Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast by Christine M. DeLucia (review)

In the groundbreaking work The Name of War, Jill Lepore asked a somewhat rhetorical question: “if war is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only one side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing presses?” (xxi). Lepore lamented that “how those Algonquians who survived King Philip’s War commemorated and remembered the war is, sadly, mere speculation” (184). In Memory Lands, Christine DeLucia complicates Lepore’s analysis and proves there is still much to be learned from indigenous memories if we know where to look and how to listen. Moving beyond the written word and its impact upon the settler colonial history of New England, DeLucia grounds the work upon the significance of place. Employing a variety of methodological approaches ranging from indigenous studies, ethnohistory, and material culture to geography, memory studies, and environmental history, DeLucia retraces the subtle and often overlooked sites of indigenous remembrance and survivance.

In this study, DeLucia makes two overarching arguments closely connected to the work’s methodology. As DeLucia states, the book “challenges the idea that the colonial period and its violences are matters of the distant past, tracking instead their enduring influence in modernity, and the contemporary persistence of settler colonialism” (1). For this reason, DeLucia contends that it is necessary to expand the scope of historical inquiry and examine the remembrance of King Philip’s War over the longue durée.

Secondly, DeLucia argues that the “remembrance of historical violence takes place” as “understandings of contested pasts take shape in relation to particular landscapes, material features of the world, and politically defined territories” (2). For DeLucia, a place-based approach is essential because it “restores the multidimensional quality of remembrance overlooked in histories reliant primarily on written records” (3). To examine the “chorographic links between time and space,” DeLucia employs the concept of memoryscapes or “constellations of spots on the land that have accrued stories over time, transforming them from seemingly blank or neutral spaces into emotionally infused, politically potent places” (3).

In addition to conversations with members of different Native communities, DeLucia conducted research in more than 140 “memory houses,” or local archives, located in public libraries, tribal museums, and historical societies. From these individuals and collections, DeLucia located the “stories, anecdotes, heirlooms, monuments, maps, and other vernacular items” that were “hauled down from family attics” and “exist nowhere else” (13). While the paucity of detailed maps and visualizations makes comprehending this place-based analysis challenging, DeLucia purposefully omitted such aides to protect sacred and sensitive locations from potential looting and vandalism (25).

True to its methodological underpinnings, the book eschews a chronological organizational scheme and is instead divided into four parts, each rooted in a particular place. Part I geographically focuses on the Greater Boston area, specifically Deer Island, where colonists forcibly removed and interned Native people during King Philip’s War. Building upon the work of Jean O’Brien, Chapter 1, “Contested Passages,” shows how the interplay between place and text amplified the impact of settler colonial memorialization. More illuminating is DeLucia’s focus on movement and its restriction as part of Anglo-colonizers’ “exclusionary version of placemaking, attempting to redetermine who could be mobile within an important node for diplomacy, cross-cultural communication, and trade” (49). Chapter 2, “Protesting the ‘Perfect City,’” concludes Part I by detailing the ways in which Native people during the last two centuries have reclaimed these historically restricted areas through protests, legal battles, and sacred mishoonash trips down the Charles River.

Part II covers Narragansett Country with the Great Swamp and the Nipsachuck Swamp serving as foci. Chapter 3, “Habitations by Narragansett Bay,” recalls the massacres that took place at these foci and locates them within a longer struggle occuring at slave-markets, in courts, and on reservations. Chapter 4, “Monumentalizing After...