In November 2024, Brown University transferred 255 acres of land at Mount Hope in Bristol, Rhode Island (which is ancestral territory of the Pokanoket Tribe) to a preservation trust established and governed by the Pokanoket Tribe. This act of restitution, nearly 350 years after King Philip’s War devastated the Pokanoket Confederacy, is historically remarkable not merely because of the size or symbolism of the land, but because it was granted to a people who remain unrecognized by both federal and state governments. In defying the institutional frameworks that typically govern land returns, this moment affirms the endurance of Pokanoket identity, sovereignty, and memory in what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance”: survival through resistance and presence rather than mere victimhood”.(1)

For generations, the Pokanoket have maintained a continuous identity despite profound efforts to erase them from the historical and political landscape. Core families within the tribe trace direct descent from Massasoit Ousamequin and his son Metacom (King Philip), and their connection to the land at Mount Hope they call Potumtuk. Their oral history traces an unbroken story of survival and perseverance. From Metom, the son of King Philip, who endured the ordeals of enslavement in Bermuda, to his descendant Simon Simons, who served in the Revolutionary War, and onward to the present day leadership of the Pokanket Tribe. It is a legacy preserved through both oral tradition and documented in the written records of colonial and early American history. The land Brown University released was the spiritual and political heart of the Pokanoket Tribe and the location of Metacom’s final stand in 1676. Following the war, colonial authorities outlawed Pokanoket governance, sold survivors into slavery, and dispersed remaining families across New England and the Atlantic.(2)

As Linford D. Fisher and Jenny Hale Pulsipher have shown, the enslavement of Indigenous people after King Philip’s War was systematic and widespread. Between 1675 and 1677, hundreds of Indigenous captives, many of them women and children, were sold into bondage in the Caribbean, Iberia, and North Africa, while others were condemned to servitude within New England itself.(3) These policies not only removed Indigenous people from their lands, but also sought to dismantle Pokanoket sovereignty and erase the cultural continuity and collective memory of the Pokanoket people. 

These colonial policies not only removed Indigenous people from their lands, but also deliberately sought to dismantle Pokanoket sovereignty and erase their cultural continuity and collective memory. This process was not unique to the Pokanoket. Across New England, colonial and later American narratives frequently misnamed, subsumed, or declared extinct Indigenous nations to justify land seizure and undermine claims to sovereignty. After the Pequot War of 1637, for example, the English declared the Pequot people “annihilated” and legally outlawed the use of their tribal name, forcing survivors to live under other identities such as the Mohegan or Narragansett.(4)

Such acts were part of a broader colonial logic that historian Jean M. O’Brien has termed “Firsting and Lasting”, a rhetorical practice in which English settler communities proclaimed themselves the rightful “first” inhabitants of a newly “civilized” space, while simultaneously casting Indigenous peoples as having “lasted” only into a distant, vanished past.(5) This narrative strategy functioned as a powerful tool of erasure, recasting sovereign Indigenous nations like the Pokanoket as relics, thereby denying their continued presence, legitimacy, and rights to land.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, these distortions became embedded in the historical record. The Pokanoket were increasingly labeled as “Wampanoag,” a term used broadly and retroactively to homogenize the diverse surviving Indigenous communities in the wake of King Philip's War. Yet this name would have been unfamiliar to Metacom himself, who identified not as Wampanoag but as Pokanoket, or his father Massasoit Osamequin of the once powerful confederacy he exercised influence over. This renaming was not merely a linguistic error, it was a deliberate act of colonial simplification and control that continues to obscure Indigenous history, enabling centuries of land theft, historical marginalization, and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty.

Yet the Pokanoket resisted erasure. Over centuries, they preserved genealogical records, reestablished governance structures, and protected cultural knowledge tied to the land at Mount Hope. When members of the tribe reoccupied the Brown University, owned property in 2017 and demanded its return, they asserted a truth that could not be ignored, that the Pokanoket are not a historical footnote but a living people with a rightful claim to their homeland.

Brown’s eventual land transfer in 2024 was a direct result of that truth. Though the Pokanoket Tribe lacked federal recognition, a bureaucratic process often criticized for favoring documentation over lived history and for reproducing colonial power structures, the moral, historical, and cultural strength of the Pokanoket claim was overwhelming.(6) It is in this context that Brown University’s decision stands as a historic act of restorative justice. Despite the Pokanoket Tribes lack of federal or state recognition, Brown University, a globally respected Ivy League institution formally acknowledged the Pokanoket as the rightful stewards of their ancestral homeland. This act is extraordinary not only because of its scale, but because it publicly validated the Pokanoket’s unbroken identity, oral history, and historical truth in the face of centuries of institutional denial. In doing so, Brown University challenged the logic of erasure embedded in settler narratives and helped restore visibility, legitimacy, and dignity to a people long written out of history.

This act is not merely a symbolic gesture but a material restoration of land, agency, and dignity. It sets a powerful precedent, that Indigenous nations do not need federal recognition to deserve justice, nor must they wait for colonial structures to validate their existence. The Pokanoket land return is, above all, a testament to survivance, the capacity of Indegnous people endure, to remember, and to reclaim.