An array of photos and documents now on display at the State Archives chronicles the history of indigenous peoples in Rhode Island. The area was once home to several Native American tribes, including the Wompanoag and the Narragansett.
The exhibit features early deeds between colonists and the tribes living in the area. One of the deeds gave Aquidneck Island to Roger Williams in a deal with the Narragansett Nation.
Loren Spears who heads the Tomaquog Museum in Coventry, consulted on the project, and said it’s important to look at these documents with a critical eye. She says the Narragansett people had assumptions about land use which differed from the colonists.
“It was a different construct to ‘I own this square footage,’ and I can put a fence around it and you cannot traverse it anymore, and you can’t hunt across it, and you can’t utilize the resources there anymore,” said Spears.
Spears said deeds like this can come with a litany of historical problems.
“Think about the impact of this conflict of ideologies, and this loss and attrition of land, and whether all of that was being done in good faith,” said Spears. “Were people being victimized in that process?”
Also included in the exhibit are petitions from tribal members about the possession of their lands, and resolutions from the General Assembly on the rights of native people.
Today the Narragansett Nation is the only federally recognized tribe with a reservation in the state in Charlestown, RI. The Wompanoag tribe helped the earliest colonists survive their first winter in New England but later fought a bitter war against colonization. The exhibition runs through December at the State Archives building in Providence.
