King Philip’s War began on June 20, 1675, when long-standing tensions between the Pokanoket people and the English colonists erupted into armed conflict. The war lasted until August 12, 1676, when the Pokanoket leader Massasoit Metacom, called "King Philip" by the English, was killed near Mount Hope in present-day Bristol, Rhode Island. Hostilities continued in some regions, particularly northern New England, until 1678. The war began in Sowams, the ancestral homeland of the Pokanoket, in present-day Warren, Rhode Island, and quickly spread across southern New England, from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley and the hill towns of western Massachusetts.(1)

For over 50 years prior to the war, the Pokanoket Massasoit Ousamequin had maintained a fragile but vital peace with the English, beginning with a treaty signed with Plymouth Colony on March 22, 1621.(2) That treaty committed both parties to mutual protection and cooperation. Contrary to modern misconceptions, the Pokanoket were not merely a “tribe,” but the central member of a powerful Indigenous confederation that included dozens of allied bands, clans, and nations throughout southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the coastal islands.(3)

Following Ousamequin’s death in 1661, his eldest son Wamsutta (also known as Alexander) succeeded him. A skilled diplomat and respected leader, Wamsutta refused to cede Pokanoket sovereignty. In 1662, under suspicion of unauthorized land dealings, he was forcibly seized by order of Plymouth General Court by Josiah Winslow while peacefully encamped with a large party at Monponset Pond.(4) Although surrounded by his warriors, Wamsutta offered no resistance, trusting that the peace established by his father still held. Soon after being taken into English custody, he fell violently ill and died within days in the arms of his wife, the Pocasset leader Weetamoo.(5) While colonial accounts attributed his death to illness, Pokanoket oral traditions and circumstantial evidence suggest that he may have been poisoned, a deliberate act to eliminate a sovereign who refused to submit.(6)

Wamsutta’s death fractured the unity of the Pokanoket Tribe and the allied confederates. His younger brother, Metacom, assumed the title of Massasoit but was not initially recognized by all its sachems. Unlike his father and brother, the English refused to treat Massasoit Metacom as a sovereign leader. Instead, they summoned and reprimanded him like a subordinate, most notably during the meeting at Taunton in 1671, where he was pressured to surrender arms and submit to colonial oversight.(7) Tensions escalated as English encroachment deepened, land was steadily seized, treaties were routinely violated, and Indigenous sovereignty was systematically eroded.

By 1675, confronted with forced disarmament, relentless colonial expansion, and the systematic erosion of Pokanoket autonomy, Massasoit Metacom made the fateful decision to resist. The resulting war was catastrophic in scale. Scholarly estimates indicate that approximately 40 percent of the Native population in southern New England were killed, displaced, or sold into slavery, while about 5 percent of the colonial population perished.(8) Allied Indigenous nations, including the Pokanoket, Nipmuc, Narragansett, and others attacked 52 of the 90 English colonial settlements, with many towns burned, pillaged, or abandoned before being retaken.(9) This made the ensuing conflict one of the bloodiest per capita in early American history which ravaged much of New England.(10) With Massasoit Metacom’s death near Mount Hope in August 1676, and the final battles concluding by 1678, King Philip’s War effectively shattered Indigenous sovereignty throughout southern New England.(11) 

 Entire Indigenous tribes were decimated. Survivors were sold into slavery or forced to flee to the Indigenous lands out of reach of the English in the north and west to escape such a fate. The colonial governments outlawed Indigenous self‑governance, cultural practices, and landholding, and according to oral Indigenous history the very name Pokanket from being used and quickly apprehending those who identified with that name. For the Pokanoket people, the war marked not only a devastating military defeat but the violent dismantling of their confederacy and the dispossession of their ancestral territories.

The wholesale enslavement of surviving members of the Pokanoket Tribe and their Indigenous allies following King Philip’s War was neither incidental nor sporadic. It was a deliberate policy enacted by colonial governments in Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut. Colonial authorities sold hundreds, and likely over a thousand Indigenous men, women, and children into slavery in the Atlantic markets of Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, Spain, and even North Africa. Others, particularly children, were bound to long-term indentures or involuntary apprenticeships within New England households, often lasting into adulthood deprived of their culture and forced to assimilate into a society that would never fully accept them. This systematic removal served both to profit the colonies in the wake of the conflict and to break the generational continuity of Indigenous communities, thereby undermining their cultural survival and resistance capacity.(12) This process effectively transformed the remaining Indigenous population into colonial subjects answerable to English laws and authorities.(13)

Yet the story does not end in tragedy. In November 2024, Brown University finalized the transfer of 255 acres of its Mount Hope property in Bristol, Rhode Island, the ancestral land of the Pokankets including the sacred sites associated with Metacom’s leadership and death, to a preservation trust established by the Pokanoket Tribe.(14) This land return fulfills a generations-old pledge made by surviving Pokanokets to never forget who they are, to resist total assimilation, and to gather their dispersed people and return to their ancestral homeland. It marks a tangible step toward reclaiming the sovereignty and stewardship that were violently stripped away more than three centuries ago.