Remapping King Philip's War

This was my Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) which I completed with another student to earn my B.S. For this project, we worked with a Nipmuc woman from the American Antiquarian Society to depict a narrative of King Philip's War which was respectful and accurate to the indigenous people involved in and impacted by the conflict.

Although the war itself is obscure, it was one of the most catastrophic and deadly events in American history and marked a point of no return in Colonial-Indian relations. The indigenous side of the conflict primarily (but not exclusively) involved Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuc people, who were eventually crushed after years of brutal warfare. For colonists, this was an incredible and fortuitous win, but for everybody else, the war's conclusion would usher in a brand new era of colonial land encroachment and enslavement.

A challenge we dealt with was the lack of sources that weren't from colonists on the conflict. The colonists' side of the story, unsurprisingly, had been told several times over, but we wanted a different point of view. My research skills, particularly being able to use the full capabilities of search engines like Google to track down obscure and hidden references, were pushed to their limits. We also had to contend with the complexities of sensitive language. While the woman we worked with was okay with terms such as "Indian," at earlier points in the project, she expressed concern about implying too much homogeneity among indigenous groups and accidentally making the colonists more sympathetic than they deserved. For example, when the colonist freed imprisoned Indians from Deer Island, the colonists gave said freed people nowhere to go and had destroyed nearly everything those people had. It wasn't so much freedom as it was further abandonment. We thus needed to edit our descriptions so it wasn't implied that the colonists releasing people made their lives better or involved any colonial beneficence. Learning to navigate concerns like that proved central to the project as well as an excellent exercise in rhetoric.