Who Speaks for the Past? Indigenous Memory, Survival, and the Pokanoket Question in Southern New England

I. Introduction: Different Stories, Different Memories

What happens when different Indigenous communities remember the same past differently?

At first glance, the question may seem uncomfortable. Modern audiences often expect Indigenous history to speak in one unified voice, as though the Indigenous peoples of southern New England carried identical memories through four centuries of colonization. Yet history, especially Indigenous history, is rarely so simple. Colonialism fractured communities, and disease shattered populations. War scattered families across unfamiliar landscapes. Some Indigenous peoples remained close to ancestral homelands, while others survived through migration, intermarriage, diplomacy, missionization, kinship networks, or quiet persistence hidden beneath the surface of colonial society.[1]

Should we really expect people who survived such radically different experiences to remember the past in exactly the same way? The Pokanoket remember one story. Mashpee remembers another. Aquinnah remembers another still. The same can be said for Nipmuc, Narragesset, or the host of other Indigenous people in the region. None of this should surprise us. History is shaped by survival, by competing narratives. It emerges from many voices and many perspectives, forming a tapestry of memory. Like a garden, its true beauty is revealed only when we step back to see more than a single flower.

So let us reexamine the past. Centuries ago, the Pokanoket homeland stretching across present-day Barrington, Warren, Bristol, East Providence, Seekonk, Swansea, Somerset, and Rehoboth, stood at the political center of an Indigenous confederation that stretched from Narragansett Bay to Cape Cod. It was this confederation that the Plymouth colonists first encountered in the 1620s. Indigenous leaders who are often celebrated, or championed today such as Massasoit Ousamequin, Wamsutta, and later Metacom emerged from this political landscape.[2] Yet after King Philip’s War, the Pokanoket experienced devastation unlike nearly any Indigenous community in southern New England. Those who joined Metacom's resistance against the English suffered similar calamities. Families were killed, enslaved, indentured, dispersed, or absorbed into neighboring Indigenous communities. 

Metacom's own people, the Pokanokets, so frequently documented before the outbreak of the conflict seemed to vanish from the historical record after its conclusion, as though their defeat had been so complete that they simply disappeared from English accounts. However, they did not disappear. Their survival became one of diaspora, carried forward through kinship networks, oral traditions, passed from one generation to the next within the new communities where they found refuge.[3]

Yet no flower in this garden is the same. Though rooted in a shared past, each followed its own path of survival. The Mashpee and Aquinnah followed a different road. The Indigenous communities that later emerged there survived through neutrality during the King Philip's War, missionization, adaptation, and legally recognized community continuity under colonial systems. Their histories were shaped not only by resistance, but by pragmatism. By making difficult decisions made under extraordinary pressure. In what would become Mashpee in the 1660’s the weakened Cape Indigenous communities adapted a praying-town structure with the assistance of Rev. Richard Bourne, seeking legal protection, communal survival, and insulation from complete colonial domination.[4]

Different roads produced different memories. And perhaps that is where the modern tension begins. Today, federally recognized tribes often occupy an important and respected position in public conversations about Indigenous history. Yet recognition can also create unintended consequences. Governments, universities, museums, municipalities, and media outlets frequently seek singular Indigenous voices to represent entire regions. Complex Indigenous histories are compressed into simplified narratives. Communities with different memories may suddenly find themselves spoken for by others.[5] New England is no exception to this paradox.

This article is not an argument against Mashpee or Aquinnah Indigenous identity. Their survival is real. Their histories matter. Nor is this article an argument that Pokanoket memory alone possesses absolute truth. Rather, this essay asks a more difficult question.

Who has the authority to speak for the Indigenous past? And perhaps more importantly. When different Indigenous communities remember history differently, who gets to decide which memory survives?

II. A Name Remembered, A Name Forgotten: Pokanoket, Wampanoag, and the Memory of Survival

Names matter. They tell us not only who people were, but sometimes how they survived. One of the central historical tensions in southern New England concerns the relationship between the names Pokanoket and Wampanoag. Today, many people use the two interchangeably. Yet the historical record suggests they did not necessarily function in the same way.

17th century colonial records overwhelmingly identified Ousamequin (Massasoit), Wamsutta, and Metacom with Pokanoket. Plymouth writers referred repeatedly to “Puckanokick,” “Pokanoket,” “Pockanokett,” and related spellings when describing the political center based at Sowams. [6] By contrast, "Wampanoag" appears to have functioned more broadly as a linguistic, directional, or regional designation rather than as a tribal identity. Often translated as "people of the dawn" or "easterners," it described Indigenous peoples living in the eastern reaches of southern New England rather than a single political nation in the modern sense. [7] This distinction matters. Pokanoket appears in the earliest colonial records as a specific political identity. Wampanoag appears more often as a broader regional or cultural designation until Metacom's Resistance in 1675.

After King Philip’s War, something changed. The Pokanoket name begins to fade. Why? Perhaps the answer lies not in disappearance, but destruction. For the Pokanoket were not simply another Indigenous community affected by the war. They stood at the center of it. Thus Metacom’s people became prime targets of severe colonial retaliation.[8]

So what happens to a political identity when the political world sustaining it is shattered? History offers many examples. We do not say the Armenian people disappeared because the Kingdom of Armenia fell. We do not say the Quechua peoples disappeared because the Inca Empire collapsed. Nor do we claim that the people of Rome vanished because the Roman Empire lost its political primacy. Political structures collapse. Names change. Empires rise and fall. Yet families endure. Memory survives. People adapt. Why should Indigenous history be held to a different standard?

Perhaps the Pokanokets did not disappear. Perhaps the name itself became too dangerous to carry publicly, as association with "Philip's Indians" could place survivors and their children at risk of English reprisal, even decades after the war. Perhaps survival demanded something broader. At the same time, another historical process was unfolding.

As Indigenous peoples of southeastern New England endured colonialism, disease, war, cultural conversion, and displacement, broader identities increasingly became important. "Wampanoag," once functioning primarily as a regional or directional designation among the Indigenous peoples of the east, gradually grew into a larger shared identity, Over time, it became the banner under which surviving communities such as the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Herring Pond, Assonet, and others could organize, remember, and move forward together. [9]

This too is survival. This too deserves respect. The mistake comes when one memory is used to erase the other. The rise of Wampanoag identity does not mean Pokanoket never existed. Likewise, remembering Pokanoket continuity does not diminish the legitimacy of Wampanoag identity today. Both histories can coexist. Both memories can be true. Perhaps what matters most is not which name one prefers, but what those names represent.

Survival. Whether Pokanoket or Wampanoag, the deeper truth remains the same. Indigenous families endured extraordinary loss and somehow continued forward. They carried memory, kinship, responsibility, and identity through centuries designed to erase them. They buried loved ones, rebuilt communities, adapted to changing worlds, and continued paving a future for generations yet unborn. [10]

Maybe this is the lesson history asks us to remember. Names matter. But survival matters more. And perhaps the greatest tragedy would be allowing debates over names to divide descendants of peoples who endured so much simply to ensure that any future remained possible at all.

III.Different Roads of Survival: How King Philip's War Shaped Indigenous Memory

To understand why Indigenous communities sometimes remember the past differently, we must first understand that they did not survive colonialism in the same way.

Modern audiences often speak of "the Wampanoag" as though all Indigenous communities of southern New England experienced the 17th century together, moved together, suffered together, and remembered together. Yet such a view risks flattening history into something far more uniform than it really was. Survival was uneven. Geography mattered. Politics mattered. The decisions made by Indigenous leaders under extraordinary circumstances mattered.

The Pokanoket homeland of Sowams occupied one of the most politically exposed regions of southern New England. Centered near present-day Mount Hope and extending through present-day Bristol, Warren, Barrington, East Providence, Seekonk, Swansea, Somerset, and Rehoboth, the Pokanoket stood at the crossroads of diplomacy, trade, and Indigenous politics. It was from here that Massasoit Ousamequin, known to the English as Massasoit, channelled an extensive alliance network after the devastating epidemics of the early 17th century.[11]

Yet geography also made the Pokanoket vulnerable. Unlike many Indigenous communities farther east on Cape Cod or Martha's Vineyard, the Pokanoket homeland bordered rapidly expanding English settlements while also occupying a frontier with powerful Indigenous rivals, particularly the Narragansett. Ousamequin's alliance with Plymouth was therefore neither simple friendship nor submission. It was calculated diplomacy born from catastrophe. The Great Dying had devastated the Pokanoket while leaving some neighboring peoples comparatively stronger. This strategic alliance provided the Pokankets with a degree of leverage in an increasingly dangerous political landscape.[12]

For nearly half a century that fragile balance between worlds endured. Then came King Philip's War. 

For the Pokanoket, the consequences were ruinous. As Metacom's own people, they stood at the center of colonial retaliation. Their homeland at Sowams became the principal theater in which the war in southern New England both began and drew to its conclusion with Metacom's death at Mount Hope. Families were killed. For those who escaped the sword, enslavement or indentured servitude often awaited. Survivors scattered, fleeing north and west into neighboring Indigenous communities beyond lands dominated by Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. The Pokanokets were driven from their ancestral homeland and were never permitted to reestablish themselves there as a people again. Their political center was destroyed. Their leaders were executed. In the wake of the conflict, publicly maintaining a Pokanoket identity became dangerous. Survival often depended upon diaspora, kinship networks, and memory rather than place.[13] This kind of survival no longer relied upon visible political sovereignty. It depended upon adaptability. It depended upon kinship. It depended upon remembering.

Other Indigenous communities followed different paths. Although Indigenous communities throughout southern New England suffered profoundly during King Philips War, the paths of survival that followed distinctly diverged.The praying Indigenous communities of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard chose neutrality and experienced the war profoundly differently than Metacom's own people, the Pokanokets. Many praying Indians suffered terribly, enduring imprisonment, starvation, internment on Deer Island, and, in some cases, enslavement at the hands of opportunistic colonists who made little distinction between friend and foe. Yet colonial leaders such as Increase Matter and Daniel Gookin vigorously defended these communities, insisting that many had remained "faithful to the English interest" and had been "falsely accused, injured, and abused" as though they were “Philip's Indians”, the Pokanket.[14] Many retained greater geographic and institutional continuity through their Christianized settlements, kinship consolidation, and later recognized community structures.

 The Indigenous communities that later formed Mashpee emerged through one of the most remarkable adaptations to colonial pressure in early New England. Disease, population loss, shrinking land bases, and colonial expansion reshaped Cape Cod long before the war itself. Within this context, the missionary work of Rev. Richard Bourne offered many Indigenous communities a means of preserving land, legal recognition, and communal life through praying towns.[15]

Participation in these communities represented far more than religious conversion. Christianity often became a political language of survival. Communities weakened by disease, displacement, and colonial pressure consolidated through shared governance, kinship, and mutual support. The historical and legal record, including Mashpee's own federal acknowledgment materials and the testimony presented in Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe v. New Seabury Corp. describes a community shaped through kinship, adaptation, consolidation, and collective survival among Indigenous peoples navigating the upheavals of colonial New England.[16][17] The Mashpee, then, appears not simply as an unchanged continuation of a singular pre-contact tribe, but as a remarkable Indigenous response to colonial pressure. This should not be read as diminishing Mashpee identity. Quite the opposite. It tells a more powerful story.

Aquinnah followed yet another course. Separated by geography on Martha's Vineyard, Indigenous communities there retained greater continuity of place than many mainland peoples, although not without profound change. Conversion, colonial oversight, demographic decline, and economic transformation reshaped island life as well. Yet relative isolation helped preserve stronger continuity of homeland and community than was possible for many Indigenous peoples whose lands became the principal battlegrounds of King Philip's War.[18]

Different wars produced different survivors. Different survivors preserved different memories. Perhaps this is where modern misunderstanding begins. When later narratives compress these profoundly different histories beneath a single generalized "Wampanoag" umbrella, something important can disappear. The Pokanoket story risks becoming the Mashpee story. The Mashpee story risks becoming the Aquinnah story. All three become flatter than the historical record allows. Each possesses its own history of survival, adaptation, and continuity. No single Indigenous community experienced colonialism unscathed. Why should we expect Indigenous memories to be uniform and unchanged either?

Under such circumstances, should we really be surprised that descendants of Metacom's people remembered the past differently than descendants of communities whose ancestors survived through other means? Perhaps the real historical mistake comes when one pathway of survival is generalized as the Indigenous experience of southern New England. It never was one story but rather many.

IV. Historical Contradictions and the Politics of Memory

If different Indigenous communities survived colonialism differently, disagreement about the past should not surprise us. What deserves closer attention, however, are moments when historical narratives become internally inconsistent, or when public claims sit uneasily beside legal records, federal documentation, and even a community’s own historical materials.This is where the Pokanoket question becomes especially challenging. The issue is not whether Mashpee or Aquinnah are Indigenous communities. They unquestionably are. Nor is it whether the modern Wampanoag identity is legitimate. It unquestionably is. Rather, the question is whether some modern public narratives, in seeking to tell a unified Indigenous story, dilute the historical complexity of southern New England in ways that can unintentionally, or at times actively obscure Pokanoket continuity.

For in some public educational materials and statements, Pokanoket has been presented primarily as a geographic territory or sphere of influence rather than as a sovereign Indigenous people. Public interpretations associated with contemporary Wampanoag cultural leaders such as Ramona Peters and Linda Coombs have, at times, emphasized Pokanoket as a place more than as a distinct political polity. [19] Yet this interpretation becomes difficult to reconcile with the historical record. 

17th-century English observers repeatedly identified the Pokanokets not merely as a place, but as a people with a distinct political identity. Edward Winslow referred to Ousamequin as sachem of the “Puckanokick.”[20] William Bradford consistently associated Massasoit's authority with Pokanoket-centered leadership. [21] Plymouth Colony records identified both Wamsutta and Metacom as sachems of “Pockanokett” or “Pocanacutt.”[22] Daniel Gookin later listed the "Pawkunnawkuts" among New England's principal Indigenous political nations [23]

Even references to “Pokanoket country” do not undermine this interpretation. Colonial writers frequently used the names of Indigenous peoples and their homelands interchangeably. Narragansett country, Nipmuc country, Pequot country. Territory and people were intertwined, but they were never quite the same thing. After all, no historian argues that “Narragansett” referred only to land and not a people. Why should Pokanoket alone be treated differently?

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary historical question. Can Pokanoket be reduced to geography when its leaders repeatedly appear throughout the historical record exercising diplomacy, waging war, negotiating treaties, overseeing succession, and governing as hereditary sachems "of Pokanoket"?

The tension becomes even more direct in a 2018 article published by the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, where Jessie Little Doe Baird wrote, “The proper term is in fact Wampanoag as there never was a single tribe known as the ‘Pokanocket’.”[24] In the same article, she further say,“It must be noted here that there has long been confusion between the terms Wampanoag and Pokanocket and even today, a new group of people have called themselves, ‘the Pockanocket’.” [25]

Taken seriously, these are not merely differences in terminology. They are historical interpretations. Yet they sit uneasily beside both the documentary record and the broader historical framework through which Indigenous continuity is understood elsewhere in New England. For if there “never was a single tribe known as Pokanocket,” why do 17th-century records repeatedly describe sachems, diplomacy, succession, land negotiations, and political authority through Pokanoket identity? Why do colonial writers repeatedly describe Ousamequin, Wamsutta, and Metacom not simply as generic “Wampanoag” leaders, but specifically as sachems of “Pokanoket”? [26]

Perhaps the issue is not whether the term Wampanoag existed. Clearly, broader eastern Indigenous identities existed and, over time, the Wampanoag identity became profoundly important. The more difficult historical question is how Wampanoag gradually became the broader identity through which surviving communities came to understand themselves after King Philip's War, rather than the identity they had always possessed. 

Perhaps then, the question is not simply who the Wampanoag are today, but how the Wampanoag came to be. That, too, is history. If so, Pokanoket and Wampanoag are not opposing truths. They may instead represent different layers of Indigenous memory, each preserved through different experiences of survival.

V. Continuity and Historical Consistency

Ironically, some of the strongest evidence complicating simplified public narratives comes not from Pokanoket oral tradition, but from the Mashpee’s own legal and federal historical record. During Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe v. New Seabury Corp. (1977), the question before the court was not whether Mashpee people were Indigenous. Rather, it concerned whether Mashpee constituted a legally continuous tribal entity under specific federal legal standards. Historians emphasized the enormous disruptions caused by colonization such as population collapse, intermarriage, political restructuring, migration, missionary influence, and changing community organization.[27] Later, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' federal acknowledgment record likewise recognized the Mashpee continuity through adaptation, emphasizing kinship, consolidation, praying-town formation, and political reorganization under colonial pressure. [28] This history does not weaken Mashpee. It strengthens Mashpee. It tells a remarkable story of Indigenous endurance.

Yet it also raises a broader historical question. If adaptation, consolidation, intermarriage, conversion, and changing political organization constitute continuity for Mashpee, as it rightfully should. Then why should Pokanoket continuity through diaspora, kinship, oral tradition, family networks, and dispersed identity be evaluated by a different standard? Why should one Indigenous pathway of survival count while another is questioned?

No Indigenous people of southern New England survived unchanged. The historical record shows that every community adapted. Every community changed. The difference lay not in whether they survived, but in how they survived, for the paths of survival were never uniform.

VI. Indigenous Knowledge, Historical Humility, and Shared Futures

At this point, some readers may feel uncomfortable. Good history often does that, especially Indigenous history. Once we move beyond simplified narratives, we are forced to confront something far more difficult.

Different Indigenous communities sometimes remember the same past differently, and perhaps that is exactly what we should expect. After all, memory is shaped by survival. A people devastated by war may remember differently than a people who survived through neutrality. A diaspora community may remember differently than a geographically rooted one. Families forced into silence out of fear may preserve memory differently than communities able to maintain visible continuity.

Why should southern New England Indigenous history be any different? The Pokanoket remembers one story. Mashpee remembers another. Aquinnah remembers another still. Perhaps none of these memories are entirely complete. Perhaps none were ever meant to be. Colonialism shattered Indigenous worlds. Disease collapsed populations. War fractured kinship systems. Conversion altered political relationships. English legal systems forced Indigenous peoples into categories never designed for our values, our realities. Families scattered across towns, slave ports, reservations, disrupted kinship networks, and unfamiliar landscapes. Would we really expect one surviving community to inherit the entire memory of such a fissured world? Or is it more likely that different peoples carried different fragments forward? This is where historical humility matters.

Historians revise interpretations when new evidence emerges. Archaeologists rethink assumptions. Linguists refine conclusions. Oral traditions themselves evolve as communities adapt to new realities and reinterpret the past through lived experience.

Indigenous knowledge holders are not exempt from this process. Neither are academics. Neither are the Pokanokets. Neither are the Mashpee. Neither are the Aquinnah. No historian remembers perfectly. No elder preserves every piece. No archive is complete. No oral tradition remains unchanged. This is not a weakness. It is humanity.

The responsibility then, is not to defend a certain narrative at all costs, but to remain willing to revisit them when evidence grows stronger. If 17-century records repeatedly describe the Pokanoket as a tribal identity, if Pokanoket family memory survived King Philip’s War, if kinship networks preserved continuity through diaspora, and if modern descendants continue carrying those memories today, then Pokanoket survival deserves serious historical consideration.

Likewise, if Mashpee and Aquinnah preserved continuity through praying communities, kinship consolidation, geographic persistence, institutional survival, and centuries of adaptation, then their histories deserve equal respect.

Perhaps the real mistake comes when one truth attempts to erase another. What ultimately matters most may not be which name survives most prominently in public memory, be it Pokanoket, Wampanoag, Aquinnah, or Mashpee. What matters is that Indigenous families survived at all. Against disease. Against war. Against enslavement. Against removal. Against erasure. Against centuries of institutions that repeatedly predicted Indigenous disappearance, and actively promoted it. Yet somehow, they remained, and their living descendants are a testament to this perseverance.

For political institutions decline. Names change. Empires rise and fall. Yet people endure. Why should Indigenous history be held to a different standard? Maybe the lesson is not that one memory must defeat another. Perhaps the lesson is something harder. That no surviving Indigenous community inherited the entire story, but only pieces of it. The responsibility of this generation, then, is not to decide whose memory prevails, but to ensure that those fragments continue speaking to one another before more is lost. Because regardless of whether one identifies as Pokanoket, Wampanoag, Mashpee, Aquinnah, or any other Indigenous community altogether, the deeper truth remains the same. Our ancestors survived, and now the responsibility of not just survival but continuing our peoples story belongs to us.

Endnotes

1. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 81–110; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 168–210; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 1–35.

2. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England (London: William Bladen and John Bellamie, 1624), 57–63; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, edited by Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 88–110; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, edited by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 12 vols. (Boston: William White, 1855–1861), vols. 1–5; Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., vol. 1 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1792), 141–79; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 95–108; Don Brown ("Strong Turtle"), "Pokanoket or Wampanoag? The Origins of Names," Small State Big History, 2025.

3. Colin G. Calloway, After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 1–58; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 240–335; Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 1–42; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, vols. 5–6.

4. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 189–217; Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 28–42; David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 20–61; Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18–42.

5. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Final Determination for Federal Acknowledgment of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, Inc. (Washington, DC: Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2007); Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), ix–xxiv; Daniel R. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 87–126.

6. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England (London: William Bladen and John Bellamie, 1624), 57–63; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 88–110; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston: William White, 1855–61), 1:157, 4:18.

7. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), 31–34; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 12–18; Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, vol. 1 (Boston, 1792), 141–79.

8. Colin G. Calloway, After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 1–29; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 240–89.

9. W. F. Gookin, “The Wampanoag,” in The Old Indian Chronicle (Boston, 1792); twentieth-century intertribal organizing among Mashpee, Aquinnah, Herring Pond, and Assonet communities; Daniel Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 87–126.

10. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), ix–xxiv.

11. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England (London: William Bladen and John Bellamie, 1624), 57–63; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 88–110; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 81–110; Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip's War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 18–33. 

12. Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 168–210; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 95–108; David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 34–53; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 15–35. 

13. Colin G. Calloway, After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 1–29; Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 240–89; Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, vol. 1 (Boston, 1792), 141–79.

14. .Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England, in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677, in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1836), 433–39.Gookin wrote the work to defend the praying Indians against widespread accusations of disloyalty, describing them as having been "falsely accused, injured, and abused" and asserting that many had remained "faithful to the English interest" throughout King Philip's War. His account illustrates that influential colonial leaders distinguished many Christian Indians from those they regarded as "Philip's Indians" the Pokanke,t even as local colonists often failed to make such distinctions.  

15. Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 11–35; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 201–210; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 189–217. 

16. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 189–217; Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 28–42.

17. Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe v. New Seabury Corp., 427 F. Supp. 899 (D. Mass. 1977); U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Final Determination for Federal Acknowledgment of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, Inc. (Washington, DC: Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2007).

18. David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–44.

19. Ramona Peters, quoted in “Wampanoag Peace Treaty Commemorated on Cape,” Cape Cod Times, December 1, 2010; Linda Coombs, The First Thanksgiving (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2013); Linda Coombs, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story (North Mankato, MN: Capstone, 2023), 166.

20. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England (London: William Bladen and John Bellamie, 1624), 57–63.

21. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 88–110.

22. Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston: William White, 1855–61), 1:157, 4:18, 5:275–76.

23. Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, vol. 1 (Boston, 1792), 141–79.

24. Jessie Little Doe Baird, “America Moves to Bite the Hand That Fed It: The Mashpee Wampanoag Sole Surviving Signatory Tribe to America’s First Indian Titled Land,” Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, September 10, 2018.

25. Ibid

26. Winslow, Good Newes from New England, 57–63; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 88–110; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, 1:157, 4:18.

27. Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe v. New Seabury Corp., 427 F. Supp. 899 (D. Mass. 1977).

28.  U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Final Determination for Federal Acknowledgment of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, Inc. (Washington, DC: Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2007).