 Well, good afternoon. It's wonderful to see so many chairs stood. So thank you all for coming on this blistery cold day. You know it's winter. I'm Gigi Barnhill, and a member of the Historical Society. And it's a pleasure to welcome Christine Delusia this afternoon. She's an assistant professor of history at Williams College and previously taught at Mount Holyoke College. So her heart is here in the valley, not on the west of her shoes. She received an undergraduate degree in history and literature at Harvard College in 2006, and her PhD in American studies at Yale in 2012. She's the author of Memory Lands, King Philip's War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, published last year by Yale University Press in the Henry Rowe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. This year, the book received the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Award, the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and an honorable mention from the National Council of Public History. She's written essays that have appeared in various historical periodicals and has recently started working on another book at the, working with the Fellowship of the New Library, a study of Native American, African American, and colonial relationships in the Northeast and the era before, during, and after the American Revolution. In Memory Lands, Christine offers a major reconsideration of the violent 17th century conflict in Northeastern America known as King Philip's War. She provides an alternative to pilgrim-centric narratives that has conventionally dominated the histories of colonial New England. Christine grounds her study of one of the most devastating conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers and early American in five specific places that were directly affected by the crisis driving the Northeast, as well as the Atlantic world. So please welcome Christine DeLusia. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for the welcome. Is the microphone on? Or not sure. Can people hear me? Yes, okay, let's tweak it up a little. How's that? Okay, thank you so much for the introduction. I'm thrilled to be back here in the Phonetic River Valley. This feels like home in so many ways, even though I'm now over the mountains. I also wanted to begin with a acknowledgement of this as an indigenous homeland, historically, traditionally connected to Pocomptok and Nonotok people. We are very much still in native space near Abenaki, Nipmok, Mochikin, Skatacoke, Wampanoag, so many other communities who I will touch upon today. And these are present day communities, not only historically. So what I would like to share with you today is a little bit from my book, Memory Lands, about the intertwining of history, memory and place in some particular areas of the Northeast. And to share with you as well my journey into these landscapes that I thought I knew, and then it turned out I had to learn to see in very different ways, alongside native community members who have had very different connections to these places. And I thought we could get right down into it. So the image I'm showing here I wanted to start with because it is a powerful journey into memory, into place, into reckonings with violence in New England. This is a photo from 2010 during the Deer Island sacred run and paddle. It is a memorial event organized by and carried up by native community members from different parts of the Northeast, Wampanoag, Nipmok, Wabanaki, and others. And here you see three of them in a massoon, a traditional dugout style canoe heading down the Charles River through the center of Boston. What they are commemorating and what I am in the canoe behind them photographing is an enormously painful part of indigenous and also colonial history in the Northeast. And you can see some pieces of this in a mural that is still present in the post office of native Massachusetts. In 1675, a few months into the conflict that has become known as King Philip's War, made for King Philip a medicom or medicom, a Wampanoag resistance leader, native people around Nadek, along the Charles River in Eastern Massachusetts were forcibly rounded up, taken from their homes, shackled, put on boats that carried them down the Charles River and out into Boston Harbor. This was done by colonial authorities who wanted to incarcerate them on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, ostensibly for their own protection during the war time. This wound up being an enormously devastating event. Hundreds of native people are believed to have died on Deer Island, exposed to the elements left there over the winter of 1675, 76, without their provisions, without their livestock, without the tools they would have needed to protect themselves. And this is what the sacred journey is remembering, the loss of ancestors, but also looking forward. The reason I begin with Deer Island, both here and in my book, is that it tells us something very potent about the nature of memory and also amnesia in New England. And this is the point where I ask if anyone has ever flown into Logan Airport. Yes, okay, there we go. So if you've done that, then you have seen Deer Island. You may not know it, but the image on the top left here shows the wastewater treatment plan that is presently situated on this island. It is sewage treatment for Greater Boston and the Digester A's at the end you have probably seen from the air. Not many people know the longer history of this place, however, and much of what I write about in the book regarding Deer Island is the debate in the late 90s when the proposal to build a sewage plant emerged. And there was forceful pushback by tribal communities across the Northeast who said this is a sensitive site, this is a sacred place, this is a place of tremendous loss and it is inappropriate to have a sewage plant on it. And as I write in the book, it got built nonetheless. And I use this as a way of talking about histories of forgetting, of marginalizing, and of treating some histories as negligent or negligible, sorry. And yet that is not the whole story. So much of what I'm interested when I talk about memory are events like the one on the bottom. The sacred paddle and many has happened every year in recent times. And what you see at the bottom are native community members with a canoe about to launch out into Boston Harbor and go up the river towards Natic and then to enact ceremony at the falls by South Natic. This is an event very much about history but also very much about the present and the future enacting different kinds of solidarities and looking ahead to a future of resilience. So as a couple of touchstones for this work, I wanted to share two passages from native community members in the Northeast that have really shaped my thinking about the nature of history and the need to do this kind of work. The first is from Ramona Peters. She is a Basque Wampanoag community member and for generations, her family has worked in repatriation, meaning bringing home to the Cape Cod area, ancestors and important objects that have been taken from Wampanoag homelands. She says this about the past. The past has everything to do with who we are in this present moment, both individually and collectively. Personal and collective histories shape our dominant thought patterns, what we value, what we desire and what we miss. This remark has sat with me for a while because it insists that history is not optional. It is not something that lives on a bookshelf that comes down once a year. It is something that is lived on a daily basis, the shapes, emotions, the shapes, understandings of where to go forward and is deeply present in everyday life. And this is a lot of how I think about history. It is lived, it is embodied and there's an obligation for all of us to think critically about the past. The second remark that I wanted to share is from Dawn Dove. She is a Narragansett and Niantic educator and she has written at some length about the problems of the educational system in the United States in terms of the expectations they set up around Native histories and ongoing Native communities. She writes this, the population at large has been lied to or misinformed about the history of this nation. We have raised a society that does not know that we, the indigenous people of this land, still exist. And so some of what I want to share with you today is the nature of that misperception, that misinformation, how it is that so many people in New England do not know about indigenous histories or ongoing indigenous communities and soverties. So to make this a little more concrete, some of the ways that I have gotten into King Philip's War include reckoning with the event that is held every November called the National Day of Morning. This is held at Coles Hill in Plymouth or Patuxent, Massachusetts. And as you see here, it is Native community members and allies gathered around the statue to Usamequin or Massasoid, the leader of the wanton oaks at the time of the Pugam arrival. It is a kind of counter memorial, counter commemoration that pushes back against conciliatory benign Thanksgiving narratives. And instead, it recollects the violence, the genocide, the dispossessions that have resulted in the years since the early 17th century. But it is also an event about looking to the future and considering what indigenous future is, what forms they can take in the northeast and beyond. To get right down into it a little bit more, so what about King Philip's War specifically has been misunderstood, misremembered? The image that you're seeing here is from a protest in 2010 held in the shadow of the Rhode Island state capital in Providence. And as you can see, members gathered here, Native and non-Native, are holding signs saying things like stop playing the genocide game. Genocide is not a game. What they're referring to is a board game that had been put into production in which players could choose to, for example, play the role of a colonial military leader and burn down Native villages or play the role of a Native person and burn down English villages. The point of the protest is that this is highly inappropriate. This is a still traumatic past. It is not entertainment, and it should not be trivialized in that way. But the very existence of that game, which does exist today, tells you something about the nature of knowing, but also forgetting deliberately, sometimes in the Northeast. One more touchstone here, right? So, and here I realize I didn't include a photo of the short-lived Metacombe cafe that you may have noticed, I was right down the way, right? So all around us in the Northeast, there are these signs that you may not have ever thought twice about that are referencing, in some manner, Native American people, communities and histories. And I went looking for the signs referring to King Philip, the leader of this resistance movement who dies so horrifically in 1676. His name is all over the landscape. The King Philip Motors, the Metacombe condominiums, the Metacombe auto sales by the sip and dip, right? And then my favorite, the King Philip spelled wrong apartments. So, a real indigenous individual has been commodified and woven into the landscape and become part of the fabric of this region. And yet the question is rarely asked why and with what effect does this landscape surround us? If people knew the actual histories, would they continue with these kinds of signs? So with that as a little bit of preface, I want to take us on a quick, hopefully enriching tour of the Northeast, both before King Philip's War and then afterwards. My students often ask me, where does the history begin? And I always frustrate them because I don't give them a year. I say it starts at the beginning. It starts at the shaping of the land as human beings came into the Northeast in this case. And the way I wanted to share this with you is through an oral tradition from the Penobscot community to the Northeast of us where there is a deep story cycle about how the land came to be a native space. And the version of this that I'm sharing is the English translation from a story told by Carol Dana who's a contemporary Penobscot language speaker. And what she is describing is a figure, a huge figure named Luskabe or Luskap who is describing how the world came into being. And I'm doing this so that we can begin thinking about memory and place long before colonization. Okay, so here's what the Luskap story, this piece of it says. Then said Luskabe to his grandmother. Now, grandmother, I'm going to travel to search for and transform things so that our descendants may not have such hard times to exist in the future. Now I'm leaving and shall inspect the rivers and lakes. I shall be gone long but do not worry. Then he started off paddling and entered all the rivers emptying into the ocean. He inspected them. Wherever there were bad falls, he lessened them so that they would not be too dangerous for his descendants. He cleared the carrying places. Then he left his canoe upside down, where it turned into stone and may be seen there yet. And indeed it may be seen there yet in Wabanaki homelands for those who know these stories and who understand this as a homelands which was shaped for the people who retain a responsibility and a strong desire to be in that place where the ancestors, where the stories, where the histories are. I invite you to think as well about what happens when communities are dislocated on these homelands. What happens to the knowledge of place, to the sense of identity, when violence or colonialism causes people to be removed from these environments that are so meaningful. I'd really like to stress that the history well before any colonization in the Northeast involves complex, flourishing native communities. And I'll be here briefly, I wanna say a little bit about one of the most interesting sites in the Northeast that conveys this to us. Sometimes called the Salt Pond Village, you can see the outline here, down by Narragansett Bay, currently surrounded by a housing development. As this reconstruction shows, native villages long before European arrivals were flourishing places containing hundreds or thousands of people. Salt Pond has been described as one of the most significant of these villages along the entire Atlantic seaboard. And as you can see from this image, based on archeology and community knowledge, it was filled with dwellings called Weetouache. They were made of bent saplings covered in bark. They were intended to move with the seasons to go inland at certain times of year to be on the coast at others. And so it's this very dynamic sense of connection with the homeland where people had been in close proximity to generations of their ancestors for thousands and thousands of years. A couple other things I would notice about this space. Women were deeply involved, not only in the construction of homes, but also in the caretaking for the planting lands that would have surrounded this. And this is something that is quite different than colonial modes of living that arrive in the 17th century. Violence does not begin in the 1670s. It begins even before the programs arrive here. And I want to give credit to the Wampanoag communities today who have been doing very active work to teach to the public these earlier histories. And the example I'm showing here is that one of the first encounters that Wampanoag people have with English arrivals comes through kidnapping and captivity in 1614 when the English captain, Thomas Hunt, seizes 20 native people from the area around Cape Cod, pulls them aboard a ship and sends them to Europe to be sold into slave markets. The only one of these who we know to have returned to the Northeast was to Squantum, who you may also know as Squanto. He goes on this extraordinary journey against his will to Spain, to England, and back to Patuxet, his homelands. And when he arrives in Patuxet, he finds his homeland decimated because an epidemic has just come through and wiped out huge numbers of Wampanoag people. This is the prehistory into which the pilgrims arrive. They come into a space that is dynamically and devastatingly being affected by violence and disease. Some of the ways that I briefly talk about the lead up to King Philip's War is to stress that violence doesn't come out of nowhere. It erupts after decades of tension growing between native communities and predominately English newcomers who are trying to find ways to inhabit a space that is highly desirable. One of the ways that we can think about this is through so-called land deeds, which when you actually go read them, are usually not just sales of land. They are in fact, much more complicated transactions, negotiating rights and responsibilities. And this is one of my favorites. I found it down in the registry of deeds in Springfield from 1662, talking about negotiations of land in the river valley. And the reason I share this is twofold. One, the three native signatories here, Huecuegon, Alunos, and Squamp, are not in fact signing their names. They are leaving their marks. And so this ought to have us thinking about translation and mistranslation. I would also highlight Alunos, the middle one. She is a female leader. She is a silk squad. And this is something quite perplexing, disturbing to English colonists who are not accustomed to interacting with female leaders, particularly around land. And so there's already this kind of emerging political collision. Another way we might think about tensions, this is always a favorite with students, is the English livestock that is moving further and further into native cornfields. It's trampling their planting lands. And when native people are going to court in the English system, they are finding that the court system rarely treats them equally with English people. It does not always compensate them for these huge losses they are sustaining as a result of swine and other animals. We might also think about wampum, right? I think, I know from my students that many people have encountered this in roughly fourth grade and are told that it is currency, that it's Indian money. There's an aspect to it that is that, but it's much more than that. These shellbeads, purple and white from Kohog and Welk, were integral to ceremony, to diplomacy, to exchange. And as the 17th century goes on, English authorities are increasingly imposing fines upon native communities like Wampanoag, Narragansett, when those communities do something that doesn't accord with English expectations. And they're imposing these giant fines of wampum, on native communities who then struggle to produce enough wampum to pay that. And when they are not able to pay, the colonial authorities turn around and seize their land, right? They say, if you are not able to pay us X fathom of wampum, we are going to take this part of your land. So there's this emerging set of incredibly complicated tensions around land. This comes to a head in outright violence at Mystic. This is a really difficult image to look at, but I think it's important for us to reckon that as early as 1637, that is 17 years after the pilgrims first arrive here, there is a massacre of Pequot people at Mystic in Connecticut. What you are seeing inside that circle is a Pequot village. Women, children, and elders are in there and they are surrounded by a protective palisade, but they are about to be attacked by a circle of English colonists bearing firearms and then, more complicated perhaps, that outer circle of Narragansetts with bows and arrows. I share this to impress upon us that there is nothing neat or binary about the 17th century. In this case, Narragansetts, for their own reasons, had developed an alliance with the English and enacted part of this violence against their kin, the Pequots. The nature of the violence is so horrific that in the aftermath of Mystic, the Narragansetts tell their English collaborators how horrified they are by the scale of the violence. This is not something they are accustomed to. And it also makes the Narragansetts very wary of how going forward to interact with their English neighbors, having seen what just happened. Just a couple other touchstones. Religion becomes a massive force of transformation. The so-called Praying Towns, John Elliott, a Puritan missionary. If you've never seen before the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this tells us a lot about English missionary desires to convert native people. It is a stylized native person with a word bubble coming out of their mouth that says, come over and help us. It's a kind of ventriloquism, right, that is imagining that native people are desirous, all of them, and quite powerfully, to receive Christianity. But in fact, this winds up being a much more contentious force. And just as point of reference, a version of that seal is still in the Massachusetts state flag, and there are ongoing discussions about that. So that's a little bit of backstory, but to turn now to the outbreak of violence itself, I want to focus on three particular places that I think can help us see more clearly what happens beginning in 1675. War breaks out a little bit to the east of King Philip's Wampanoag homelands, present day of Bristol, Rhode Island. And the first place I wanted to tell us about is Great Swamp, which is in Narragansett homelands on the west side of Narragansett Bay. It is a beautiful, flourishing place. It is filled with plants and animals and birds, deer, medicinal plants as well, and would have been a place of great importance for Narragansett people for many generations. It is also the kind of place to which native communities would strategically retreat during times of conflict. They would send particularly women, children, and elders into the swamps for protection to get them away from the path of violence. And this is indeed what happens in late 1675. The Narragansetts, along with their Wampanoag relations, who have come over across the bay, they go inside the swamp deep in it. In many years they would have been safe there. They are surrounded by a palisade to protect them, much like the one at Mystic. But 1675 is in the middle of the global climactic change known as the Little Ice Age. It is especially cold that winter. And we know from various records that the swamp freezes that year. It wouldn't have in other years. It would have remained a kind of protective moat that would keep out English troops on horseback. Horse and swamp doesn't go so well. But it freezes this year. And so the English are able to infiltrate Great Swamp and to perpetrate a massacre, much like the one being described at Mystic. Something that is essential to recognize about Great Swamp is that there are people who survive this. And I have been so frustrated at the narratives that present that as the end of the Narragansetts, or the end of Wampanoag resilience. And here I think we can think through environments as a helpful lens or tool for conceptualizing what I mean by this kind of survival. There are so many swamps west of Narragansett Bay. This is a contemporary environmental map. And you can see just how full of wetlands. These are some of the places to which the survivors of Great Swamp are going. They're retreating west and north and regrouping at places like here. And I'll say about that in just a moment. Dear Island, we talked about a little bit. But this is another of these important places. You can see it on the 17th century map, a little bit east of Boston. This is the place to which native people, hundreds of them are sent and incarcerated, interned for the winter as part of an effort to keep them isolated from other native communities, to try to keep them from joining this growing native resistance. Again, native people do survive Dear Island. And some of them are able to make their way back to places like Natick, where their communities have continued right through today. But this is the third place that I think is especially resonant for us being here in the River Valley. It is a place to which native survivors of this earlier phase of conflict come very deliberately. The place sometimes known as Pesky Omskut or Sutinwijk, the waterfalls at the middle point of the Kronetika River. Has anyone been to the town of Turner's Falls? Yes. So this is what we're talking about, this beautiful waterfall. We know from many sources of evidence, archaeology, oral tradition, documents, that native people had been coming to the waterfalls for at least 8,000 years. So I'll let that number sink in 8,000 years of presence at the falls, particularly in springtime, when they knew the fish runs would be coming up. And so there's this cycle of coming to this meaningful place for sustenance. During the latter part of this war, native people from multiple communities come to Pesky Omskut to replenish themselves. Many have been starving by this point. There's also the strategic advantage that it's just at the far northwestern edge of English colonial presence. The English have very little idea of what is past Pekumtap Deerfield or Squawking Norfield. And so again, in many other situations, they would have been safe. But the English attain intelligence of this giant gathering of native people. And in May of 1676, William Turner leads colonial troops upriver under cover of night. And they deliberately attack at dawn to take people by surprise. I often struggle with how to even narrate these histories. These are so difficult. But something that has really struck me about Pesky Omskut is that the English attack weaponizes this landscape. It turns a place of sustenance and resilience into a source of death. The English troops are driving native people over the waterfalls and killing others with firearms and swords. Again, this is not the end, though. There are survivors, and we actually have their voices, albeit mediated through sources like this. It is a court marshal that is held in Newport, Rhode Island, where native people who had been in the resistance, who had been taken prisoner, are being put on trial for, as the English put it, murder and treason. And this document is full of native voices. Here are some of the participants who describe what just happened at places like the waterfalls or at Great Swamp. They are narrating their own experiences. And it is important for us to grapple with seemingly straightforward sources like this to actually think, what were they saying? Were they reshaping the story to perhaps protect relations who are still out in the Western parts? It's hard to know exactly, but I would raise the question. So to draw things a little bit further in time, I wanted to highlight a couple dimensions of this war that have often not been part of people's reckonings. One is the pervasive enslavement of native people who have survived this. And the place that I like to talk about this relates to Providence, Rhode Island. At the bottom, you see one of several statues of Roger Williams, who's often held up as a kind of a hero in Rhode Island. He's seen as multicultural, religiously tolerant, progressive kind of of his own time. That may have elements of truth to it. But in his later years, Roger Williams is the first signatory on this document, which is composed by English colonists around Providence at the end of the war. It is selling native people into slavery. That is some of the turn that Roger Williams has taken at the end of his life. And this is a massive process that I get into at the latter part of my book of English colonial authorities deliberately enslaving native people or subjecting them to terms of indentured servitude. And it's keeping some within colonial households in New England, but sending others far out into an indigenous Atlantic world to places like the Caribbean, Barbados, Jamaica. As far to the east, if you see where Tangier is marked, there are documents in the English public record office that I came across a number of years ago. This is a letter from a ship's captain. He's in charge of a galley ship in the Mediterranean at Tangier, the English colony. And he is describing the 30 Indians from New England aboard his ship, who have been sent there as slaves. Nine have already died, and he is wondering what to do with the rest. We don't know what happens to those survivors and what the rest of their lives may look like. To draw things together, I wanted to say a little bit about memory in the long post-war period through a couple of concrete examples that tell you something about the enduring impact of this war. And I often do a lot with material culture, so objects and how they are mobilized to tell stories and to conceal other stories. This is a beautiful bowl. It is made from burl. It currently resides in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. And the story associated with it is that it was taken by English soldiers from the dwelling of King Philip after his death violently in August of 1676. He is killed, and he is beheaded. And the people who collect this, the antiquarians at the Mass Historical Society, are not content to just tell the story. They in fact inscribe it with gilded letters in the interior. You can't see from this angle, but what it says is a trophy taken from the wigwam of King Philip when he was slain in 1676 and then saying how the bowl got This is an enormously troubling object. And I've recently written about this as a kind of conquest trophy that is using physical items that have been deeply meaningful for indigenous people to turn them into these trophies of conquest and also of supposed finality, meaning the end, supposed end of native people in the region. Antiquarians are really fascinated by and motivated to mark the landscape to recall aspects of this war that are most important to them. They are really into the story of Mary Rowlandson, the English woman who was taken captive from Lancaster, Massachusetts during the war, taken on a long walk west and then eventually redeemed back to the English communities. They are so invested in recalling her story that you can see them, they've gathered around a rock that they renamed Redemption Rock. This is supposedly maybe the rock at which she was given back to the English. And they not only gather on this, putting their bodies out into space to claim the space, they actually incise the stone with part of the Rowlandson story. So thinking how the landscape itself centuries after this conflict is being used to recall a very particular history. I don't usually share this image, but I thought I would today because there's a strange way that these monuments to violence become kind of ignored over time. And so what this is in the background is a monument recalling a really violent episode of this war. And the pageants from 1960 of Ms. Kweibog over by Brookfield are gathered around it. I don't think they're paying attention to the meanings of that element, right? There's something quite strange going on here, but I share this to invite you to think about monuments in our midst that may have been deactivated or just not seen over time and ways we might circle back to them to tell more meaningful histories. The final place I want to end this up is back at Great Swamp. And to talk a little bit about signage and then ways to read against this. So in the 1930s, the state of Rowland put up a lot of commemorative signs telling versions of Rowland history. At this one that they write, the Great Swamp fight. Language matters. They have taken a massacre and turned it into a fight. The sign says three quarters of a mile to the southward on an island of the Great Swamp. The Narragansett Indians were decisively defeated by the United Forces of the Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Plymouth colonies. If this were the only point of encounter that you had with this place, you might well take away the impression that this is the end of the Narragansetts. They have been decisively defeated. The sign says nothing more. This is very much a part of what Jeanne O'Brien, a dear friend and colleague who's Ojibwe, has written in regards to what she terms erasure in native New England. As she writes about signs, monuments of this kind, quote, non-Indians failed to accord Indian peoples a legitimate place in modernity. They failed to recognize New England Indians as modern peoples who looked to the future and instead constructed a pervasive myth of Indian extinction. And I think signage like this, which is massively present in this region is doing that kind of erasive work. It makes it extremely hard for enduring sovereign tribal communities today to exert their own existence, right? And so there's a big conceptual issue that is coming through signs like this. But this is where I want to end. This has never been the full story. And for me, some of the most important decolonizing methodologies have been involving native voices, native perspectives, native sources that recall very different histories and also assert their ongoing modernity. And so the example I used to convey that is at that very same moment in time of the 1930s, a tribal magazine called The Narragansett Dawn is being published down in the Narragansett community, authored, organized by a woman named Princess Redwing who is Pakenook at Wampanoag descent. And this is filled with wonderful sort of social items, births, marriages, deaths, folklore, event notices, pertinent to native peoples in southern New England. The passage that I want to share relates to this biographical sketch of a Narragansett man named Theodore Dennis Brown. He was a toddler in the 1880s when the state of Rhode Island illegally de-tribalized the Narragansetts, emphasis on illegally and auctioned off their land. So he has lived through a lot by the 1930s. The final passage about Theodore Dennis Brown says this. Mr. Brown will be very helpful to anyone seeking the historic landmarks of Rhode Island. 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 Berry Grounds, old forts, Devil Paw Rock, Hannah Robinson Rocks, Crime Rocks, and other interesting historic spots. So he's given this kind of counter-tour that recalls this very different geography for Narragansett people. And what I would additionally point out is that his tour is not strictly focused on violence. It is not fixated narrowly on King Philip's war. That is there. That is what big swamp is. But it's also about places of resilience, of fishing, connected to all different components of Narragansett life, past, present, and even future. And so that is where I want us to stop today, that these sites continue to be enacted, commemorated, interacted with in really dynamic ways, including Great Swamp itself, which is a site of one of these memorial pilgrimages. I love this flyer for a couple reasons. One, I can give a shout out to local historical societies. This one is from the Petticoats Good Historical Society down in Rhode Island. But two, the year 1968, which people might associate more often with global revolutions, with student uprisings. It is also a year of very active indigenous resistance. And as you can see from this, the Great Swamp Memorial Pilgrimage is focused partly on Rhode Island Indians, indigenous people to this area, but also friends, allies, supporters, others, who wish to know more and to bear witness to these painful histories, but also to look to the future and to think and enact a different kind of living. So I would be happy to take questions if people have any. Thank you. Yes? I was wondering if you know of any townships, say, in the Commonwealth, that does different type of signage that does on those first peoples of San Luis, that are not from New York and so forth. That would be the first question. And if you know of anyone else in the Commonwealth that is trying to do that, say, I was thinking, East Northern Hatfield, welcome to Hatfield, first said, open. If the second part of the question is, there is one, oh, there you go, there you go. And the second signage, not to say that either shouldn't come, but have a second one that says, first here, so-and-so, or such-and-such, and just kind of to have that question, because I'm thinking of my children going up and not seeing it. I love the question. So there are some really marvelous, historic walking tour signage projects that have been happening in a bunch of different communities. I did a tiny bit of work with the Mohegan tribe that had been asked by the town of Norwich, Connecticut, if they would be willing to create a Mohegan-centered walking trail and digital project. I don't think I have the sight of it, but if you look up the website, Walk Norwich, one of the trails that was developed to do heritage interpretation was done exclusively by Mohegans, and it has both these gorgeous signs out on the land that interpret different places, and they use Mohegan language with they have been bringing back, and also a QR code so that you can read more about it on your phone. Stockbridge Mohegan community is also working on this and various Wampanoag projects, especially in the lead-up to 2020, the 400th anniversary next year. And so that stuff is really carpeting. I love examples like that, and would be happy if anyone here is interested in how to carry that kind of work forward. I would also share this, because this may be really sad recently. The Gazette's back in August had an article about these Turcentenary markers that I'm sure you have seen around. They are super problematic signs. In fact, I have a whole essay in the Journal of Environmental History about why these are problematic. The Department of Transportation just put a bunch of money into refurbishing them, giving them a physical makeover without doing anything to address the underlying messaging. And so if anyone wants to talk about that, please let me know. Yes? I was, I'm on the historical commission in Hatfield. Now it was the state DOT that's doing redoing those signs. And that one has recently been rehabbed and moved. And there was another one on River Road where Wakeley gives way to Hatfield. And that one had been broken by farm equipment about 30 years ago. And we had the pieces of it in the farm museum. And when the state DOT people were contacting me, I said, you know the signs have inaccurate historical information. Right. And they said, that's none of your business. Oh. Oh. I swear to God, yeah, I'm not buying it. So wow, I genuinely mean it. It's Massachusetts. I would love to find some way for maybe communities here to host some conversation about this, because there's so much knowledge in different places, native and non-native, they could illuminate why these signs are begging for a different kind of interpretation or some counter-signs. I'm sorry they hung up on you. That's another sort of something very similar. Next year is the 350th anniversary of Hatfield being settled from Hadley as a separate town. And we're in the process of putting together a commemoration of that. And I wrote some things about the people who lived there before the English arrived. And the 350th committee liberally eliminated that from what they have written up about this. Oh no, we'll put back in. So these erasures are ongoing in sometimes slightly more subtle ways, but that's still... ongoing barely covers it. Yes. It's deliberate. That's... I always am appreciative when people share information about what's happening locally. If I could mention as a... I always have extra slides, in case we want to talk about them. Up at Turner's Falls today, right the town bears the name of William Turner, the perpetrator of this massacre. There's this really amazing collaborative project that's been going for a number of years through the American Battlefields Protection Program, bringing together local landowners, town planning folks, historical commission folks. Kevin McBride is doing the archeology. He worked at Mashantaka Pequot for many years. And it's collaborating with Nipmuk people, Abenaki, Wampanoag representatives. And this is really important because it creates a talking space and then an action space, meaning going out on the land. And what they have found so far, as I understand it with metal detectors and other approaches, are ammunition in the earth that bears witness to a running native counterattack. And so this adds a real complication to the story. It is still a massacre that happens at the falls, but then what they are finding is this immediate native resistance on the heels of that. And it has come about through this kind of collaborative process. And I would love to see ways that other towns could take up processes like this. Yes? You mentioned briefly about all of the loss of life after the first contact with the Europeans, their disease, and things like that. And how many of the natives were already gone by the time the sort of settlement came about. And I've always been wondered how that effect, how that must have affected the worldview of a lot of these indigenous people and how that affected them going forward. Yeah. There's a wonderful video that has recently been produced by Paula Peters. She's matched with Wampanoag and they've been creating documentary media resources in the lead up to 2020 to educate about these topics. And the video, her company is called Smoke Signals, Y. So if you wanna look it up on Vimeo, it's on there. And it's telling from the perspective of a contemporary Wampanoag person inhabiting the role of a 17th century person what these experiences of loss would have been like and how that was pressuring communities to form alliances where in other circumstances they might not have done that if they had been at their full population strength. And it also talks about how some of those early epidemics don't equally affect this region. They are so devastating along Cape Cod, the immediate coastal area, up to 90% population loss. They don't reach at that moment in time over to Narragansett, right? So the Narragansett community is still at it's sort of customary strength at that point. And so there's some really fine-brained differences in which that's playing out. But one way that people have talked about this is how that shapes native communities' interactions with Christian missionaries who are coming into these spaces. This is the native language Bible, Wampanoag, probably Nipmuc influence as well. The John Elliot is involved in. And the point has been made that for communities that are in such upheaval and have experienced the loss of such important community leaders and spiritual leaders that the arrival of this new system of spirituality which purports to have access to other kinds of power and healing is something that communities are quite actively deliberating about. I haven't used the word conversion, you may have noticed because it's a much more complicated process than that. But there's this wide-ranging set of effects. I appreciate the question because that's the, it's like a foundational condition under which the rest of the 17th century operates. Yes. I'm wondering if you could explain any of the research you might have done on William Pynchon and his impact on the Connecticut Valley area during the 17th century. So I would invite others who might be interested to go down to the registry of deeds and look at the Pynchon connected land documents. They've been done a little bit of work on but there's so much more. So the Pynchon family of fur traders, he and his sons have this huge effect, not just in the Connecticut River Valley much beyond that as they are working increasingly closely with native trappers who have the traditional ecological knowledge about to hunt, say beavers. They know the behavior of these animals, they know where they live. One of the complexities of those relationships which in certain ways are mutually beneficial. Trade items are circulating in ways that are desirable for both entities. But very quickly this spirals into an uneven dynamic as native people through coercion, through fraud, through changing access to resources are finding themselves indebted to the Pynchons. And so if you go through the Pynchon family's account books you can see this massive growing indebtedness which then as I was saying with Wampum leads to the pressure to seed land as a means of paying that. Before I left Mount Julio College I began to get a little bit into the land deeds associated with South Hadley area and on the face of it they seem to be land sales but when you get into the larger context including those account books you can see that they're part of this indebtedness condition and that is what is causing some of these valley lands to be claimed by the English particularly in the decade or so before this war breaks out. Yes. What does the colonists even do with the Wampum? That is an excellent question. And here I will mention Marge Bruchak's work. She has done a lot of work in the Comptek Deerfield area. She's currently working on a project called the Wampum Trail. If you want to check out her website on that. Some of it they were circulating back to other native communities as an item of exchange. I have actually been trying to track down where some of the Wampum payments, these fathoms, these long strings of Wampum wound up because they're being paid to colonial authorities and I thought like was there an official colonial now state repository with all of this diplomatic Wampum? I don't have an answer yet but I hope you're gonna ask me that question. There's also the fact and here I credit Bruchak as well as some others that colonists themselves try to angle into the Wampum economy by producing their own Wampum which varies a lot in quality. Just go to that way. And if anyone knows about economics, what happens when you flood a market with that kind of, you're essentially printing money. And so there's this massive economic effect once that begins to happen. But in terms of where a lot of these, the fathoms of them wound up, I'm not sure. There's been a lot of discussion recently about Wampum belts. So particularly in Haudenosaunee communities but also others what happens to the diplomatic full belts that have been woven about this. And there's been a little bit of an effort to track down the Wampum that was taken from King Philip. There's a story in colonial documents that he was sent to England, some of his rarities quote. And they haven't been seen since. And so there's been some question about how those might be tracked down. Might they be in a private collection? I've got a file on my computer of interesting things that we should go find. Which is not really a joke, actually. There are treaties that are lost. There are items that are lost. But they may resurface if people know the right kind of questions to ask. Don't you think that over time, this erasure of memory, has something to do with our romanticizing some of the names of the places we live. I mean, the deputants there in front of the rock. Yes. I asked them to think about the history. That's their town. And over time, there's sort of a romance about these native, that we live in these beautiful native places. And we've kind of co-opted them. Yes. I mean, think of all the names around us. And they're ours now. They're these beautiful Indian names. Right. And I think that has a lot to do with erasing the memory because it's not them, it's us. It's ours. So yeah, so this is a really challenging topic about topinins, place names, and how those change or are appropriated over time. I didn't mention this map previously, but on the immediate heels of this war, John Foster does this woodcut which is attached to William Hubbard's narrative of King Philip's war. And it's a completely colonial map. It's showing, Kennedy Rivers is there at the top, right, it's sort of flipped on its side. So we are here, right. It is erasing a lot of native topinins by keeping some, right. You can see now our advance that is here, Pequot country is here. And so there is this enduring presence of some place names, but overall we're seeing this intent to overwrite them with English ones, particularly after this conflict. And the place that I have seen that happening in a really disturbing way, the soldiers, the colonial soldiers who were present at both, who were perpetrators, at both Peskyanskut and at Great Swamp. The colony of Massachusetts is not able to pay them cash for their services in many instances. And so decades later, the colony compensates these veterans or if they're dead, their heirs through allotments of land, which are called in the case of Great Swamp, right, which is known as the Narragansk townships, numbers one through seven, which are all across central Northern New England, up into New Hampshire and Maine. And they're known for a short span of time as the Narragansk townships, Narragansk number four and so on. But then those towns are renamed and so infrequently do the towns have any sense of how that land got to be in that way. I was really startled, if you see numbers three, four and five, I grew up next to one of these. Towns of Bedford, Goff's town, New Hampshire and had not a clue. The only sign of that is that in, I believe it's Bedford, New Hampshire, there is still a civic building called the Narragansk Range, which is a reflection of this history, right? And why are they keeping that word Narragansk? I think it's part of what you're pointing to, this desire to have some kind of indigenous touchstone but to not really grapple in any full way with the violence that underlies that. I think about this question a lot, so I could say more, but thank you for that.