109 Nipsachuck, 122–123, 134, 189, 196, 280–281, 325; as borderlands space, 192; as nonplace, 192–193, 195; process of, 194–195 Noepe, 33, 41. See also Martha’s Vineyard Noka, Bella, 187 Noka, Joshua, 162–163 Noka, Randy, 182 Nolumbeka Project, 281 Nonintercourse Act (1790), 176 North Africa, 11, 322 North America, 35, 41, 178, 244, 280, 290, 305; Indigenous peoples, 289; and slavery, 289 Northampton (Massachusetts), 213, 252 Northeast, 8, 14, 17–18, 21, 229, 243– 244, 250, 286, 308, 322, 327–329; African commemorations in, 315; ceremonial landscapes, protection of, 279–280; historical innocence, selfimage of, 3–4; historical violence,

462

Great River valley (cont) shaping of, 6; Indigenous continuance across, xii; as memorial terrain, 15–16; memory and history in, 12; memoryspaces of, 19; as Native space, 116; place in, 23–24; placemaking practices, 3; refugee crisis, 301; remembrance, as contested in, 2, 11; settler colonialism, as region of, 6–7, 9 Northern Cheyenne, 246 Northfield (Massachusetts), 206, 219, 241, 243, 262, 284; Indigenous students in, 263; tercentenary of, 270. See also Squakheag Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, 263 Northfield Village Improvement Society, 262 Noyes, James, 296 Nut Island, 97 Nuweetooun School, 312 Oakes, Edward, 55 Oakes, Urian, 58 Obbatinewat, 36 Oglala Lakota, 105 Oklahoma, 76, 239 Old Bloody Brook Tavern, 264 Old Bridgewater Historical Society, 316, 442–443n102 Old Deerfield. See Historic Deerfield Ollivierre, Lawrence, 177 Olmsted, Frederick Law Jr., 170 Oneida (New York), 149 Oneida lands, 231 Ononko’s View (film), 260, 420n19; Colonial Revival, as artifact of, 270; product tie-ins, 261 Outerbridge, Anna Maria, 308 Owaneco, 48, 214, 378n40

index

Panic of 1857, 151 pan-Indian movement, 94, 172 pan-Indigenous solidarity, 105 Parsons, George, 247 Passaconaway, 46, 297–298 Passamaquoddies, 110, 176 Patience (ship), 304 Patuxet, xiii, 96, 126. See also Plymouth (Massachusetts) Peltier, Leonard, 203, 276–277, 282 Pennacooks, 8, 42, 44, 46, 224, 299 Penobscots, 8, 100, 102, 105, 109–110, 116, 176 Pequots, 6, 8, 44, 77–78, 121, 131, 133– 134, 137, 192, 219, 232, 295, 378n40; surrenderers, group of, 296 Pequot War, 45–46, 77, 127, 139, 215, 289, 295, 307 Perry, Marsden J., 389n14 Peskeomskut, 204, 227–228, 231, 285, 407n66 Pessicus, 128, 136, 147, 214, 301 Peters, Ramona, 289, 329 Petra Academy, 312 Pettaquamscutt Purchase, 127, 142 Phelps, John, 206 Philip, King (Metacom or Metacomet), xi, xiii–xv, 47–48, 52, 60, 71, 80, 87, 93–94, 96, 129, 140, 152, 166, 171, 212, 233, 241–242, 248, 267, 270, 338n12, 437n55; death of, 133–134, 219; dismemberment of, 305–306; “Eulogy on King Philip,” 76–77, 232; mythology surrounding, 4–5; oral vindication of, 76–77; relatives, enslavement of, 291, 320; relatives of, 307–309, 311, 313, 316, 442n98; Pierce, William, 295, 431n15 “Pierce’s Fight,” 169, 184. See also Nine Men’s Mystery Pilgrims, xii, 35, 96, 166, 387–388n153

index

Pioneer Valley, 264; as “Frontier of Freedom,” 265; as regional moniker, 284 place, 18, 21, 23–24; attachment to, 3; belonging to, 11; as dynamic, 2; historical violence, memory of, 2; memories of place, 124; and memory, xv, 226; multiple claimants to, 9; place-respect, 22; and remembrances of, 10, 122–123; as sites of memory, 2; space, as distinct from, 10, 12 placemaking, xvii, 3, 85, 88, 94, 99, 116, 286, 291, 330; invisible qualities, 18; and memory, 270; reopening history, 325 place-marking, 160, 165, 168; Eurocolonial hegemony of, 250 Plimoth Plantation, 106–107, 117 Plymouth (Massachusetts), xii, xiii, xiv–xv, 35–37, 45, 47, 87, 96–97, 106, 121, 126, 128, 131, 139, 165, 303. See also Patuxet Plymouth Colony, 317, 329 Plymouth Rock, xiii Pocassets, 297 Pocumtuck, 208, 211–212, 214, 220, 223. See also Deerfield (Massachusetts) Pocumtuck, A Native Homeland (walking tour), 272 Pocumtucks, 8, 211–212, 252, 281; Pocumtuck massacre, 203–204 Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA), 205–206, 240, 250, 253, 265, 272, 282, 284; Field Days, 239; Field Meetings, 247–249, 262; historic sites, marking of, 249; “Indian relics” at, 242–243; Indian Room, 242, 246; Memorial Hall, 239, 242–244, 251, 254–255, 271

463

Pokanokets, 47, 129, 187, 212, 307 Pomham, 46 Porter, Colin, 144 Portsmouth (New Hampshire), 126, 137, 315 Potter, Charles, 396n87 Power, Susan, 110–111 Powhatans, 36 Pownall, Thomas, 225 Pratt, Richard Henry, 263 praying towns, xvi, 30, 39–40, 44, 47– 49, 65, 92, 149, 212 Prentice, Thomas, 45, 50, 55–57, 75 Printer, James, 52, 83, 110 Printer, Moses, 65 Project Mishoon, 107–108 Proper, David, 270 Prosper, Lisa, 18 Providence (Rhode Island), 95, 126, 137, 171, 182, 188, 198, 295, 316 Providence Island, 295, 431n15 Purchase, Reuben, 196 Puritan missionaries, xvi, 39–40, 47–48 Puritans, 4, 13, 37, 58, 77–78, 83, 92, 94, 129, 153, 165–166, 176, 215–216, 218, 249, 307, 445n3; ebenezer, concept of, 61, 224; filiopietism of, 93; as missionaries, xvi, 39–40, 47– 48; missionizing, and memoryscapes, 91; monumentalizing, lack of, 222, 250, 356n138; “original sin” of, 93; remembrance, acts of, 60–62 Pynchon, John, 210–213, 216, 284–285 Pynchon, William, 208–209, 213, 285 Quaiapen, 122, 133, 192–193 Quanapin, 129 Quanopohit, James, 51, 133, 213, 303. See also Marsh, James Rumney

464

quartz, xi, xvi, 186, 329; significance of, xv, 40 Québec, 11. See also New France Queen Anne’s War, 68, 257 Quinnipiacs, 8, 229, 274 Quinsigamond, 44–45, 108 race, 78, 86–87, 92, 155, 162, 166–167; dying of, 92, 155, 248, 307; extinction of, 77, 162, 237; as mistreated, 77; and slavery, 296, 305; and violence, 14 Reagan, Ronald, 178 Reconstruction (U.S.), 240 Red Atlantic, 290, 322 The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion (Williams), 205, 221, 223 Redemption Rock, 5 Red Wing, Princess, 172–175, 391n36 Reede, Thomas, 213 remembrance, 2–3, 9, 135, 136, 218, 328, 340n26; chain of memory, 224; landscapes, transformation of, 15; materiality of, 15; and memory, 250; and place, 10, 11, 122–123; public remembrance, 184; trace, notion of, 16–17; of war, 14–15 reorientation, 109 repatriation, 271–272 revisionism, 270, 273; decolonizing critiques, 274 Rhode Island, xi, xv, 121–122, 127, 129, 137–139, 143–144, 146, 148, 152, 158, 160–162, 164–166, 172, 175, 177, 182–184, 188–189, 191–192, 195, 199, 280, 387n152; colonial placemarking in, 168; Colonial Revival period, 151; detribalization in, 156; immigration, response to, 153–154; memoryscape, codifying of, 151; as Narragansett country, 187; tribal

index

casinos, concern over, 178–179; Yankee nativism in, 154 Rhode Island Department of Agriculture, 175 Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), 190 Rhode Island Historical Society, 151, 167–170, 185, 191, 197, 251 Rhode Island Indian Claims Settlement Act (1978), 176–177 RI-1000, 183 Richard, Eleazer, 71 ritual, 116; v. performance, 115 River Gods: King Philip’s War, psychological effect on, 227; as tastemakers, 226 “The River Will Not Testify” (Espada), 275 Roach, Joseph, 32 Roanoke, 36, 294 Robinson, Julius, 256 Robinson, Paul, 122, 186, 374–375n11 Robinson, Solomon, 436n52 Roe Cloud, Henry, 263–264, 266 Roger Williams Spring, 169 Romantics, 220 Rowlandson, Mary, 4, 52, 59, 109, 221 Rubertone, Patricia, 190, 325, 399n124 Russell, John, 214, 216 Ryden, Kent, 17 Sagamore George, 317 St. David’s (Bermuda), 289, 312, 315, 322–324; Dark Bottom, 313; displacement in, 311; identity transformation in, 310; memoryscape in, 313; New England, linking of, 313; Red Hole, 313 St. David’s Island, Bermuda: Its People, History and Culture (Tucker), 312

index

St. David’s Island Historical Society, 315 St. David’s Island Indian Reconnection Committee, 312 Salem (Massachusetts), 36. See also Naumkeag Sand Creek, 327 Sangeen Band of Indians of Ojibway, 153, 385n116 Sapiel, John Sam, 100, 103 Sassamon, John, 47 Savage, James, 74 Sayet, Rachel, 392n39 Schagticokes, 8, 228 Scott, Sir Walter, 262 Seaconke Wampanoags, 187 Sea-Flower (ship), 303 Seattle (Washington), 95 Seattle, Chief, 269–270 Sea Venture (ship), 304 Section of Fine Arts, 89 Sekatau, Ella, 386–387n142 Sekater, Daniel, 157–158, 196 Seminoles, 76 Settlement Act (1978), 182 settler colonialism, xvi, 6–7, 22, 24, 32, 42, 92, 94, 115, 144, 175, 233, 252; and archiving, 13–14; cartography of, 168; destructive collecting of, 168; expansion of, 227; and monuments, 327; persistence of, 1–2; settler melancholia, 239 Sewall, Hannah, 225 Sewall, Samuel, 53, 59, 148, 224, 229, 235–236, 240, 301; boundary marking, 226; diary of, 222–223, 225; Sewall scholarships, 142–143 Shapleigh, Nicholas, 299 Shawmut, 31, 42, 43, 45, 80. See also Boston (Massachusetts) Shays, Daniel, 231

465

Sheldon, George, 239, 240–242, 248, 250–251, 253, 255, 261, 270–271, 274 Shoah, 10 Shrimpton, Samuel, 49–50, 54 Sillery (Québec), 328 Silliman, Stephen, 323 Simon, Jean Foggo, 312 Sioux, 78, 244, 246 Sivan, Emmanuel, 17 Skrælings, 35 Slade, Daniel Denison, 249 slavery, 6, 231, 289–290, 293–297, 300, 303–304, 316–317, 323, 407n66, 436n52, 437n56, 441n92; public history of, 314–315; slave insurrections, 305–306 Slavery Abolition Act (1833), 306 Smith, Albert, 246 Smith, James, 242 Smith, Richard Jr., 138, 380n64 Smith, Thomas, 303 Smith College, 271 Smithsonian Institution, 81 Snake, Lawrence, 100 Society of Colonial Wars, 165 Somers, George, 304 Somers Isles, 290 Sons of Liberty, 69 South America, 305 South County, 154–155, 170, 172–176, 178, 180, 183, 188–189, 198; tribal casinos, concern over, 181 South Deerfield (Massachusetts), 233– 234, 261, 264; peace memorial, 268–269 sovereignty, 8, 76, 100, 104; within ancestral homelands, 155; asserting of, 104, 137, 197; disputes over, 189; Indigenous sovereignty, 9, 47, 128, 148, 177–178, 184, 187–188, 200, 227

466

Sovereignty and Goodness of God, The (Rowlandson), 4 Sovereignty Day (Narragansett), 197 space, xvii, 116; as active force, 10; as enduring, 17; history, shaping of, 10; and memoryscapes, 3; place, as distinct from, 10, 12; and time, xvi, 3 Spanish colonization, 293 Speen, Anthony, 40 Speen, John, 40 Spotted Elk, Molly, 85 Sprague, Abigail, 195–196 Springfield (Massachusetts), 95, 213, 252, 284 Squant, 33 Squakheag, 212–214, 216, 262, 270, 284. See also Northfield (Massachusetts) Standing Bear, 79–80 State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs), 183 Stebbens, John, 218 Steliga, Stanley, 269 Stevens, Catherine, 85 Stevens, John Paul, 189 Stiles, Ezra, 121, 145–148, 168, 183, 229, 234, 270, 274; collecting of, 230 Stockbridge (Massachusetts), 230–231, 252 Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians, 100 Stockwell, Abigail, 268 Stockwell, Quentin, 219, 221, 268 Stoler, Ann Laura, 123 Stoughton, Ralph, 252 Stoughton, Timothy, 246, 250–252 Stoughton, William, 56 Sudbury (Massachusetts), 63–64, 73, 114, 226 Sullivan, Maureen, 113 Sunggumachoe, 214

index

survivance, xvii, 2, 121–122, 223, 323, 329 “Swamp Fight Dead,” 169 Swamp Yankees, 122, 180–181. See also Anglo-Americans, Yankees Sweeney, Kevin, 426n85 Tackuppawillin, 40 Taínos, 293, 322–323 Takawampbait, Daniel, 92, 317 Talcott, John, 133, 217 Tangier (Morocco), 320–321, 322, 444n112 Tantaquidgeon Museum, 173, 392n39 Tefft, Joshua, 378n40 temporality, 84 Thayer, Richard, 66 Thomas, Benjamin, 157 Thomas, Matthew, 181, 187–188, 199 Thompson’s Island, 81 Thrush, Coll, 85, 144 Tilton Public Library, 270 time, 147, 230; and deep-time, 104, 207–208, 276; and history, 116; as liminal, 284–285; and memoryscapes, 3; and space, xvi, 3, 144, 218, 289; “time out of mind,” 3, 11, 15, 124 Tisquantum (aka Squanto), 294 tobacco, 187–188, 304–305 Tohono O’odham, 92 Tomaquag Indian Museum, 172–173, 198 topophilia, 3 traces, 40, 58, 110, 144, 193, 236, 274– 275, 282, 284, 300, 304, 322, 324– 325, 328; archival, 43, 50, 313; environmental, 146; Indigenous, 81, 116, 323; material, 17, 102, 116, 143, 163, 198–199, 218, 237 Transit of Empire, The (Byrd), 23

index

Treat, Robert, 219 treaties, 4, 215, 262, 297, 299–300 tribal casinos, 177–183. See also gaming Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs), 183–184, 187 Tri-State Marker, 270 Trott, Chesley, 442n95 Tucker, St. Clair “Brinky,” 312, 313 Tucson (Arizona), 95; pumping station, installation of, 92 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 19–20 Turkel, William, 17 Turn and Jump (Mansfield), 282 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 255 Turner, Henry E., 239 Turner, John, 215 Turner, Mary, 216 Turner, William, 203, 206, 214, 217, 222, 228, 231, 237, 239, 248–249, 265–266, 276, 428n107; camizado attack, 215–216; monument to, 250–251, 254–255 Turners Falls (Massachusetts), 238, 256, 277, 279–281 Turners Falls Company, 256 Turners Falls High School: mascot of, 284 Turners Falls Municipal Airport, 279–281 Turners Fall Sacred Ceremonial Hill Site, 279 Uncas, 48, 128, 212, 214 United American Indians of New England (UAINE), 96–97 United Colonies of New England, 46, 128, 139, 166 United Kingdom, 306, 311 United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc. (USET), 426n85

467

United States, xi, 2, 22, 24, 32, 70, 74– 75, 77–78, 89, 103–104, 114, 122, 147, 156, 170, 176, 184, 188–189, 231, 254, 306–308, 311, 327, 329, 384n110; alphabetic literacy, 14; history, professionalization of in, 241–242; immigration, reshaping of, 153–154; Indian schools in, 263; Natives, urbanization by, 95; termination, policy of, 266 University of Connecticut Field School, 400n130 University of Massachusetts Amherst, 271–272 The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (Demos), 273 “Urban Indians,” 95; public commemorations by, 96 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 278 U.S. Postal Service, 113 Venezuela, 304 Vermont, 270 Verrazzano, Giovanni di, 125 Vietnam War, 268 Village Improvement Society, 269 Vinland, 35 violence, 1, 10, 15, 17, 23, 29, 37, 58, 60, 63–64, 77, 96–97, 103–105, 107–108, 124, 218, 129, 135, 139, 140, 142, 144, 152, 153, 172, 182, 187, 188, 196, 204–206, 218–221, 224, 227, 236, 244, 249, 257, 261, 266–267, 270–271, 275, 278, 282, 295, 299, 314, 323, 325; and colonialism, 83, 175, 199–200, 217, 289; and dispossession, 174; historical violence, xii–xiii, xvii, 2, 6, 91, 186, 247; intertribal violence, 328; material “signature” of, 193; memorialization of, 186;

468

violence (cont) narrativization of, 14; Native-settler violence, 75, 146, 268; as racialized, 327; remembrance of, 145, 233; and sites, 158; sites, marking of, 143; and slavery, 290 Virginia, 36, 291, 306 visualization, 25 Vizenor, Gerald, xvii Waban, 89, 91 Waban, Thomas, 59, 65, 317 Wabanakis, xi, 95, 109–110, 140, 205, 221, 256, 294, 297–298, 301 Wabanaki Tribes of Maine, 100 Wachusett, 5, 46, 213 Wadsworth, Benjamin, 63, 72–73, 114, 226 Wadsworth, Samuel, 63–64 Waite, Benjamin, 219, 250 Waldron, Richard, 223–224, 297, 299– 300, 316–317 Walker, Adrian, 103 Walker, H. O., 91–92 Wallis, Nathaniel, 55 Wampanoag Confederation, 329 Wampanoag Golf Course, 6 Wampanoag Indigenous Program, 106 Wampanoags, xvi, 8, 21, 29, 31–33, 35– 37, 41–42, 46–48, 76–77, 85, 96, 100, 102, 105, 107, 114, 116, 122, 125– 126, 130, 134, 136, 146, 151, 192, 212– 213, 294, 297–298, 308, 312, 329; memorial practices, 16 Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), 100 wampum, 14, 43, 45–46, 126–128, 164, 212, 228, 230, 375n11 Wamsutta (Alexander), 47, 129 Wanchequit, 214 Wappingers, 231

index

Warren, Wendy Anne, 444n112 Warwick (Rhode Island), 126 Washington, George, 77 Washington County (Rhode Island), 188 Washington Monument, 166 Watertown (Massachusetts), 43 We Arrive (sculpture), 315, 442n95 Weaver, Jace, 290 Webster, Daniel, 233 Wecopeak, John, 217 Weeden, Everett “Tall Oak,” 312 Weeounkhass/Weunquesh, 136–137, 379n56 Weetamoo, 47, 129, 267 Wellesley College, 170 Wells, Jonathan, 218, 222 Wenanaquabin, 217 Wendats, 205, 221 Wequaquat, 214 Wessagussett, 36. See also Weymouth (Massachusetts) West Bridgewater (Massachusetts), 316 West Brookfield (Massachusetts), 252 West Indies, 11, 290–291, 300, 304, 306, 314 Weymouth (Massachusetts), 36. See also Wessagussett White, John, 107 Wilbour Woods, 315–316 Wilcox, Lloyd, 177, 190, 279 Wilder, Harris Hawthorne, 244, 271 Willard, Samuel, 58–59 Williams, Eunice, 249, 273 Williams, John, 205, 221–226, 228– 229 Williams, Roger, 84, 126–131, 143, 152– 153, 199, 295, 316, 387–388n153 Williams, Stephen, 228, 274 William Turner Monument, 206, 254– 255, 276, 282

index

Willis, Christina, 85 Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, 263 Winslow, Edward, 16 Winslow, John, 93, 131, 134 Winter, Jay, 17, 379n52 Winthrop (Massachusetts), 30 Winthrop, Henry, 38 Winthrop, John, 37–38, 46, 74 Winthrop, John Jr., 44 Wisconsin, 11, 149 Wissatinnewag, 204, 277–278, 281 Wituwamet, 37 Wolfe, Patrick, 42 Wonalancet, 297–300, 316 Wood, Hiram, 261 Woodland Revolt, 76 Woodman Institute, 316–317 Woonsocket (Rhode Island), 187 Wootonekanuske, 303, 309, 315–316 Worcester (Massachusetts), 95, 175

469

Worcester Society of Antiquity, 5 Worden’s Pond, 373n4 Works Progress Administration, 89; Federal Writers’ Project of, 264 World War I, 170 World War II, 93, 310 Wounded Knee, 105 Wowaus/James Printer, 41, 94 Yale College/University, 229–230, 263, 274 Yankees, 13, 192, 204; antiquarianism of, 12; nativism of, 181, 205; territorialization by, 6, 206; Yankee memoryscapes, 251. See also AngloAmericans, Swamp Yankees Zea, Philip, 272 Zobel, Melissa Tantaquidgeon, xv, 293, 392n39 Zunis, 81–82, 83, 170