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Abstract
The colonial crisis of King Philip's War (1675-1678) transformed the physical and human landscapes of the American Northeast, destroying English frontier settlements and decimating or displacing diverse Native peoples from their ancestral homelands. This dissertation examines cultural landscapes of violence and memory in the war's aftermath: how Eastern Algonquian and Euro-American communities, haunted for more than three centuries by colonial violence, have remembered, marked, and mapped the grounds of conflict—or struggled to forget. While Yankee recountings of King Philip's War have routinely erased enduring Native peoples from New England by making the war the "Indians' last stand," followed by indigenous retreat from local landscapes, tribal communities have mobilized this same iconic conflict to maintain and make visible alternative geographies of persistence and recovery.
Critiquing the physical landscape as a vector of memory transmission, the project uncovers the politically inflected trajectories that regional fashionings of place-sense have taken. Certain environmental features, like Great Swamp and Peskeomskut Falls (both Native massacre-grounds), have been transformed into "sites of memory" while others—zones of exile and subsistence, corridors of Native victory—have been marginalized from colonial historical consciousness. It examines the overlay of ancestral and mythic landscapes with new sites in the postwar period; transformations of old cultural topographies under English, French, American, and Canadian imperial pressures; New England town historians' peculiar abilities to evade or forget sites of violence; and transoceanic geographies tying Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Pequots to Bermudan peoples believed to be descendants of enslaved prisoners-of-war. Highlighting indigenous sites of counter-memory challenging State-driven narratives about the colonial past, it contends that creation and preservation of place-sense can be conservative tools of marginalization and erasure, but also means of resistance, regeneration, and even surprising cross-cultural reconciliation.
This project opens the historiographic view of the Algonquian Northeast into a diasporic, transnational geography that has not before been systematically articulated, stretching through New England, Québec, and a Red Atlantic World stretching as far as North Africa. Taking up sub- or non-national levels of identity-formation rather than monolithic "American" or "Indian" ones, it recuperates the "minor" spaces of town, colony, state, watershed, reservation, and home-site that are so crucial to local senses of belonging and collective purpose. While many critiques of King Philip's War have focused on narratives produced by colonial elites near Boston, this project takes a de-centered approach, investigating vernacular expressions of memory in communities from the Connecticut River Valley to the Piscataqua, Boston to Narragansett Bay. By more firmly and specifically grounding memory and diverse tribal/settler experiences in particular landscapes, the project builds upon but also moves beyond important studies of New England Indian history and representation like Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity and Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Moreover, it situates acts of remembrance within sociopolitical contexts of territorial dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism. Finally, it makes Native oral testimonies, museums, archives, and geographies central sources, bringing these under-examined documentary, ethnographic, and material culture records into dialogue with the colonial materials more commonly used in existing historiography. Ultimately it pursues an epistemological investigation: How do we know what we know about the violent colonial past of the Northeast? By identifying the region's multitude of memory-keepers; the sources from which they derive their knowledge and authority; and the spaces where they perform their work, it tracks the startling diversity of ways in which communities maintain, sever, or re-shape relationships with the past and its contested grounds.
