Williams College History Professor Christine DeLucia, speaking to a capacity crowd at the Little Compton Community Center on July 25, 2019, described “the confluence of longstanding Native places with colonial ones and its influence on shaping how we remember and honor it, inviting us into a better/greater understanding and acknowledgement of its complex and challenging history.”
Sponsored by the Sakonnet Preservation Association, Professor DeLucia’s talk referenced her book, Memory Lands, “an enlightening work that draws from oral traditions, archival traces, material and visual culture, archaeology, literature, and environmental studies, [that] reassesses the nature and enduring legacies of a watershed historical event.” [Yale University Press]
(Above) DeLucia holds up a package of coffee that she recently found in a local grocery store that’s named “Wild Weetamoo”, the name of a Sachem of the Pocasset Tribe in what is now Tiverton, an example of how Native culture continues to be demeaned and diminished by the dominant American culture.
DeLucia spoke about the importance of Placemaking that conveys meaning to publicly visible affirmations of significance, in contrast to the use of local Native names on business signs she found along Metacom Road in Bristol, RI.
