Sowams is often mistakenly identified as the homeland of the Pokanoket Tribe when in fact, it was a prominent settlement and political center within a much larger and more complex Indigenous confederacy. This confusion originates in part from colonial-era writings that focused heavily on Sowams because it was the principal residence of Massasoit Ousamequin and the location of key early encounters with English settlers in the 17th century.(1)

Historians such as Virginia Baker have clarified that Pokanoket, an Eastern Algonquian term meaning “the cleared land” does not denote a single village, but a broad territorial and political identity that encompassed vast portions of southeastern Massachusetts and the East Bay region of Rhode Island.(2) The ancestral homeland of the Pokanoket Tribe was geographically centered between the Taunton and Seekonk Rivers, encompassing present day Barrington, Warren, Bristol, and East Providence in Rhode Island, as well as Seekonk, Swansea, Rehoboth, and Somerset in Massachusetts.(3)

Within this larger domain, Sowams stood as a vital subregion. As Virginia Baker emphasized, Sowams functioned as a ceremonial and agricultural nexus, linking outlying communities to the Pokanokets.(4) Colonial maps and records describe the area as rich in cultivated fields, freshwater springs, and extensive village networks.(5) Archaeological surveys, along with historical accounts from early European explorers such as Giovanni da Verrazzano (1524), Martin Pring (1603), and Thomas Dermer (1619), confirm that the region was densely populated, as evidenced by the abundance of settlements and extensive fields of cultivated corn.⁵ Located in what is now Barrington and Warren Rhode Island, it was the seat of Massasoit Ousamequin power and served as a hub of diplomacy, trade, and agriculture. For these reasons, Plymouth Colony dispatched two expeditions in 1621 and again in 1623 to Sowams, the principal residence of Massasoit Osamequin, where he exercised authority over a broad territory extending from the eastern shores of Narragansett Bay to the outer reaches of Cape Cod.

As Sagamore Po Wauipi Neimpaug of the modern Pokanoket Tribe explains, “Sowams was the homeland of the Pokanoket Tribe, not the entire Pokanoket Nation.” This distinction is critical, as the Pokanoket were the leading tribe within a confederation of more than sixty allied tribes, clans, and bands spread across southern New England, from Narragansett Bay to Cape Cod, all united by kinship ties, diplomatic alliances, and tributary relationships. The use of “Sowams” and “Pokanoket” interchangeably by colonial writers and subsequently in modern public memory has contributed to the flattening of a vast territorial and political identity into a single location.

Today, Sowams lives on not only in the names of local roads, rivers, and historic markers, but in the cultural memory and the sovereign identity of the Pokanoket Tribe. By honoring Sowams for what it truly was, a political, ceremonial, and ecological heart of a once powerful Indigenous confederacy, we help correct the distortions that have long marginalized the Pokanoket from the historical narrative of New England.

In 2024, this restoration took a tangible form when Brown University, under growing public and moral pressure, returned 255 acres of sacred land in Bristol RI around Mount Hope (Montaup) to the Pokanoket Tribe. This unprecedented act of Indigenous reclamation, though partial, marked a historic acknowledgment of the Pokanoket Tribes ancestral ties to the region and enduring presence. It reaffirmed Sowams as not just a symbolic homeland, but a place where the Pokanoket Tribe can once again exercise cultural stewardship, environmental guardianship, and sovereign connection to the land.

Such acts of restitution are rare but they are possible. And they remind us that historical truth must be paired with material justice. By confronting the erasures of the past and returning land to the original stewards of this region, we take vital steps toward healing, dignity, and a more truthful future. Sowams is not lost. It is remembered, reclaimed, and once again being tended by the people who have never left it in spirit.