Christine DeLucia has written a forceful new book meant to overhaul the way we look at King Philip’s War and the lands on which it raged. While students of early America might think such a storied chapter in the history of Indigenous-European relations has been completely covered—“done, finished, a fait accompli”—DeLucia challenges such assumptions, showing through a careful reading of the landscapes of violence, how we can view the conflict in different, more layered terms (328). Taking four distinct places important to the war, DeLucia reexamines their deep history, a history informed by Native voices, to craft a richer narrative of how settler-colonial populations and Indigenous peoples commemorated, erased, reinterpreted, and maintained the “memoryscapes” of King Philip’s War into the present (3).
DeLucia’s book takes aim at older works, most notably Jill Lepore’s 1997 The Name of War, for giving settler colonial retellings and nineteenth-century mythmaking the last...
