Christine M. Delucia. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 496 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-20117-8.
Reviewed by Boyd Cothran (York University)
Published on H-AmIndian (April, 2020)
Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe (University of South Carolina Lancaster)
Dwelling in the Shadow of King Philip’s War
Christine M. DeLucia introduces her book by quoting Colin Calloway’s observation that King Philip’s War remains one of the “great watershed” moments in the Indigenous and colonial history of New England. “It is difficult to escape the shadow it casts,” he said. “We cannot study Indian New England prior to 1675 without the knowledge of the destruction to come; after the war, things are never the same again” (p. 1). A terrible, genocidal conflict that raged throughout southern New England from 1675 to 1678, King Philip’s War was, without a doubt, “one of the most devastating periods in the history of the early American Northeast” (p. xi). Led by the Pokanoket Wampanoag leader Metacomet, called King Philip by the English, the war drew together a diverse coalition of Indigenous tribes including the Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, and Narraganset against the English and their Mohegan and Mohawk allies. Commonly considered one of the deadliest wars in American history by relative population, King Philip’s War casts across the history of New England and the United States a long shadow indeed.
But DeLucia’s exhaustively researched and extensively documented study of the history and legacy of King Philip’s War dwells in another shadow, too: the titanic shadow of Jill Lepore’s Bancroft Prize-winning The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1999). Published over twenty years ago, The Name of War has, in many ways, laid the foundation for historians’ contemporary understanding of this conflict. Focusing on the development of a peculiarly American “national mentalité and mythos” (p. 2) that justified tremendous violence through the literary deployment of racial ideologies of civilization and savagery, Lepore’s popular book reintroduced thousands of Americans to a largely forgotten regional conflict that occurred nearly 350 years ago. DeLucia, however, takes issue with Lepore’s methodology. Lepore’s focus on elite print culture and her historiographical concern with tracing the origins of American identity led her to ignore or even misunderstand the meaning of this conflict for Indigenous communities. As DeLucia puts it: “As a result of focusing tightly on narrative language, Lepore’s constrained methodology foreclosed important avenues of inquiry. ‘How those Algonquians who survived King Philip’s War commemorated and remembered the war is, sadly, mere speculation,’ The Name of War lamented. This is misleading” (pp. 14-15).
Over the course of seven chapters, DeLucia constructs a different understanding of King Philip’s War and its legacy in the US Northeast. The book draws on extensive archival material from small archives and local historical societies as well as material cultural objects such as wampum belts, deerskins maps, petroglyphs, and megaliths. Focusing on the contested making of place through acts of commemoration, memorialization, and counter- or rememorializations, Memory Lands takes the reader on a simultaneously far-reaching and meticulously detailed study of four memoryscapes, “constellations of spots on the land that have accrued stories over time, transforming them from seemingly blank or neutral spaces into emotionally infused, political potent places” (p. 3).
Structurally, Memory Lands eschews chronology. Instead, DeLucia roots her understanding of the presence of the past in space. After a substantial preface and introduction, the book opens with an examination of Deer Island in Boston Harbor, which was used as a prison camp for New England Natives during the war. Moving both forward and backward through time, DeLucia traces minutely, though not always systematically, the connections, continuities, and continuums of memory from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. From Deer Island, the book next moves to the shorelines, coasts, islands, and swamplands that make up the Narragansett Bay region. Here she focuses mostly upon the contested memory of the Great Swamp massacre and the multigenerational struggles over how to commemorate this atrocity as well as protracted lawsuits over the land’s development in the twentieth century. DeLucia’s third memoryscape follows the “Great River,” Kwinitekw, or the Connecticut River. Guiding the reader along the four-hundred-mile-long Great River, we encounter places such as the falls at Peskeomskut, renamed Turners Falls, and learn more about the legacy of violence during the war and how settlers sought to contain and control both the river and the memory of colonial violence in the region throughout the centuries that followed. Finally, DeLucia concludes her book with a fascinating chapter that explores the diasporic consequences of King Philip’s War for those Narragansett Indians who may have been sold into slavery in Bermuda and beyond.
Memory Lands’ greatest strength is its research methodology. DeLucia embraces “decolonizing methodologies” as well as the ethos of community-engaged and community-informed research as articulated by Indigenous studies scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Devon Abbott Mihesuah, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, and others. Her scholarship is thus based upon, and committed to, hearing from, engaging with, and incorporating “Indigenous perspectives on their own terms” (p. 19). Her work also benefits from a methodology of embodied experience with the New England landscape, which gives her descriptions of the places she’s writing about greater depth and texture. Visiting these off-the-beaten-path places “meant climbing mountains, mucking through swamps, sliding across frozen streams, venturing down dirt roads and wooded paths, enduring island ferries with seasick tourists” (p. 19). Finally, her work is the result of an exhaustive investigation into “the hundreds or thousands of tiny public libraries, tribal museums, and local historical societies” (p. 13) to be found throughout New England. Over the course of several years, DeLucia painstakingly visited more than 140 of these “memory houses” and pawed over the manuscripts and material culture that these treasure troves preserve. All of this attention to detail informs her granular level of analysis. The result is a neo-antiquarian examination of the legacy of King Philip’s War that embraces the parochial and passionately local nature of memory.
Yet DeLucia’s granularity is also the book’s greatest weakness. Embracing the forgotten corners of rural New England, the sheer detail to be found in this book is at times numbing, and even enervating. Wading through the density of analysis and the stratified layers of meaning piled upon meaning, Memory Lands is historiographically archaeological in nature. And, perhaps more importantly, DeLucia’s refusal to connect this deeply local story to a larger, national one limits the book’s applicability to scholars working on similar themes elsewhere. But in the final analysis, Memory Lands is a remarkable feat of research and analysis for which DeLucia should be praised.
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Citation:
Boyd Cothran. Review of Delucia, Christine M., Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast.
H-AmIndian, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54840
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