On Nov. 15, 2024, Brown University returned 255 acres of Mt. Hope (Potumtuk) land in Bristol to the people who had been stewarding it for 12,000 years.

Nearly 350 years ago, King Philip’s War erupted in Sowams, the ancestral homeland of the Pokanoket Tribe. The conflict ravaged Indigenous and colonial communities throughout New England, causing the highest per capita fatality rate in North American history.

After the war, the English confiscated Tribal lands across the region, including the last of Pokanoket land in today’s towns of Bristol and Warren, R.I. Pokanoket men who did not surrender were shot on site. Women and children were sold into slavery in the Caribbean, interned in camps, or absorbed into other Tribes. For Pokanokets to speak their own language or call themselves Pokanoket was illegal. It is said that the Pokanokets “were disappeared.”

Or were they? Over the centuries, history may have obscured the Pokanoket, but their descendants and their culture never disappeared. Today members of the Pokanoket Tribe are telling their stories — in school presentations, community gatherings, business forums, university lectures, and at neighborhood festivals such as the popular annual Pokanoket Heritage Day in Warren. Wherever they go, the Pokanoket Tribe reminds us of the importance of preserving open spaces, where nature and wildlife can thrive undisturbed.

And now, the descendants of the Pokanoket Massasoit Ousamequin can resume caring for their ancient, sacred land of Potumtuk.

At last.

Andrea Rounds
Sowams Heritage Area