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

by Christine M. DeLucia

Overview

Noted historian Christine DeLucia offers a major reconsideration of the violent seventeenth-century conflict in northeastern America known as King Philip’s War, providing an alternative to Pilgrim-centric narratives that have conventionally dominated the histories of colonial New England. DeLucia grounds her study of one of the most devastating conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in early America in five specific places that were directly affected by the crisis, spanning the Northeast as well as the Atlantic world. She examines the war’s effects on the everyday lives and collective mentalities of the region’s diverse Native and Euro-American communities over the course of several centuries, focusing on persistent struggles over land and water, sovereignty, resistance, cultural memory, and intercultural interactions. An enlightening work that draws from oral traditions, archival traces, material and visual culture, archaeology, literature, and environmental studies, this study reassesses the nature and enduring legacies of a watershed historical event.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300231120
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	01/09/2018
Series:	Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Christine M. DeLucia is assistant professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. She grew up in Amoskeag/Manchester, New Hampshire, and presently lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in the heart of the Kwinitekw/Connecticut River Valley.

Table of 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

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 335

Index 447

Editorial Reviews

DeLucia writes . . . with considerable attention and imagination.”—Wall Street Journal

“The stories DeLucia uncovers are sure to fascinate readers interested in the long reach of colonial memory and how the past is remembered.”—Publishers Weekly

“DeLucia’s eloquent writing style flows from one thought and place to the next effortlessly, bringing the reader along in her journey. . . . Readers are able to travel networks and memories over time, space, and generations, both Native and non-Native, and recognize the interwoven nature of our collective past.”—D. Rae Gould, Winterthur Portfolio

“This book moves back and forth across time and place in order to weave together a dense and wide-ranging reconstruction of the war and its many continuing consequences.”—Annette Kolodny, Native American and Indigenous Studies

“[This book] sets out to continue and deepen a tradition of revisionist historiography that began in the 1980s. . . . A major contribution to the field of colonial American history after the ‘linguistic turn.’ . . . [It] powerfully illustrates the transformative effect that foregrounding Indigenous perspectives on the past and present can have for the ongoing construction of the American story.”—David J. Carlson, Early American Literature

“The book creates a greater understanding and interpretation for local historians on a subject that is pivotal to early post-contact history and identity.”—Isaac St. John, Public Historian

Awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 National Council on Public History book prize

Winner of the 2019 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, sponsored by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

Winner of the 2019 Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize, sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society

Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Prize, sponsored by the New England American Studies Association

“A brilliant exploration of the interweaving of past, present, and future, Memory Lands casts a fresh light on the maelstrom of violence now known as King Philip’s War. The landscape of New England will never look the same after reading this important and haunting book.”—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

“Having tromped through woods, swamps, and widely-flung archives, Christine DeLucia has produced a powerfully poetic study of the dynamic, frequently conflicting meanings of Indigenous and settler memoryscapes in New England.”—Jean M. O’Brien, author of Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England

“A remarkable ‘reopening’ of the history of New England. Christine DeLucia turns our attention to the ‘memoryscapes’ in our midst, demanding reconsideration of the markers, monuments, objects and placeworlds that memorialize King Philip’s War, alongside the processes that alternatively repress and recover Indigenous histories of survivance.”—Lisa Brooks, author of Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

From the Publisher