The Indigenous people who welcomed the Pilgrims in 1620 did not identify as Wampanoag, but as Pokanoket. The name Pokanoket, meaning “the cleared land,” referred both to a sovereign people and their principal territory on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. This region formed the political and cultural heart of a powerful Indigenous confederation led by Massasoit Ousamequin. The Pokanoket Confederation included over sixty allied tribes, clans, and villages extending across what is now southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It was this confederation, not an entity called “Wampanoag” that negotiated the earliest treaties with Plymouth Colony.

The word Wampanoag, derived from an Eastern Algonquian root meaning “easterner” or “people of the dawn,” was originally a geographic and linguistic descriptor, not a tribal or political name. Linguists such as Ives Goddard and Blair Rudes have shown that it likely originated as a directional term used by interior Algonquian groups to describe coastal peoples, not as a name those people used for themselves.(1) The people living at Pokanoket, Pocasset, Sakonnet Nemasket, and Patuxet never referred to themselves as Wampanoag in any known primary sources from the early colonial period.

Like many Algonquian speaking peoples, these communities identified themselves not with abstract names but with the specific territories they inhabited. Names that were place based, relational, and political. Just as the French live in France, the Pokanoket lived within their own homeland. Pokanoket Country was situated between the Seekonk and Taunton Rivers. This territory encompassed what are now the towns of Barrington, Bristol, Warren, and East Providence in Rhode Island, as well as Seekonk, Swansea, Rehoboth, and Somerset in Massachusetts. It was a landscape of cultivated fields, riverways, coastal villages, and forested hunting grounds. The principal seat of Pokanoket leadership was the settlement of Sowams (Barrington/Warren RI), where Massasoit Ousamequin exercised authority over a territory extending from the eastern shores of Narragansett Bay to “the island in the east [Martha’s Vineyard] to the Cape [Cod].”(2)

Naming conventions among Algonquian societies typically reflected geographic and political autonomy. Kathleen J. Bragdon notes that identity among southern New England Indigenous peoples was “centered on village-based polities, headed by sachems,” and that these names often derived from a principal settlement or landscape feature.(3) Such names expressed ties to land, kinship networks, and local sovereignty, rather than allegiance to an overarching tribal label. For example, the people of Nemasket were Nemasket, those at Patuxet were Patuxet. The Pokanoket were no exception as they were called Pokanoket because they lived in and exercised dominion over Pokanoket territory.

The Pokanokets were one just one of a coalition of allied tribes within a larger confederation under Ousamequin’s leadership. This coalition included groups such as the Sakonnet, Nemasket, Mattakeeset, and others across southeastern New England. Although the confederation’s own name was not recorded in colonial sources, the Pokanoket were unmistakably its dominant polity militarily, diplomatically, and geographically throughout the early seventeenth century. Colonial officials like Daniel Gookin listed the “Pawkunnawkuts” among the principal nations of New England, and Edward Winslow repeatedly referred to Ousamequin’s seat as “Sowams or Puckanokick.”(4) In the absence of a surviving Indigenous term, it is historically accurate to refer to this alliance as the Pokanoket Confederation. This naming convention parallels broader Algonquian political structures, such as the Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia, which was similarly named after its most powerful member nation.(5)

The shift from Pokanoket to Wampanoag began in earnest after the outbreak and suppression of King Philip’s War (1675–1676), a brutal conflict initiated in part by the English arrest and suspicious death of Ousamequin’s eldest son, Wamsutta. His younger brother, Metacom, called King Philip by the English, led the Pokanokets and their Indigenous allies in one of the most widespread resistance movements in early colonial American history. After the war, colonial governments deliberately suppressed references to the Pokanoket name, given its association with rebellion, sovereignty, and defiance. Survivors of the Pokanoket Tribe were executed, sold into slavery, or driven into hiding and exile. Public identification as Pokanoket became dangerous in the aftermath of the war. Colonial officials, missionaries, and later American institutions imposed the term Wampanoag as a broad, depoliticized label for the surviving Indigenous peoples of the region, regardless of their distinct tribal affiliations prior to the conflict. It was likely adopted by the English from their Mohegan allies, who used it as a geographic term meaning “easterners.” This pattern of adopting Indigenous outsider names is mirrored in other English colonial designations, such as Mohawk, a hostile external name used by the Mohegan to refer to the Kanyen’kehá:ka, whose own name means “People of the Flint Place.”(6)

This colonial practice of name suppression has precedent. Following the Pequot War (1636–1637), the English undertook one of the earliest acts of deliberate ethnic erasure in New England. After the Mystic Massacre and the near annihilation of Pequot resistance, the 1638 Treaty of Hartford formally outlawed the use of the Pequot name. The treaty declared, “The Pequots shall no more be called Pequots but Narragansetts and Mohegans.”(7) Pequot survivors were placed under the control of English allied tribes, stripped of their language, and banned from gathering in their ancestral lands. The name itself was criminalized. Historians such as Jean M. O’Brien and David J. Silverman have interpreted this as an act of linguistic genocide, in which colonial powers not only eliminated military resistance but attempted to erase Indigenous identity itself.(8) Just as the Pequot endured and later reasserted their name and sovereignty, the Pokanoket survived this attempted erasure and continued to reclaim their rightful identity.

The imposition of the Wampanoag name served colonial interests in a number of ways. It obscured the memory of a powerful Indigenous polity that had once dictated regional diplomacy and land use. It collapsed the identities of multiple distinct tribal groups into a single, vague category, making it easier to manage Indigenous affairs within colonial and missionary bureaucracies. And it laid the groundwork for narratives of Indigenous “disappearance,” wherein Indigenous peoples were presumed extinct or assimilated once their original names were removed from the record.

Seventeenth century sources consistently use Pokanoket and its variants. Edward Winslow, writing in Good News from New England (1624), described his diplomatic visit to “Sawaams, or Puckanokick.”(9) Daniel Gookin, superintendent of Indian affairs, listed the “Pawkunnawkuts” among the five principal Indigenous nations of New England in 1674.(10) Nowhere in these texts is the term Wampanoag even mentioned or used to describe a tribe or political body.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, Wampanoag had evolved into a pan-Indian identity, not through voluntary adoption but through forced erasure. Indigenous communities who survived dispossession and colonization often had no choice but to use the name in censuses, land petitions, and missionary records. Some embraced it strategically to remain visible. Others, especially among Pokanoket descendants, preserved their original name through oral tradition, kinship ties, and quiet defiance. As Amy Den Ouden demonstrates, even the use of a non-recognized tribal name in legal petitions could result in denial of land claims and state refusal to acknowledge Indigenous political continuity.(11)

The Bureau of Indian Affairs later reinforced this colonial framework. In its 2007 Final Determination for federal recognition of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, the BIA acknowledged that Wampanoag had become a general term for multiple Indigenous descendant communities but also noted that specific tribal names like Pokanoket had been more commonly used prior to the late 17th century.(12) The bureaucratic insistence on the Wampanoag label perpetuated settler logic as only those who fit within colonial categories could be seen as “real” tribes.

Yet today, the Pokanoket Tribe continue to assert their original identity, not as a relic of the past, but as a living people. Reclaiming the name Pokanoket is a direct challenge to the colonial erasure embedded in state records and settler memory. As Blair Rudes argues, linguistic recovery is not merely academic, it is a form of sovereign resistance.(13) To assert Pokanoket identity is to declare we were never Wampanoag, and we never left. We are still here.