Who Speaks for the Past? Indigenous Memory, Survival, & Abstract

How do Indigenous communities negotiate belonging when they remember the same past differently? This paper examines competing historical memories surrounding Pokanoket and Wampanoag identity in southern New England as a case study in the relationship between memory, survival, and belonging. Rather than treating divergent narratives as evidence that one tradition is correct and another mistaken, I argue that these differences reflect distinct historical pathways through which Indigenous communities endured disease, colonialism, King Philip's War, diaspora, religious conversion, and political reorganization.

Drawing upon 17th century colonial records, Indigenous oral tradition, federal acknowledgment materials, and legal testimony, I suggest that historical memory should be understood as a product of lived experience rather than a fixed inheritance. Communities that survived through geographic continuity, praying towns, or political adaptation preserved different memories than those whose identities endured primarily through kinship networks and diaspora. These divergent experiences shaped not only how history is remembered but also contemporary understandings of Indigenous belonging.

Different pathways of survival produced different historical memories. Rather than asking which Indigenous narrative is correct, this paper proposes that historical scholarship should recognize multiple surviving traditions as complementary fragments of a more complex past. The Pokanoket experience demonstrates how historical memory can both sustain identity and unintentionally exclude other Indigenous communities from public narratives. Recovering these overlapping memories offers a framework for understanding belonging that embraces historical complexity rather than seeking a single authoritative Indigenous voice. 

the Pokanoket Question in Southern New England

Abstract: How do Indigenous communities negotiate belonging when they remember the same past differently? This paper examines competing historical memories surrounding Pokanoket and Wampanoag identity in southern New England as a case study in the relationship between memory, survival, and belonging. Rather than treating divergent narratives as evidence that one tradition is correct and another mistaken, I argue that these differences reflect distinct historical pathways through which Indigenous communities endured disease, colonialism, King Philip's War, diaspora, religious conversion, and political reorganization.

Drawing upon 17th century colonial records, Indigenous oral tradition, federal acknowledgment materials, and legal testimony, I suggest that historical memory should be understood as a product of lived experience rather than a fixed inheritance. Communities that survived through geographic continuity, praying towns, or political adaptation preserved different memories than those whose identities endured primarily through kinship networks and diaspora. These divergent experiences shaped not only how history is remembered but also contemporary understandings of Indigenous belonging.

Different pathways of survival produced different historical memories. Rather than asking which Indigenous narrative is correct, this paper proposes that historical scholarship should recognize multiple surviving traditions as complementary fragments of a more complex past. The Pokanoket experience demonstrates how historical memory can both sustain identity and unintentionally exclude other Indigenous communities from public narratives. Recovering these overlapping memories offers a framework for understanding belonging that embraces historical complexity rather than seeking a single authoritative Indigenous voice. 

Different Stories, Different Memories

How we remember the past is deeply intertwined with our own sense of identity and belonging. Yet remembrance is never entirely inclusive. Too often, it privileges the loudest, most visible, or most institutionally accepted narratives while overlooking others. The ways individuals, communities, and even entire societies remember history are shaped by circumstance, experience, and perspective rather than by a single, objective account. Across generations, cultures, and nations, no one inherits an entirely homogeneous past.

However, in our effort to remember, we sometimes forget. We forget that memory cannot be monopolized by any one community or institution. We forget the voices of those pushed to the margins. We forget that every historical narrative represents only one part of a much larger canvas.

So, what happens when the way we remember the past excludes others? How do we construct histories that create space for belonging rather than leaving people forgotten in the margins of history? These questions become especially significant when different Indigenous communities preserve distinct, yet equally sincere, memories of the same past.

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. Governments, universities, museums, and media outlets can inadvertently showcase a single Indigenous memory to represent the whole. In doing so, complex histories can become compressed into simplified narratives, leaving communities with different memories spoken for by others. [1]

Yet history, especially Indigenous history, is rarely so simple. Colonialism fractured communities, disease shattered populations, and war scattered families across unfamiliar landscapes. Some Indigenous peoples remained close to ancestral homelands, while others survived through migration, intermarriage, religious conversion, extensive kinship networks, or quiet persistence beneath the surface of colonial society. [2]

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. The Mashpee remember another. The Aquinnah remember another still. The same can be said for the Nipmuc, Narragansett, and many other Indigenous peoples of the region. History is shaped by survival and preserved through many voices, forming a tapestry of memory. Like a garden, its beauty is revealed only when we step back to see more than a single flower.

Names matter. They tell us not only who people are, but also how communities remembered themselves and were remembered by others.  One place where these different memories intersect concerns the relationship between the names Pokanoket and Wampanoag. Today the two are often used interchangeably. Yet 17th century colonial records overwhelmingly identified Ousamequin (Massasoit), Wamsutta, and Metacom as Pokanoket sachems. Plymouth writers repeatedly referred to "Puckanokick," "Pokanoket," and related spellings when describing the political center at Sowams. [3] By contrast, Wampanoag appears more broadly as a regional or cultural designation, often translated as "people of the dawn" or "easterners", rather than as a specific political identity in the earliest colonial sources. [4]

After King Philip's War, however, something changed. The Pokanoket name gradually faded from prominence while Wampanoag increasingly emerged as the broader identity through which surviving Indigenous communities came to remember and understand themselves. This should not be read as evidence that one identity replaced or invalidated the other. Rather, it raises an important historical question.

Was this the disappearance of one people and the appearance of another? Or did different experiences of survival produce different understandings of the past?

This article argues the latter. Rather than asking which Indigenous memory is correct, it asks how different pathways of survival shaped different historical memories and, ultimately, different understandings of belonging. The answer lies not in names alone, but in the different historical pathways through which Indigenous communities endured the upheavals of the 17th century. Perhaps what matters most is not which name one prefers, but what those names represent. For this is not an argument against Mashpee or Aquinnah identity. Their survival is real. Their histories matter. Nor is it an argument that Pokanoket memory alone possesses absolute truth. Rather, it asks a more difficult question.

Who has the authority to speak for the Indigenous past? And when different Indigenous communities remember history differently, who decides which memory survives?

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, suffered together, and remembered together. Yet such a view risks flattening history into something far more uniform than it really was. Geography mattered. Politics mattered. The decisions Indigenous leaders made 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 Ousamequin (Massasoit) rebuilt an extensive alliance network after the devastating epidemics of the early 17th century. [5] It was also from here that the fate of Plymouth Colony at Patuxet was ultimately decided. After the Pilgrims endured a bitter winter and were reduced to only a fraction of their original number, their continued presence depended not on providence alone, but on Ousamequin and the Pokanokets' decision to allow them to remain in peace. 

Yet geography also made the Pokanoket uniquely vulnerable. Unlike many Indigenous communities farther east on Cape Cod or Martha's Vineyard, their homeland bordered rapidly expanding English settlements while also lying adjacent to powerful Indigenous rivals, particularly the Narragansett. Ousamequin's pact with Plymouth was therefore neither simple friendship nor submission. It was calculated diplomacy born from catastrophe. The Great Dying devastated the Pokanoket while leaving some neighboring peoples comparatively stronger, making a defensive alliance a practical strategy for survival. [6]

For nearly half a century that fragile balance endured until colonial abuses could be endured no longer. The result was King Philip's War.

For the Pokanoket, the consequences were catastrophic. Known to the English as King Philip, Metacom the son and successor of Ousamequin stood at the center of colonial retaliation, as did his own people, the Pokanokets. Their homeland became the principal theater in which the war in southern New England both began and ended with Metacom's death at Mount Hope. Families were killed. Others were enslaved or indentured. Survivors fled north and west into neighboring Indigenous communities beyond the reach of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Their political center was destroyed, their hereditary leadership dismantled, and they were never permitted to reestablish themselves in their homeland of Sowams as a people. [7] Survival increasingly depended upon diaspora, kinship networks, and memory rather than territorial sovereignty. Yet other Indigenous communities followed different paths.

Although Indigenous peoples throughout southern New England suffered profoundly during King Philip's War, the communities that later formed Mashpee and Aquinnah experienced the conflict under different circumstances, as they did not join Metacom's coalition against the English. Many praying Indian communities endured imprisonment, starvation, internment on Deer Island, and, in some cases, enslavement. Yet influential colonial figures such as Daniel Gookin and Increase Mather defended many of these communities as having remained "faithful to the English interest" and as having been "falsely accused, injured, and abused," distinguishing them from those they regarded as "Philip's Indians." [8]

On Cape Cod, Indigenous communities increasingly consolidated through praying towns under the leadership of individuals such as Rev. Richard Bourne. Faced with disease, shrinking land bases, and colonial expansion, these communities adapted through shared governance, Christianity, and mutual support while preserving Indigenous kinship and communal life. [9] Mashpee's own federal acknowledgment record and the testimony presented in Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe v. New Seabury Corp. describes this history as one of adaptation, consolidation, political reorganization, and collective survival. [10] This should not be understood as diminishing Mashpee identity. Rather it illustrates another successful Indigenous pathway through the colonial period, preserving Indigenous identity despite profound change.

Aquinnah followed a different course still. Geographic separation on Martha's Vineyard allowed greater continuity of place than was possible for many mainland communities, although conversion, colonial oversight, demographic decline, and economic change profoundly reshaped life there as well. [11]

Different wars produced different survivors. Different survivors preserved different memories. Perhaps this is where modern misunderstanding begins. When these distinct histories are compressed beneath a single generalized "Wampanoag" narrative, something important can be lost. The Pokanoket story risks becoming the Mashpee story. The Mashpee story risks becoming the Aquinnah story. Yet each reflects a different history of survival, adaptation, and continuity.

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 historical mistake comes when one pathway of survival is generalized as the Indigenous experience of southern New England. As it never was one story, but many.

Historical Contradictions & 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 sit uneasily beside colonial records, legal documentation, and even a community's own historical materials.

One such tension concerns the historical identity of the Pokanoket and how modern narratives shape the sense of belonging experienced by their descendants today. In some public educational materials and statements, Pokanoket has been presented primarily as a geographic territory or sphere of influence rather than as a distinct Indigenous polity. 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 political people. [12]

Yet 17th-century sources consistently describe something more.Edward Winslow referred to Ousamequin as sachem of the "Puckanokick." [13] William Bradford repeatedly associated Massasoit's authority with Pokanoket-centered leadership. Plymouth Colony records identified both Wamsutta and Metacom as sachems of "Pockanokett" or "Pocanacutt”. Daniel Gookin later listed the "Pawkunnawkuts" among New England's principal Indigenous political nations.

References to "Pokanoket country" do not contradict this interpretation. Colonial writers routinely used the names of Indigenous peoples and their homelands interchangeably with references to Narragansett country, Pequot country, Nipmuc country. Territory and people were closely connected, but they were never synonymous. No historian argues that "Narragansett" referred only to land rather than a people. Why should Pokanoket be treated differently?

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.'" [14] In the same article she added, "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.'"

This is where remembrance and belonging intersect. When one Indigenous memory is presented as the only legitimate one, other communities and the histories they preserve risk being excluded from the shared narrative. Taken seriously, these are not simply differences in terminology. They are competing historical interpretations. If there "never was a single tribe known as Pokanocket," why do 17th century records repeatedly describe hereditary sachems, diplomacy, succession, treaty making, and political authority through Pokanoket identity? [15]

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether the term Wampanoag existed. Clearly it did, and over time it became a profoundly important shared identity among surviving Indigenous communities. The more difficult historical question is how that broader identity emerged through remembrance, the upheavals of colonialism and King Philip's War. Viewed this way, Pokanoket and Wampanoag need not be opposing truths. They represent different layers of Indigenous memory, each preserved through different experiences of survival.

Continuity & Historical Consistency

One of the strongest challenges to simplified narratives comes not from Pokanoket oral tradition alone, but from the historical and legal record surrounding the Mashpee themselves. During Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe v. New Seabury Corp. (1977), historians did not portray Mashpee as an unchanged continuation of a 17th century political community. Rather, they described a history shaped by population loss, intermarriage, migration, missionary influence, political reorganization, and adaptation under colonial rule. [16] Likewise, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' federal acknowledgment documented Mashpee continuity through kinship, consolidation, praying-town formation, and changing political organization over time.

Far from weakening Mashpee identity, this history demonstrates the resilience of Indigenous communities adapting to extraordinary circumstances. Continuity did not require remaining unchanged. It required preserving a people through change.

Far from weakening Mashpee identity, this history demonstrates the resilience of Indigenous communities adapting to extraordinary circumstances. Continuity did not require remaining unchanged. It required preserving a people through change.

No Indigenous people of southern New England survived unchanged. Every community adapted. Every community changed. The difference lay not in whether they survived, but in how they survived. How that memory shapes their identity and sense of belonging today.

Indigenous Knowledge, Historical Humility, & A Shared Future

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. 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 one able to maintain continuity within their own homelands.

Why should southern New England Indigenous history be any different?

The Pokanoket remember one story. The Mashpee remember another. The Aquinnah remember another still.  Colonialism shattered Indigenous worlds. Disease devastated populations. War fractured kinship networks. English legal systems forced Indigenous peoples into categories never designed for their own ways of understanding identity and community. Families scattered across towns, reservations, slave ports, and unfamiliar landscapes. Is it not more likely that different communities carried different fragments of that history forward rather than one inheriting it all?

This is where historical humility matters. Historians revise interpretations as new evidence emerges. Archaeologists rethink assumptions. Linguists refine conclusions. Oral traditions too, continue to preserve memory as communities adapt to changing realities. 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. Our remembrance of the past is inseparable from our sense of identity and belonging in the present.

The responsibility, then, is not to defend a particular narrative at all costs, but to remain willing to revisit our conclusions as new evidence emerges. To recognize that every memory preserves part of the forest, but none encompasses it entirely. If 17th-century records repeatedly describe the Pokanoket as a tribal identity, if Pokanoket oral tradition survived King Philip's War, if kinship networks preserved continuity through diaspora, and if modern descendants continue carrying those memories today, then Pokanoket continuity has a rightful place within the broader story of Indigenous belonging. 

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, Mashpee, or Aquinnah. 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. Yet somehow, they remained.

Political institutions decline. Names change. States 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. No surviving Indigenous community inherited the entire story, only pieces of it. The responsibility of this generation, then, is not to decide whose memory prevails, but to ensure those fragments continue speaking to one another before more is lost. Because regardless of whether one identifies as Pokanoket, Wampanoag, Mashpee, Aquinnah, or another Indigenous community altogether, the deeper truth remains the same. Our ancestors survived. Now the responsibility is not just survival, but of continuing our people's story which belongs to us.

Endnotes

1.  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. 

2. 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. 

3.  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, 12 vols. (Boston: William White, 1855–61), 1:157; 4:18; Daniel Gookin, "Historical Collections of the Indians in New England," in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., vol. 1 (Boston, 1792), 7-9, 141–79. 

4.  Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), 31–34; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650, 12–18; Daniel Gookin, "Historical Collections of the Indians in New England," 141–79; Don Brown ("Strong Turtle"), "Pokanoket or Wampanoag? The Origins of Names," Small State Big History, 2025.

5.  Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 95–108; Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 168–210; 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.

6. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 95–108; Silverman, This Land Is Their Land, 34–53; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 32–45.

7. 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, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston: William White, 1855–61), vols. 5–6. 

8. 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, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1836), 433–39; Increase Mather, A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England (Boston, 1676).

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

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

11.  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. 

12.  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. 

13.  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, 12 vols. (Boston: William White, 1855–61), 1:157, 4:18, 5:275–76; Daniel Gookin, "Historical Collections of the Indians in New England," in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., vol. 1 (Boston, 1792), 7-10, 141–79. 

14. 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. 

15.  Winslow, Good Newes, 57–63; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 88–110; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, 1:157, 4:18, 5:275–76; Gookin, "Historical Collections," 141–79. 

16. 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). 

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