(soft music) - To the Narragansett people, land is much more than just like a place, right?

It's actually a place world.

The entire landscape is imbued with meaning and significance and history and stories.

And you can go out in the back of this church and there's a graveyard and you can go all around this place and know a lot about the ancestors, know a lot about the history of this place just by being at this place, right?

- The history of the Narragansett Indian Church, it's one of the earliest churches in Rhode Island.

We utilize the church for our own betterment as a place to meet and a place to gather.

If you actually go to the church, you'll notice that the pulpit is right behind the window that's in between the two front doors.

Most churches, the doors are in the back.

We have our doors in the front.

And as it's always been told to us from oral history, in the colonial times when we weren't supposed to be gathering to talk about political issues of the day, economic issues of the day, the concerns of the day, whoever was up on the pulpit talking was the only one that couldn't see anyone approaching.

And if anyone in the, quote, unquote "congregation" broke into a hymn, that meant stop talking about the issues that we were talking about 'cause someone's approaching that shouldn't hear it.

And so these were strategies that our ancestors did in order to ensure our continuation.

And as a grandmother myself, that's important to me.

Everything that I do is important for the next generations that come and our ancestors did that, they ensured that we're here today.

And my job is to ensure that my great-great-great-great grandchildren down the road are able to be here.

And so I think that that's really important and why I do the work that I do and why we tell the stories that we tell.

(drumming) (water rushing) - It was probably the best place to be in the world at the time.

(soft music) The reality is that there's not these huge religious wars.

The reality is that there's not these endemic diseases, They come later, but when we're talking about pre-contact, that doesn't exist.

Where we are right now, within a mile, you could be in Cedar Swamp, you could be in deep forest, you could be in freshwater ponds.

There's springs all over the place.

You could be in open ocean, you can be in saltwater ponds, right?

The abundance is tremendous here.

If I had a choice, I would much rather be in the Dawnland, probably than anywhere else in the world.

The shape and sizes of the colonies and later states come pretty much out of the reality that those were the dominions and domains of the Indigenous communities.

When the pilgrims, the Separatists, or the Puritans come and they interact with the Wampanoag or the Massachusetts, and they start to have their relationships and alliances, they're gonna try to claim the territory that the Wampanoag and Massachusetts claim.

So pretty much what you see as Rhode Island today was the dominion of the Narragansett, the Niantic are in Southeastern Connecticut.

One of the things that pushes the Niantic and the Narragansett to be such a tight confederacy is the Pequot, right, that are kind of pushing against the Niantic dominion.

- The Northeast was in fact, among the most diverse, heavily settled and prosperous parts of North America at the time of European contact to begin with.

And that this century of disruptions that the Spanish and then the French, and these English mariners and others bring to the region so thoroughly destabilizes the region by 1620, that the British are able to settle, as one scholar calls it, a widowed land.

European diseases have taken extraordinary toll in the region, Indigenous slave traders have come to the region and trafficked dozens of peoples away from their homes.

And the Puritans learn pretty quickly in part through their Indigenous informants and guides that certain peoples are in deep tension with one another.

So enlisting Narragansett suppor Puritan leaders begin a series of initiatives to essentially dislodge Pequot supremacy along the Connecticut River, which is the major artery into, as we all know, the northeastern interior.

The Pequots are powerful, they're concentrated, and they put up a relative resistance initially in some of these growing tensions.

Puritan leaders mobilize a large military force that attacks the Mystic community in 1637 and burns and essentially destroys the largest, I think, concentrated village within the Pequot Confederacy.

Survivors flee, captors are enslaved.

Ironically or not, 1637 is an important date in the kind of founding of so many Connecticut towns and many of the most kind of largest kind of ports communities of the region are established within, you know, months or a year or so after the Pequot Massacre.

- The Pequot War is gonna be framed as a just war.

And this is important for English jurisprudence because in a just war, you can take land for sure, take treasure for sure, but also enslave people.

Although the people that come are Separatists and Puritans and they're thinking about establishing a city on a hill or being able to establish this community where they can practice, you know, their religious beliefs unencumbered, the reality is that they are economic endeavors and they have benefactors in England that expect to reap rewards from this investment.

And prior to the Pequot War, there were no rewards to be reaped, right?

They were struggling to be able to pay back these benefactors.

So what the Pequot War does is it creates a new revenue stream in enslaving people.

(light string music) - If you don't understand your own history fully, then you can't heal from the trauma.

The reality is some of our people were enslaved.

They were enslaved here in what is known as Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations.

And some were enslaved through the exodus of enslaving people in the islands, Bermuda, Bahamas, but all the way over to Spain and Portugal.

There was this vast slave trade that was happening here.

And this place that we now call Rhode Island was knee deep in it.

- Native people were extremely afraid of being enslaved, right?

More so a lot of times than dying because if you are enslaved, then you're taken from your land, you're taken from community, all of the connections that youve ever had, you're not gonna be buried in this place.

Lots of people moved into the marginal places, into the swamps, into those places where they couldn't, colonial authorities couldn't come and get them.

- I say it all the time, there is no US history without Indigenous people's history, and there is no Rhode Island history or any other state for that matter, without Indigenous people's history.

Roger Williams could not have created this colony if it were not for the Narragansett people.

And the Narragansett nation and its sovereignty in this place, and allowing during that time, Roger Williams to even come into their sovereign space and to allow him to create a village that eventually becomes Providence in that place.

(soft music) Conquest is about greed, power, and then there's entitlement.

There's promoting fear and hate.

We use the Declaration of Independence as an example of that because they wanted to -- had major goals of new appropriations of land.

And so they call us "merciless Indian savages, whose known rules of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions."

That's vilifying and dehumanizing Indigenous people.

- After the revolution, a series of tropes develop about Native Americans that the revolution itself establishes and that others build upon.

This vision that Native Americans are so fundamentally different, that they are merciless and savage forms a paradigm of American cultural understandings that expands across the continent and forms much of 20th century American culture.

Other tropes establish Indians as being noble or kind of religiously in tune with the natural world.

But here in New England, a really kind of disturbing trope emerges that locates Native peoples as being the last of their tribe.

- How can you just declare the end of a people?

(light music) This is post-civil war, there's an economic collapse.

The states and the federal authorities are trying to go into these landscapes that they weren't interested in before so they could build railroads through.

They're going into those areas that they had been, that Indigenous peoples had been pushed into.

Well, how do you get license and authority to be able to build on these lands?

So the solution for Rhode Island is to say, "Well, there's no Indian people here," but there are.

Not just in Rhode Island, Connecticut does the same thing, this huge campaign to de-legitimize the indigeneity of Native peoples in this region by claiming that they're not native because they're Black.

- Dispossession of land, dispossession of culture, dispossession of community, of identity.

It's all of those things.

And some of the ways in which they did that is to start erasing us.

One of the ways to erase people was on official documents.

So a gentleman would go into the regimen as Narragansett, as Indian, and come out of the regimen as colored, mulatto, musty, or negro.

And so they were consistently and pervasively doing that by either taking our people away in enslavement, taking our children away in boarding schools, industrial schools, religious schools.

And so then they would use all those techniques and then they would say, we have dwindling numbers, so therefore we are not enough people to be a people.

(soft music) - When I was in school, they told us that the Narragansett didn't exist.

So I'm sitting there in class and my grandmother's at home, right?

My mother's there, I know that we exist.

But the idea is that we don't, and this is powerful because it's an act of erasure.

Unless you know that there's these things that have happened in the past that have preferenced some people over others, and that the legacy of that continues to today and where we have these socioeconomic measures that separate people.

And if you know that, then that's important because then it determines how you allocate resources.

It's not a benign history, right?

That these things have created situations that we deal with and live with today.

And if we know that, then we'll be more apt to think about solutions and ways in which we can deal with and create a more equitable society, because that's what we say and who we say we are.