1) The Great Swamp Massacre of 1675 was one of the bloodiest events in Rhode Island history, where colonialists slaughtered and burned alive hundreds of Narragansett and Niantic people, including many elders, women, and children. 2) Since then, Native Americans in Rhode Island have faced ongoing injustice and loss of lands, culminating in the 1880s sale of the last Narragansett lands and the forced assimilation of Native children in boarding schools in the late 19th/early 20th century. 3) In modern times, the Narragansett have faced continued opposition to economic development efforts, including a violent 2003 police raid on a tribal smoke shop, reinforcing the intergenerational

1. By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer
October 25. 2015 11:15PM
Race in R.I.: Since the days of Roger Williams,
Native Americans have suffered one devastating
blow after another
Illustration ofGreat Swamp massacre,South Kingstown,R.I. The Providence Journal/Tom Murphy
Secondof two parts
A gentle rain falls on Paulla Dove Jennings as she stands by a monument deep in the South
Kingstown woods. She has come here on this autumn morning to tell the story of the Great
Swamp Massacre, in which white colonialists slaughtered and burned alive hundreds of her
Narragansett and Niantic ancestors. Many were elders, women and children.
The massacre, on Dec. 19, 1675, is far and away the bloodiest event in Rhode Island history.
It still reverberatestoday, nearly three and a half centurieslater.
The backdrop was King Philip's War, during which English settlers and some of New
England's Native American tribes fought, with devastating consequences for all. At the start,
Jennings' ancestors declared their neutrality, but they feared a white offensive. As winter
approached that first year, many hundreds of them sought sanctuary on a remote island,
further into the wilderness from today'smonument.

2. Paulla Dove Jennings talks atthe Great Swamp monumentaboutthe massacre of1675.Providence Journal
video by Tom Murphy
They were living in long houses -- large timber lodges that provided shelter for dozens of
extendedfamilies.
"There was warmth," says Jennings, 75, an educator, author and nationally acclaimed
storyteller. "There was food stored. You shared. It was all right there so they could get
through the winter."
Extreme cold that December of 1675 had frozen the swamp solid, providing easy access for
the colonialists, who suspected that the Narragansett and Niantic people were providing
sanctuary to members of the Wampanoag tribe, the whites' principal adversaries. On the
afternoon of Dec. 19, they stormed the island with guns, blades and fire. In her telling,
Jennings assumes the persona of a Native grandmother who was there with a youngchild.
"You could feel the pain. You could peek out and look and you could see people on fire,
people being slaughtered, people being shot. Children, falling dead. And I'm thinking of how
to get away, how do we survive, with these flames and these guns going off and people with
daggers and swords and spears -- and they're trying to kill us, and you're seeing the blood
and you're hearing the criesand you're hearing the moans.
"And after all of this, the shock of it. How can man's inhumanity to man be so strong? How
they couldbe so hateful? When it was our land, our people."
The colonialists captured a number of survivors, and later sold some into slavery. Some
of those who escaped fled as far away as Wisconsin, while others retreated deeper into the
woods and swamps of South County, into parts of what are now known as Charlestown,
South Kingstown and Westerly.
Further tragedy awaited them and the other tribes that ultimately were defeated in King
Philip's War, which left many Native communities and white towns in ruin, including
Providence, founded by Roger Williams, an early friend of the Narragansett. Diseases
introduced by the English claimed many. Tribal lands were taken, until, by the late 1700s,
Narragansett territory had been reduced to about 15,000 acres, a fraction of what had been
theirs for thousands of years. The Founding Fathers disparaged them in the Declaration of
Independence, writing this often-overlooked clause near its end, addressed to the king of
England:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the
inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is
an undistinguished destructionof all ages, sexes and conditions.

3. "That always just astounds me," Jennings says. "We didn't come with the cannon. We didn't
come with the gun. We didn't invade [settlers'] territory. Andyet we're vilified."
The Narragansett and Niantic struggled into the latter part of the 19th Century -- and then
came another blow, one more injurious than words. In defiance of federal law, the Rhode
Island General Assembly in 1880 "detribalized" the Narragansett, abolishing tribal authority
and eventually selling all but two acres of the tribe's land. In her Exeter home, Jennings
keepsa copy of the poster that announced the first offering.
Sale of the Indian Reservation, it begins. There will be sold at public auction, in the town of
Charlestown, commencing on Tuesday, July 11, 1882, at 10 o'clock a.m., at or near the
Indian Meeting House… first parcel embraces the Indian Cedar Swamp, including 'School
House Island'…
The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought the federal policy of "forced assimilation" of
members of the Narragansett and other tribes across the United States. Government officials
intended to essentially remake Indians into whites by forcibly remanding them to specialized
boarding schoolswhere their Native American culture was stripped away.
One of the most notorious was the United States Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 by Army Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, who wrote that a Native
American "is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Transfer the savage-born infant to the
surroundings of a civilization and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit." His
motto was "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."
Records at Exeter's Tomaquag Museum, which preserves the culture and history of Rhode
Island's indigenous people, chronicle the fate of the Narragansett men who were sent to
Carlisle.
"The entire purpose," says museum head Lorén Spears, who is Jennings' niece, "was to take
you far away from home, keep you there for years on end and strip of you everything you
know -- your language, your culture, your community, your family. Change your clothes,
change your hair, change your religion -- literally strip you of everything you know as being
Narragansett or any Native Americannation group."
In 1978, after a land-claim lawsuit, ownership of about 1,800 acres, a pittance, was
returned to the Narragansett. In 1983, the federal government recognized the tribe as a
sovereignnation. The State of Rhode Island, however, remained antagonistic.
As the 20th Century wound down, the Narragansett sought to build a casino that might
improve their economic circumstances, much as casinos across the border in Connecticut
have for the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot peoples. But a 1996 budget-bill rider
authored by the late Sen. John Chafee required the Narragansett to receive statewide voter
approval. Voters have not granted it. None of America's other 565 federally recognized tribes
must get voter approval.

4. In 2003, another economic-development effort was crushed when state police, acting on
orders of then-Gov. Donald Carcieri, shut down the Narragansett's tax-free smoke shop on
July 14, the day after it opened. Police stormed the shop on tribal lands on South County
Trail in Charlestown. Seven unarmed adult Narragansett were arrested, and several women
and men, including Jennings' son Adam, were injured.
"It lookedlike a war," says Jennings. "We were all stunned."
Carcieri called the raid "truly regrettable, but truly necessary," and prompted by
Narragansett's "flagrant violation of state law." Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas, one of those
arrested, said the state ignored "the federal status of the tribe," which allowed it to operate
the store. "Governor Carcierishould be ashamed of himself," Thomassaid.
"Not once have the Town of Charlestown, the state police, or the State of Rhode Island come
and apologized," Jennings says. "And they need to."
The immediate effect on the Narragansett community was demoralizing, says Spears, and not
only because once again, an economic opportunity was denied: the violent arrests and
injuries, recorded by many media outlets brought viscerally to the surface earlier injustices
dating to the Great Swamp Massacre.
"As a mother, my heart bled," says Spears. "I thought my kids weren't going to have to deal
with this."
In the wake of the smoke shop raid, Spears says, many Narragansett, including her and her
aunt, were regularly followed and stopped by police without cause -- and occasionally still
are.
"We're tailed because we are brown in an area of Rhode Island that is very white," says
Spears, whose husband, Robin Spears Jr., is a tribal environmental police officer. "I know
there are good police officers, but the fact is that our family members get harassed. My
mother was stopped not too long ago. Somebody didn't believe it was her car because she
drivesa Volvo."
The Rhode Island Indian Council website (riindiancouncil.org) has a page on historical
trauma, defining it as "the collective emotional and psychological injury both over the life
span and acrossgenerations, resulting froma shattering history of genocide."
The theory, embraced by many Native Americans but controversial in some quarters, seeks to
help explain the significant rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse and domestic
violence found in some Native American communities with long histories of suffering
injustice and atrocity.
The autumn rain continuesduring Jennings' visit to the monument marking Dec. 19, 1675.
As she stands with her aunt, Spears describes the effect in metaphorical terms she heard
from Elizabeth Hoover, a Brown University professor of American studies who is the

5. daughter of a Micmac and Mohawk family. Passed down by an elder, the metaphor is of the
succession of heavy bags of sand that Native Americans have carried, beginning with the
17th-century introductionof disease and loss of their homelands.
"Each generation is trying to let one bag off, Spears says, "but it's hard because we're carrying
all the pain of all those bags, and when the next generation after that is trying to pull their
families back together, they've been so victimized and beaten down that they're carrying the
social woes -- alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness -- just despondency.
"And you've got to try to start healing from that in order to take a bag off. I think our
community has come a long way, but we're still carrying the weight of a lot of those bags on
our shoulders."
Jennings concludes her retelling of the Great Swamp Massacre by describing the connection
she feels to the grandmother and child in her story.
"I always pictured that child as my grandmother Dove's great-great-great-grandmother," she
says. "Without her surviving, my grandmother wouldn't have been here. If my grandmother
wasn't here, my father wouldn't have been here. And if my father wouldn't have been here, I
wouldn't have been here. My children wouldn't be here. My beautiful niece wouldn't be here.
"But the inner strength that the Creator gave us -- Cautantowwit gave us -- to help us survive
and nurture one another in any way that we can is why we come here and pay homage to
those that were slaughtered."
Says Spears: "It's really a blessing and a powerful feeling to know that our ancestors truly are
not only watching over us but their spirits are washing over us. They're giving us what we
need today to survive thisperiod in time to bring our community forward."
--gwmiller@providencejournal.com
(401)277-7380
On Twitter: @gwaynemiller
http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20151025/NEWS/151029773