Massachusetts soil holds two stories. One is celebrated every July 4th. The other, older, bloodier, and deliberately buried, is the one we need to understand first.
One hundred years before the American Revolution, King Philip’s War engulfed the Indigenous nations of southern New England, Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett and others, in one of the deadliest conflicts in North American history relative to population. When it ended, the colonial winners didn’t just claim the land, they also claimed the story. A narrative of inevitable destiny, of brave but doomed resistance, of a continent naturally passing from one civilization to the next. A story designed to be mourned, not questioned.
But what happens when you question it? In Wampanoag country, the war’s end was total: leaders killed, survivors enslaved. Or was it? What did colonists find when they arrived, and what did they dismantle? What was lost that we still don’t fully understand? The Indian wars didn’t end in New England; they migrated westward with the expanding nation. Was the logic of dispossession already present in the Pilgrims’ earliest encounters with the First Nations? Does Mary Rowlandson’s celebrated captivity narrative tell us as much about the making of American racial and gender identity as it does about war?
Hosted by journalist Phillip Martin, this conversation features Indigenous panelists from local tribal communities and asks what it means that we still carry this story, and what it costs us that we’ve never fully told the other one.
Join the conversation.