INTRODUCTION

THE ABSENCE OF PRESENCE

As the first leaves of sassafras and strawberry emerged in the Wampanoag country during the spring of 1623, a leader stepped forth to confront Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow and the Wampanoag diplomat Hobbomock as they entered the Pocasset town of Mattapoisett, on the banks of the Kteticut (or Taunton) River. All were preoccupied with the illness that had overcome a beloved man, Ousamequin, or Massasoit (his title)—a “great sachem” of the Wampanoags and leader of the adjacent region of Pokanoket. Hundreds gathered at Ousamequin’s council house, and both Hobbomock and Winslow were en route to pay their respects, a “commendable” Indigenous custom in this land, as Winslow noted in Good News From New England. This Pocasset leader, however, had remained at Mattapoisett, perhaps to help begin cultivating the fields, process the spring fish, or look after children and elders who required care. A gunshot had sounded beyond the river just prior to Winslow’s arrival, putting the leader on edge, prepared to defend those kin who also remained. From the well-worn path ahead, the leader may have heard heavy English boots, or Hobbomock’s voice, lamenting and singing Ousamequin’s praises. Winslow later reported that a rumor had circulated that Ousamequin had already passed away. Indeed, their diversion to Mattapoisett was in part necessitated by his concern that the sachem of this town, a man who held a much more suspicious view of the English settlers who had so recently planted on the Wampanoag coast, “would succeed” Ousamequin1 (see maps 1 and 4).

Upon entering Mattapoisett Winslow approached the great Sachimo Camoco, the council house where leaders deliberated, where the sachem and his family lived and hosted guests. However, he quickly discovered that “Conbitant, the Sachem, was not at home, but at” Pokanoket, tending to Ousamequin and his kin. Instead, Winslow remarked, he was greeted and given “friendly entertainment” by “the Squa-sachim,” translating to an audience in England, “for so they called the Sachims wife.” This was his mistranslation. Saunkskwa, or “sachem-squa,” was not simply the word for spouse but rather the word for female leader, suggesting that this woman who “entertained” him was perhaps more than Conbitant’s wife, particularly given that by local custom she would have come from a leadership family.2

1. Native homelands of the Northeast, highlighting places mentioned in the book

The saunkskwa must have carried a legitimate suspicion of this English newcomer who, by his own account, had raised a gun at her and her family during the previous year’s spring gathering at Nemasket, a neighboring Wampanoag town, acting rashly on false rumors that Conbitant had killed Plymouth’s interpreter, Tisquantum. Indeed, that spring, on the return journey home from Pokanoket, Conbitant would raise this encounter when Winslow assured him of Plymouth’s good intentions, asking, “If your love is so great and it grows such good fruits, why is it that when you come to our places or we go to yours, you stand as if ready to fight, with the mouths of your guns pointed at us?” Yet, despite the gun Winslow carried, the saunkskwa responded to his arrival with diplomacy. She hosted Winslow and his small party, offering hospitality, food, and rest, as well as assistance and information, when she allowed Winslow to “hire” one of her runners to seek news from Pokanoket of Ousamequin’s status. Perhaps this impulse arose in part from her awareness of the danger of rumors in Winslow’s hands. But it also arose from her responsibility as a leader, a choice she made about how to deal with this stranger in her space. Her response was emblematic of the ways in which Native leaders often acted as diplomatic hosts to unexpected European guests.3

Indeed, two years before, the Wabanaki leader Samoset, of Pemaquid (far up the coast), had greeted the startled newcomers at Patuxet (or Plymouth) in their language, saying, “Welcome Englishmen!” This reflected not only Indigenous diplomacy, but experience with over one hundred years of trade, cultural and linguistic exchange, as well as violence, disease, and captivity with “Englishmen” and other western Europeans on the coast. Indeed, Samoset was one of many Wabanaki and Wampanoag men who had been captured by European “explorers,” learning a new language by necessity, and in his case, returning to serve as an intercultural diplomat. This exchange was not new to the Wampanoags or Wabanakis, who also had been traveling by canoe to exchange with each other for millennia. What was new about this “encounter” was that these Englishmen had come to stay, marking a discernible move from extractive colonialism (including the harvesting of trees and fish and the capture of Indigenous bodies) to settler colonialism. These newcomers also carried a vision that “Englishmen” would replace the Indigenous people, including women planters, as the rightful inhabitants of this land.⁴

Winslow’s is the only account of this important woman in the Puritan narratives. She was a leader, the wife of Conbitant, and a relation to many. She experienced the arrival of the newcomers and their incorporation into Native networks of exchange and diplomacy. She hosted Winslow, and other leaders, at her large home. Like other women, she cultivated and sustained the fields that fed the families. She felt the dire impacts of the diseases that ravaged her relations. Living through the epidemics and the first wave of colonization, she experienced unimaginable grief and loss. Yet she birthed and raised at least two daughters, Weetamoo (or Namumpum) and Wootonakanuske, who survived several epidemics, as well as threats of violence, to mature into leaders among their communities. Yet in Winslow’s account, this significant mother and leader was not even named.

Although well remembered within Native New England communities, like her mother, Weetamoo has often not been named in the histories and literatures of early America, despite her prominent leadership role. Weetamoo emerged as the saunkskwa of Pocasset after Conbitant’s death, recognized by Ousamequin as his relation and “true heir” to the Pocasset sachemship. In fact, the title of this book is taken from Ousamequin’s description of Weetamoo as “our beloved cousin” and “kinswoman.” An influential Wampanoag diplomat, Weetamoo presented a political and cultural challenge to the Puritan men who confronted her authority. Her strategic adaptation to the colonial “deed game” enabled her to protect more land than nearly any surrounding leader (a history explored in chapter one). She married Wamsutta, Ousamequin’s eldest son, in a dual marriage alliance with her sister Wootonakanuske and Wamsutta’s brother Pometacomet, more commonly known as Metacom, or “Philip.” She played a key role and forged alliances during the infamous colonial conflict known as “King Philip’s War.” One Puritan chronicler portrayed her “as potent a Prince as any round about her” with “as much corn, land, and men, at her command” as Metacom, insisting she was “much more forward in the Design and had greater success than King Philip himself.” Yet in many histories of the war, she is relegated to a trivial role in comparison to Metacom or colonial leaders such as Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow, Edward’s son. Even recent scholarly accounts mention her briefly, a footnote to history.⁵

•   •   •

Weetamoo’s striking presence in primary documents and her conspicuous absence from many secondary sources led me down a long winding road of historical recovery. Tellingly, this process began with a simple question regarding the role of women leaders in King Philip’s War. However, the deeper I dug the more I found myself pursuing a decolonizing process of expanding the strategies through which we might do the work of history, which in the Abenaki language is called ôjmowôgan, a cyclical activity of recalling and relaying in which we are collectively engaged. Thus, if you hold this book in your hands or are viewing it on a screen, I am asking you to follow these strands and storylines with me. I am saying, “Welcome,” although I will warn you that, for some readers, this landscape may seem unfamiliar and unsettling. Others, of course, may find it strikingly familiar. I acknowledge that it may be difficult to follow me at times. Yet, if you come in the manner of a guest to the “place-world” I’ve created, and immerse yourself as I have in the documents and maps of our history, I hope your participation may be rewarded with the gift of seeing a world we all inhabit with greater insight and clarity.⁶

This book also focuses on the recovery of the Nipmuc scholar James Printer, another compelling figure absent from most histories, who was accused of “revolt” during King Philip’s War. Wawaus, or James, was from a leading family in the Nipmuc mission community or “praying town” of Hassanamesit. After attending English preparatory schools in the Massachusetts Colony, James became an apprentice to Cambridge printer Samuel Greene, and helped usher in American publishing history. He worked the first printing press in New England, which was housed in the Harvard Indian College (another project of historical recovery covered in depth in chapter two). Here, the man henceforth known as James Printer set the type on the first bible printed in North America. Printer adapted to a changing and challenging environment, using his linguistic skills to survive the ravages of war, serving as a scribe and negotiator for Native leaders, and leveraging his invaluable talent to negotiate his way back to the Press. He went on to serve as a leader at Hassanamesit, enabling the protection of Nipmuc lands and the survival of his kin and community. Laboring at the Harvard Press after the war, he set the type for one of the first publications by a woman in the English colonies, a text that would become a classic of American literature. In the process, he encountered himself in the print. He was not only the printer of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God . . . A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, but a character within it, credited with helping to negotiate the “redemption” of the Puritan mistress Mary Rowlandson, by her (and his) own hand.⁷

Both the Nipmuc printer and the Puritan mistress survived King Philip’s War, but the conflict upended their lives. Both experienced forms of “captivity” and “restoration.” As Jill Lepore observes, however, “The lasting legacy of Mary Rowlandson’s dramatic, eloquent, and fantastically popular narrative of captivity and redemption is the nearly complete veil it has unwittingly placed over the experience of bondage endured by Algonquian Indians during King Philip’s War.” Captivity has most often been seen as a condition faced by settlers, particularly women and children. Until recently, as Pauline Strong relays, scholars often “neglected or distorted” the “Native American context of captivity.” Margaret Newell notes that “we still know more about the relatively few Euro-American captives among the Indians than we do about the thousands of Native Americans” who were enslaved. This “absence,” as both Newell and Strong suggest, is particularly grievous when we consider that “in numerical terms, the captivity of English colonists among Indians pales in comparison to the abduction, imprisonment, and enslavement of Indians by the English, and indeed, to the captivity of Indians by Indians during the colonial period.”⁸

For example, in August 1675, James Printer was captured by colonial forces and falsely accused of participating in a raid—on Rowlandson’s town of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Although he ultimately averted conviction, establishing that he was in church, James was imprisoned for a month in a Boston jail and “barely escaped lynching” by an English mob (a story relayed in full in chapter five). Five months later, James’s brother traveled eighty miles on snowshoes to deliver a warning to ministers at Cambridge that another raid on Lancaster was imminent. However, Massachusetts military leaders did not respond quickly enough, and in February 1676 Mary Rowlandson was captured by Narragansett men during a winter raid. As detailed in chapter seven, Mary was carried to the Nipmuc stronghold of Menimesit, where she encountered James and his extended family, held in “captivity,” according to missionary Daniel Gookin, by their own relations. In an intriguing twist of fate, at Menimesit, Rowlandson was given to Weetamoo, whom she followed deep into the interior of Nipmuc and Wabanaki countries, as the saunkskwa sought protective sanctuaries for families evading colonial troops. Years later, in 1682, as James set the type on Rowlandson’s narrative, he helped preserve the most detailed portrait of Weetamoo and her movements in the colonial record.⁹

As historian Neal Salisbury has insisted, “Our understanding of the cross-cultural dimensions of captivity will remain incomplete until the stories of the . . . James Printers and Weetamoos throughout American history are fully fleshed out and placed alongside . . . more familiar narratives” like Rowlandson’s. This book seeks to answer his charge. All too often, histories of war focus on male soldiers and warriors, the victories and losses of captains, generals, and chiefs. In drawing James and Weetamoo’s stories together, a different picture of war, captivity, and resistance arises, one that reveals the determination of a mother, who was a valiant leader, and the compromises of an erudite scholar, who became a diplomat and scribe. These stories reverse the narrative of absence and reveal the persistence of Indigenous adaptation and survival.¹⁰

As Anishinaabe historian Jean O’Brien and others have observed, American readers have often been drawn to the “national narrative of the ‘vanishing Indian,’” including the death of Native leaders like Philip, rather than the more complex stories of Native adaptation, as with James Printer. The persistent narrative of “extinction,” to which O’Brien refers, “has falsely educated New Englanders” and Americans “for generations,” engendering a mythological history in which the English, and their American descendants, “replace” Indians in the land. Likewise, in writing about “King Philip’s War” colonial ministers and magistrates sought to contain Indigenous resistance within narratives that would justify their replacement. Following colonial structures, many authors and historians have also contained such wars within an orderly “chain-of-events” or thesis argument. A decolonial process might reverse that trend by resisting containment and opening possibilities for Native presence. As exemplified by the expansive and connective approach of chapter six, where multiple narratives intertwine, this book seeks to focus narrowly at times on the alternative stories revealed by tracking Weetamoo, James Printer, and their network of relations, while at other times expanding far beyond that scope to vast Indigenous geographies, including the Wabanaki northern front, where many Native people sought refuge from colonization and war.¹¹

The book is organized episodically, to offer scenarios, like the encounter between Winslow and Weetamoo’s mother, and insights for contemplation and critical reflection. Section breaks and subheads signal a pause in the narrative, offering an opportunity for deliberation.

LANGUAGE: NAMING WAR

One of the most crucial lenses to viewing history anew is Indigenous language, a vastly underutilized archive of place names and concepts. A new generation of Hawaiian scholars, some trained in the Ka Papahana Kaiapuni immersion schools, is bringing forth a revolutionary understanding of the historical relationship between Hawai’i and the United States, based on a vast archive of Hawaiian newspapers and documents which past historians have largely ignored, in part because they lacked literacy in the language. Our understanding of Wampanoag and New England history will be transformed as a new generation of Wôpanâak speakers, led by Jessie Little Doe Baird, turns the lens of language on the body of place names and understudied Wôpanâak language texts. Language keepers are among the most important scholars we have with us today. Their insights into a single word can reveal layers of history which we cannot understand from documents alone. As a student of Abenaki language and a scholar of history, I have benefitted tremendously from conversations with language keepers in northern New England such as Roger Paul, Carol Dana, the late Cecile Wawanolet, her son Elie Joubert, and her student, Jesse Bruchac, as well as language keepers and tribal scholars in southern New England like Jessie Little Doe Baird, Bettina Washington, Linda Coombs, Elizabeth James Perry, Jonathan Perry, Cheryll Holley, Pam Ellis, Stephanie Fielding, and Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel. My understanding of Indigenous language is only that of a student, not of a fluent speaker, but being able to understand the nuances of language has at times shed remarkable light on the historical landscape.¹²

The “war” in which Weetamoo and James Printer became embroiled would not have been known to them, in any language, as “King Philip’s War.” As Jenny Pulsipher notes, that appellation arose only in the eighteenth century, perhaps with the publication of Benjamin Church’s Entertaining History of King Philip’s War. Thomas Church published his father’s boisterous memoir in 1716, forty years after Benjamin Church led a company to capture and kill Metacom. If Custer had survived the Battle of Little Bighorn, he may have relayed a similar account of that war. Church’s narrative formally marked the “end” of the conflict with his own successful containment of Metacom. The hyperbolic narrative implied that it was Church’s leadership and tracking skills that enabled his company to locate and ensnare the elusive Wampanoag sachem, even though Church acknowledged that a Pocasset Wampanoag man, Alderman, struck the fatal blow. Naming the conflict “King Philip’s War” created an impression of finality. The Indigenous “rebellion” had been squashed with the death of Philip, the subjugation complete, titles cleared. This act of naming contained the “war” from an ongoing, multifaceted Indigenous resistance, led by an uncontainable network of Indigenous leaders and families, to a rebellion, an event that could be contained within one year, by a single persuasive insurgent, who had taken his exit and vanished.13

As Lepore notes in her landmark work on the narratives of “King Philip’s War,” “Names of wars are always biased; they always privilege one perspective over another.” In New England, when the first narratives of the war emerged, the conflict was known more broadly as “the Warr with the Indians in New-England,” as Massachusetts minister Increase Mather entitled it, or “the Indian War,” as Rhode Island leader John Easton and Massachusetts merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall described it. Later, this struggle would be acknowledged as part of a longer engagement, “the first Indian war,” the beginning of resistance against increasing English expansion that continued in the northern Wabanaki country for the next hundred years. Indeed, the Mohegan leader Owaneco, who led an influential company of Mohegan scouts for the English in this “first” war and those that followed, referred to this conflict as “the warres with the Generall Nations of Indians,” suggesting a series of wars waged by the English with a regional alliance of Native nations. This Mohegan naming may be the most accurate.¹⁴

Moreover, most of the Native people who were impacted by this war would have named the conflict in their own languages. To them (and for many Native people today) this was not New England, but ndakinna (to use the Abenaki word), “our land,” the place “to which we belong.” This is a word that denotes kinship, similar to nigawes, “our mother.” Long before it was reinscribed as “New England,” this place was named Wôpanâak or Wabanaki, “the land where the sun is born every day.” The tribal names Wabanaki and Wampanoag reflect an originary embeddedness in this land, as well as the first peoples’ responsibility to welcome the sun’s emergence and return. Wabanaki and Wampanoag people are born of, and continually born into, this easternmost place. While neighboring Native nations used these terms to describe the nations the English termed “Indians” of “New England,” they called themselves simply “the people,” the human beings (alnôbak in Abenaki). When introducing themselves, the people would have acknowledged the families and places to which they “belonged,” like James Printer’s town of Hassanamesit, in the Nipmuc or “freshwater” interior, or Weetamoo’s homeland of Pocasset, on the coast.15

Likewise, Native people in the Northeast had multiple names for war. In Western Abenaki, with which I am most familiar, aôdowôgan is an activity in which people are engaged, a state of being which is temporary. In this language there is a distinction between being caught up or immersed in a conflict, matañbégw, or aôdin (“we are fighting, we are in a war”), and “to wage war against something or someone,” nedaiwdwôdamen, or nañsekañsw. There are also multiple words that refer to counselor-warriors, such as pniesesok, in Wôpanâak, and kinôbak, in Abenaki, both of which translate more precisely to those who have the courage to pursue difficult courses, similar to words that describe steep terrain. Edward Winslow acknowledged that “the pnieses are men of great courage and wisdom,” among the “Sachims Council,” who would “endure most hardness, and yet are more discreet, courteous and humane in their carriage than any amongst them.”¹⁶ One of the most intriguing questions raised by the study of language is to consider which “name of war” a man like James Printer, a woman like Weetamoo, a pniese like Hobbomock, or Metacom himself would have used to describe the conflict in which they found themselves entangled, and which Metacom was accused by the English of waging. Native languages also have precise and complex terms for peace, and this book, especially in its final chapters, highlights the processes and places of peacemaking that the existing narratives of war obscure.

REENVISIONING “NARRATIVE FIELDS”

Both Jill Lepore and Amy Den Ouden, among others, have highlighted the important role of narration in establishing accounts of war and legal justification for settler colonialism in New England. Den Ouden provides an incisive, if somewhat ironic, comment by Peter Hulme:

“The particular difficulty associated with the establishment of the European colonies concerned what might be called the planting of a narrative, the hacking away of enough surrounding ‘weeds’ to let flourish a narrative field in which the colonists could settle themselves.”¹⁷

Among the goals of this book is to provide, reveal, and restore alternative “narrative fields,” which have sometimes arisen quite unexpectedly from the archive of colonial documents, like “weeds” breaking through soil into that well-established “field.” Perhaps this “unsettling” process, in which I have engaged, could be better described as allowing multifaceted “plants” to emerge into the “narrative field,” transforming that field into a (narrative) swamp which requires different kinds of navigation, or reading practices.

READING IN THE ARCHIVE

When I embarked on this project, I thought it would focus on recovering the stories of James Printer and Weetamoo, revealing different perspectives on the war . . . and it does. I thought this book would be about reading narratives of the war like Mary Rowlandson’s text anew . . . and it is. I believed that extending our historical vision to include the vast land of the northern front was crucial to understanding the war and its aftermath, and that proved true. What I did not know at the outset was how much new material would be revealed by focusing so closely on the lives of James, Weetamoo, their families, and those who traveled north. So much had already been written about the war, so many archives mined by historians. I did not realize how many more documents would arise in the process of research that previous historians had not located or acknowledged. I could not have anticipated how such documents would challenge and unsettle the narratives of the war.

So many of the histories that have been written about “King Philip’s War” over the last two centuries rely on the veracity of the narratives written by seventeenth-century colonial military and religious leaders, such as Increase Mather, William Hubbard, and Benjamin Church. Yet I found many instances where these foundational narratives are either not supported or entirely contradicted by primary records from the precise time and place about which they were written. For example, the oft-cited, contradictory narratives of the death of Weetamoo’s husband, the Wampanoag sachem Wamsutta, are undermined by the records of the Plymouth Court (see chapter one). The accounts, written postwar, emphasize a suspected collusion between Wamsutta and the Narragansetts, which led the Plymouth colonial government to capture Wamsutta. Mather and Hubbard place Wamsutta’s capture and death (by either illness or poisoning) within a larger narrative of longstanding Indigenous rebellion and conspiracy. In particular, Mather offered his account as proof of the “notoriously known” “jealousies” of the “Narragansetts and Wompanoags.” However, the court documents reveal that rather than conspiracy with the neighboring Narragansetts, Plymouth’s real concern was Wamsutta’s purported land deals with settlers in the competing colony of Rhode Island.18

Land stands at the center of those narratives. Mather’s “history” of the war opens with a clear claim to the land he called New England, portraying Indigenous people as interlopers in a divinely gifted space. The Boston minister asserted “that the Heathen people amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant.”¹⁹

Mather’s geographic orientation is revealing. While Wampanoag and Wabanaki people recognized this region as the land of the dawn, Mather regarded New England as a place “seated” in the “going down of the sun.” For Native people, this was the easternmost land, a place of origins. For English settlers, this was their final resting place, the end of their journey to a remote place to the west of their home. Yet it was also a birth place for them, a “new” England, a new “Israel” that would provide a fertile ground in which to plant their fields and raise their sons. The problem, as we will see herein, is that another people were already planting here, and they had their own new generations to cultivate, their longstanding responsibilities to this land holding greater weight than the promise of a distant “Lord God.” While ancient planting fields and bonds of reciprocity rooted the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wabanaki families deeply in these places, men like Mather also claimed a “rightful possession” to these lands, which they imagined had been granted them by a higher authority. At this intersection of competing claims, “rights” and responsibilities often conflicted. The puzzle that is both perplexing and disturbing to unpack, if our orientation is east, is the way in which men like Mather sought to portray the practice and defense of those longstanding Indigenous responsibilities to land and kin as a “mischievous” plot against “the English Israel” which had planted itself “amongst” them.

The records also reveal a much more complex role for Weetamoo. In Mather’s postwar narrative of Wamsutta’s capture, she is reduced to a scorned wife who erroneously believes her husband had been poisoned by settlers. In general, colonial narrators downplayed her role, and the conflicts between the colonies, while building a narrative of Indian treachery. But in the documents, she appears as a diplomat and leader who strategically manipulated and circumvented Plymouth’s interests in her lands in order to protect them.

Two overlooked manuscript letters concerning Weetamoo, explored in chapter three, shed new light on the origins of King Philip’s War. John Easton, the Quaker governor of Rhode Island, composed a letter to Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow, one month before the outbreak of war, detailing Weetamoo’s concerns regarding Plymouth Colony’s encroachment on her lands, and urging Winslow to restrain this imposition on “the Queen’s Right.” Rather than addressing her pressing concerns, Winslow himself wrote to Weetamoo on the eve of war, hoping to persuade the influential leader to remain neutral. The letter makes clear Winslow’s intent to contain Metacom, a neighboring sachem and Weetamoo’s brother-in-law. Both letters illuminate the context of the causes of war in striking ways, as well as the reluctance of later historians to acknowledge the importance of Weetamoo’s leadership or the strategies Plymouth pursued in its invasion of Metacom’s stronghold. Thus, homing in on two extraordinary but neglected actors—Weetamoo and James Printer—led me not only to recover crucial documents, but to uncover a radically different “narrative field.”

READING SCENARIOS

In my research, I also focused on reading the primary sources closely for what was happening on the ground—interpreting actions against statements, reading depictions of geography, paying close attention to behavior, movements, and exchanges. Influenced by Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, and approaches from Native literary studies, I considered the “scenarios” contained within primary documents, reading people’s actions in places of cultural and ecological significance, through a culturally specific lens. In writing, I also sought to imaginatively reconstruct these “place-worlds.” This style may be especially evident beginning with chapter four, on the opening of the war, where storytelling evokes the interruptive, chaotic nature of war, even as critical close reading sheds light on events and causes.²⁰

This process was enabled by language study—dwelling on a place name or title, or utilizing multiple language resources to recover a more accurate conceptualization of a practice like “tribute” or a category like “captive.” But it also entailed reading texts, such as deeds, within a network of related documents. For example, one mistake that historians sometimes make is to assume that a court grant can be read as the beginning of colonial settlement, or as a marker of legitimacy. In contrast, I would often find that a “grant” issued by the Plymouth or Massachusetts Court did not lead to immediate settlement but rather to protests by Native people who inhabited those places. Sometimes the resistance to “improvement” was overt, such as dismantling built structures or assaulting livestock. In other cases it was a matter of discerning the evidence of continued inhabitation and signs of protecting lands against encroachment. Often, statements made in court years later demonstrated that although English people claimed title, Indigenous people continued to inhabit, cultivate, and know land as their own, retaining their ancestral rights and responsibilities.

READING THE LAND AS ARCHIVE

Likewise, a large part of the research for this project has entailed walking, paddling, and driving through the places where these events took place. The land itself is an archive that demands interpretation. My own education often involved my father, along with Abenaki community leaders like Lenny Lampman, Louise Lampman Larivee, Lester Lampman, and Larry Lapan, and my tracking mentor Gordon Russell, taking me out on the land and showing me the stories it has to tell. Those excursions entailed learning to recognize the rocks that revealed the remains of homes and council houses, understanding how apple trees planted by grandmothers were still feeding deer, which in turn were still feeding families through the winter, and learning to read the flow of the river in rapids and trout pools, or, as I learned from Wampanoag tribal historians, seeing the cliffs where councils were held at Metacom’s stronghold of Montaup. These ancient and ongoing places all have stories attached to them—features that evoke memories, embed oral traditions, and map subsistence and survival, and that can reveal acute insight into a historical document.

My teachers in Abenaki country consistently emphasized the importance of oral history, learned on the land and at the kitchen table. When I began this project, I imagined the same might be true in southern New England, but I learned that I had as much to learn from Wampanoag readings of the documents as I did from hearing oral histories. When I visited Massachusetts and Rhode Island, out came books, illuminating readings of the printed word, laced with ironic humor about all of the misguided interpretations that have been published over the years. We have a tendency to think of Native people, of the past and even of the present, as “oral cultures,” but this characterization fails to account for adaptation. The Wampanoags and their neighbors swiftly and adeptly adopted reading and the culture of the book in the seventeenth century, making them a highly literate people. Moreover, these communities have been engaged with the historical record for multiple generations, producing analysis, synthesis, and knowledge, which is informed by their oral traditions. Consultation and exchange regarding the interpretation of documents, places, actions, and motivations is an ongoing process in which I am engaged, a process that will never be complete. Thus, as you reach the end of this book, you will encounter more openings than closures, inviting the process of research, recovery, and exchange to continue.

My own obsession with land and place, swamps and rivers, led to many hours immersed in maps, as I strove to comprehend routes of movement, tracked particular places, and attempted to reconstruct subsistence and recreate the historical space in my mind. The maps would inevitably lead me back to those swamps and rivers, where my legs would become snagged in brambles, my feet wet and muddy. In southern New England, one of the greatest challenges was figuring out how to access and understand places that had been radically transformed by colonialism and industrial development. I encountered a stark difference in southern New England than what I had previously experienced in northern New England. Whereas so much of our forested land in Wabanaki has either been sustained or recovered, in Wampanoag country the development is overwhelming, in some places erasing any traces of the Indigenous landscape that preceded it. I will never forget the experience of traveling to Mattapoisett (in Somerset, Massachusetts), where Weetamoo grew up, to find a massive power plant overshadowing the entire peninsula.

•   •   •

Readers will be able to travel in digital space to many of these places, via the book’s website, at http://ourbelovedkin.com, which features a wide array of maps, images, and related documents as well as “connections” that offer additional context. These online maps, created for the book, are often key to understanding Indigenous networks, places, and movements in each chapter. The website provides multiple options for navigation. From the website’s table of contents, you can select “Navigate Alongside the Book.” You can also follow the embedded link to each chapter’s digital “path,” provided in the first endnote of each chapter in this book. Or you can select individual embedded links, which appear in additional endnotes throughout the text. Through this website, the interested reader will be able to journey beyond the page, linking to key documents, places, and contexts that further illuminate the stories contained in the book, allowing participation to extend into digital space, and perhaps, out onto the land.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE STORIES OF OUR ANCESTORS

In my travels, I realized that it was my own unique family that has compelled me to tell this story anew. The most obvious is my father’s influence, teaching me to read the land and waterways, to understand the depth of history that lies within the land, to laugh at our human fallibility in the face of so much power. Still, the more I wrote, the more I realized that an equally strong influence came from the stories I heard from my cherished Babcia, my mother’s mother. At the beginning of World War II, my grandmother found her family suddenly displaced by a war in which she had no commanding role and no power of resistance. She lived on a farm in rural Poland with her parents, three young children, and my grandfather, who once pulled a plow by the strength of his broad shoulders when the oxen gave out. They were displaced from their home by opposing armies, coming from both Russia and Germany, and she soon found herself separated from her husband, her parents, and her siblings, as she and her children were transported on cattle cars, often in bitter cold, between Nazi labor camps. Babcia was a phenomenal storyteller, and her harrowing tales have stayed with me. Her ability to strategize in the midst of chaos was astounding, and led to the survival of seven children, three of whom were born during the war, including my mother. I know that but for the strength and intelligence of this woman, who never had a formal education, I would not be here.

Yet among the most important realizations I drew from her stories was that for most people in the world, war simply arrives at their door, an unwelcome invader. It is not the carefully orchestrated series of causes, effects, strategies, and events that historians often construct in the aftermath. For most people, war is a relentless storm that arrives without warning, a swirl of chaos that upends their lives in untold ways. For most mothers and many fathers, the goal of war is merely striving to ensure that their children will survive. Inevitably, this understanding shapes my reading of the documents as much as my training as a scholar. Rather than striving for objectivity, I’ve taken a cue from my grandmother and father.21 I aim to strive for integrity in my research and interpretation, and pursue a relentless determination to document the strategies of survival. I acknowledge, and even cultivate, a sense of embeddedness (rather than distance) through my writing. In doing so, I draw on and respect the language of this land, which privileges participation. This includes using writing as a tool, and this book as an awikhigan, to draw you, the reader, into this Native space, to use the techniques of storytelling to draw you into “place-worlds,” with the goal of deeper understanding.

Opening the door to Weetamoo’s story meant understanding her as a mother, a sister, and a leader responsible for protecting all of her “beloved kin.” Likewise, James Printer’s story revealed his family’s remarkable efforts to find sanctuary for their relations when it seemed that no place in their homeland was safe. This project also changed when I became a mother, transformed by my newfound understanding of the lengths to which a parent will go to protect a single life. It brought not only deeper understanding of the actions of Weetamoo and James Printer, but also, quite unexpectedly, of Mary Rowlandson, and most assuredly, of those ancestors who found refuge in the north country and survived.