The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America's Indigenous Past by Douglas Hunter (review)

the richly textured landscapes and waterways of the Native Northeast have been powerful conduits connecting tribal communities to ancestors, histories, spiritual systems, and resources. Across this extensively marked and memorialized terrain, a petroglyph-covered stone sometimes referred to as Dighton Rock has attracted an enormous outpouring of attention over several centuries as Europeans and American colonizers attempted to interpret its significances. Douglas Hunter, a former journalist whose history dissertation formed the basis of this book, examines these multilayered histories in order to critically contextualize Euro-colonial efforts at claiming this important Indigenous locale as their own and at dissociating it from Indigenous communities, past and present. Over the course often roughly chronological chapters, accompanied by illustrations, he probes how Euro-colonial ministers, intellectuals, avocational historians, landowners, ethnic groups, and many others (particularly the near-obsessive Edmund Burke Delabarre) have read into this stone purported signs of early explorations and transoceanic movements by Norse, Portuguese, Phoenicians, and others. The stone's contested history demonstrates how "ever-changing versions of American antiquity and racial hierarchies spawned under colonization served to disenfranchise Native Americans from their past, and in the process from their lands, while at the same time advancing northern Europeans as the rightful claimants to those lands" (5).

Hunter clearly asserts at the outset that the stone, situated in the heart of Wampanoag homelands by Assonet and the Taunton River watershed, bears Indigenous markings. Native "provenance was apparent from the beginning of European and Anglo-American inquiries" and "was the least cumbersome and most plausible explanation" (3), yet outside observers pursued increasingly tenuous and speculative theories averring non-Indigenous origins in bids to mobilize this material feature as tangible evidence of other, Eurocentric histories of peopling the Northeast. This analysis is in conversation with recent studies about the logic, mechanisms, and consequences of settler colonial mythologizing and place making, such as Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawn-land, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press, 2012), and it offers a fine-grained account not only of the varieties but also of the converging forms of these mentalities and actions in a local context.

While the preponderance of Hunter's source material centers on Euro-colonial interpretations (and outright imaginative projections or fantasies), there are notable sections where the study takes up potential Indigenous interpretations of the feature by Mohawk travelers (chapter 4) and by Anishinaabe leader Shingwauk in dialogue with the ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (chapter 7). These parts recognize that Euro-colonial antiquarians have never been the only parties invested in this stone; Indigenous interlocutors have also expressed interest in it, though discerning details of their readings can be challenging, given thick layers of colonialist framing. The book concludes with analysis of the twentieth-century museum at Dighton Rock State Park that has been constructed over the rock itself, creating a problematic interpretive milieu that Hunter reads as a sign of the rock's having been "transformed from an Indigenous artifact into the very statement, the very proof, of colonization" (235).

Given Hunter's commitment to critically unpacking settler colonial narratives and place-claiming processes and his attunement to the willfully overlooked or negated Indigenous significances of the stone by Euro-colonial proponents of dispossession, questions arise about the author's methodology, which evidently did not include much or any engagement or consultation with present-day Indigenous knowledge-keepers. These include the many tribal historians, cultural heritage leaders, museum and educational staff members, and others across southern New England in communities such as Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag that are most directly connected to the geographies under consideration. Members of these communities have commented extensively on histories of encounter and ongoing ties to ancestral homelands. Yet "this book...