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- Title
Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands.
- Authors
DELUCIA, CHRISTINE M.
- Abstract
Water surrounded Algonquian peoples of the Northeast, and they highly valued it for sustenance, medicine, travel, spirituality, and other purposes. When English settlers in Plymouth Colony and surrounding areas attempted to claim territorial rights in the seventeenth century, they also sought water sources, including freshwater springs, to support colonization projects. Native-colonial tensions escalated in midcentury, and when the indigenous uprising known as King Philip's War broke out in 1675, a place called Kickemuit Spring seems to have been a vital locale. Situated in Wampanoag homelands, near an especially protected and fertile peninsula of vital corn lands, the spring appears in various records as a meeting place, a boundary marker, and grounds of deliberate pushback against English troops by Native parties. In the conflict's devastating aftermath, both Natives and colonists transformed such springs into sites of memory, which attempted to convey their respective--and frequently divergent-- understandings of historical violence. Tracking the material and symbolic evolutions of Kickemuit, as well as other environmental features linked to memory, demonstrates the sharply contested character of ''placemaking'' in the Northeast. It also highlights the ongoing pressures of settler colonialism in the region, where enduring Native communities continue to challenge entrenched Euro-American convictions of place ownership.
- Subjects
RHODE Island; UNITED States; KING Philip's War, 1675-1676; WAR memorials; HUMAN geography; ALGONQUIANS (North American peoples); WAMPANOAG (North American people); BORDERLANDS; WATER supply; NATIVE American water rights; HISTORY; SEVENTEENTH century; NATIVE American history; NATIVE Americans -- First contact with Europeans
- Publication
Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2015, Vol 13, Issue 2, p467
- ISSN
1543-4273
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/eam.2015.0011