Memoryscapes of King Philip’s War: Revisiting Indigenous and Colonial Places, Histories, and Legacies

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Christine DeLucia revisits late 17th-century Native American and colonial encounters, shedding new light on how and why diverse communities pursued diplomacy, peacemaking, and violence.

The Indigenous resistance movement known as King Philip’s War (1675–1678) shaped the American Northeast in powerful ways, and its consequences have reverberated for more than three centuries. This presentation revisits Native American and colonial encounters in this pivotal period, shedding new light on how and why diverse communities pursued diplomacy, peacemaking, and violence. Focusing on the significance of place, it traces the changing meanings of homelands for Indigenous people and nations including Nipmucs, Narragansetts, and Wampanoags, who strategically confronted colonial expansion by settlers. By following these histories outward into a broader reconsideration of the Native and colonial Northeast as well as the Atlantic World, we can reckon with the complex ways historical memories have remained deeply resonant and contested. This talk invites conversation about how the past continues to matter, and the opportunities and challenges related to heritage, preservation, and caretaking of meaningful lands and waters.

Christine DeLucia is assistant professor of history at Williams College, and author of Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, published in 2018 by Yale University Press in the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. In 2019 the book received the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians book award, the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Honorable Mention from the National Council on Public History. DeLucia has also written for the Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She recently held a fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago to work on her second book, a study of Native American, African American, and colonial relationships in the Northeast in the era before, during, and after the American Revolution.

Registration will close on September 30 at 5:00 pm EST, or once capacity has been reached, whichever comes first.