This book reassesses the nature and meanings of King Philip’s War (1675-1678), a major Indigenous resistance movement and colonial conflict that pervasively reshaped the American Northeast and has reverberated among regional communities for centuries. It focuses on specific places that have been meaningful to Native American (Algonquian) peoples over long spans of time, as well as to colonial New England residents more recently, and how the waging and remembrance of violence at these locales has affected communities’ senses of past, place, and collective purpose. Its case studies reinterpret intercultural interactions and settler colonialism in early America, the importance of place and environment in the production of history, and the myriad ways in which memory has been mobilized to shape the present and future. It emphasizes that American history continues to be contested, in highly local and sometimes hard-to-perceive ways that require careful interdisciplinary methods to access, as well as in more prominent arenas.

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Water surrounded Algonquian peoples of the Northeast, and they highly valued it for sustenance, medicine, travel, spirituality, and other purposes. When English settlers in Plymouth Colony and surroundings areas attempted to claim territorial rights in the seventeenth century, they also sought water sources, including freshwater springs, to support colonization projects. Native/colonial tensions escalated in mid-century, and when the indigenous uprising known as King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, a place called Kickemuit Spring seemed to have been a vital locale. Situated in Wampanoag homelands, near an especially protected and fertile peninsula of vital cornlands, the spring appeared in various records as a meeting-place, a boundary-marker, and grounds of deliberate pushback against English troops by Native parties. In the conflict’s devastating aftermath, both Natives and colonists transformed such springs into sites of memory, which attempted to convey their respective—and frequently divergent—understandings of historical violence. Tracking the material and symbolic evolutions of Kickemuit, as well as other environmental features linked to memory, demonstrates the sharply contested character of “placemaking” in the Northeast. It also highlights the ongoing pressures of settler colonialism in the region, where enduring Native communities continue to challenge entrenched Euro-American convictions of place-ownership.

This essay re-examines Wampanoag and Anglo-American relationships by focusing on a post-King Philip's War land negotiation document. Using the concept of “terrapolitics,” it argues for the significance of expansive place-based relationships for Wampanoag communities and the challenges posed by English settler colonialism in the seventeenth century.

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