The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast after King Philip's War

Abstract

The runners set out before dawn. Traveling east from the rushing falls at South Natick, Massachusetts, they swept over cold earth and under mid-autumn stars, silhouetted by headlights cutting the dark. By the time they reached the river, the sun had risen just high enough to illuminate an astonishing sight. Three mishoonash, wooden dugouts fashioned by Wampanoag Indians, floated on the Charles River upstream from the Boston skyline and alongside crew teams stroking in dawn practice. Not since the days of King Philip’s War (1675–1678) had such vessels made the trip downriver to the harbor. The Sacred Run and Paddle, undertaken on October 30, 2010, commemorated one of the most wrenching chapters in King Philip’s War: the forced removal of Nipmuc and other Eastern Algonquian peoples from their homes to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where they were confined during the winter of 1675–1676. Many of them died on that windswept spot and in other episodes of that colonial crisis, the Northeast’s “great watershed.” Giant digester eggs of a sewage treatment plant overshadow Deer Island today, and the land gives scant testimony to the island’s calamitous past. Yet memories of this violence were unquestionably alive that frigid October day, animating an unprecedented though long-coming reclamation of indigenous geographies altered but not erased by centuries of cross-cultural struggle. As the mishoonash pushed through the waves, they were more than maritime curiosities. They were politically charged agents of decolonization, making a provocative statement to Boston and transforming its urban heart into native space.1