Remapping King Philip’s War: New Geographies and Methodologies for the Indigenous and Colonial Northeast

The geography of King Philip’s War (1675-1678), one of the most devastating conflicts of the seventeenth-century Northeast, which brought diverse indigenous and settler communities into struggle, is being substantially revised.  This presentation examines new understandings of “place” that alter, or outright challenge, conventional conceptions of the conflict and its consequences.  While previous scholarship, such as Jill Lepore’s Bancroft Prize-winning The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, focused on a national scale of analysis, or retrieved selected micro-geographies of importance to English colonists, they largely missed the significance of other scales and terrains, especially those of longstanding centrality for Algonquian tribal communities.  This presentation discusses a constellation of historical landscapes all but written out of colonial and scholarly narratives, which nevertheless shaped the conflict’s trajectory, outcomes for diverse combatants and refugees, and subsequent memorializations of a watershed moment. 

Areas like the freshwater spring and cornlands at Kickemuit; the multi-tribal fishing grounds at Peskeompskut; the ceremonial and sheltering grounds at Nipsachuck; and the interior upland retreats north of the Piscataqua River anchor powerful alternative geographies, through which Algonquians were strategically moving, while activating deeply rooted kinship networks.  Yet these intensively inhabited and visited indigenous nodes tend to disappear in studies framed with colonial conceptions of place (e.g., Rhode Island, Connecticut).  This presentation reflects on investigative processes that have helped reanimate these geographies—both the promises and limitations of interdisciplinary methodologies.  Especially challenging are recent research processes that link academic archaeologists, tribal historic preservation offices and community members, landholders, avocational historians, and State authorities.  While their initial goal has been to generate revised understandings of war-related terrain, these collaborations have also generated complex multi-stakeholder discourses about knowledge production, research ethics, and ongoing indigenous connections to grounds that have been incrementally alienated from tribal homelands.