An anniversary overshadowed

Two anniversaries collide in 2026. The United States will mark 250 years of independence, and New England will also pass 350 years since King Philip's War, the 1675-76 conflict whose death toll per capita remains the highest of any war in colonial American or US history. By the reckoning of scholars who study the period, the older and more complex of the two commemorations has drawn far less attention across the region.

Christine De Lucia, assistant professor of history at Williams College and author of the 2018 book Memory Lands, said that seeing the two anniversaries together is itself an opening for reflection.

Mack Scott III, an assistant professor at Brown University and a member of the Narragansett tribe, offered one explanation: the war is remembered as a benevolent process by which the land became the US. In that telling, Native peoples today are almost back-of-mind for most Americans, he said.

From alliance to war

The story begins with an alliance, not a war. Metacom's father, Massasoit - also called Ousamequin - was sachem of the Pokanoket, and it was Ousamequin who helped the starving Pilgrims survive their first winter at Plymouth in 1620-21 and joined the first Thanksgiving.

The balance between the peoples shifted over the following decades:

• •Pathogens brought by English and earlier European explorers decimated the Indigenous population.
• •Growing English colonization tipped the population balance and encroached on Native land.
• •Wamsutta, Metacom's older brother, mysteriously died after meeting with the colonists, and the less experienced Metacom became the new sachem.
• •The colonists then compelled Metacom to accept a humiliating agreement that incensed the Pokanoket.

Eric Schultz, co-author of the 2017 book King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict, said Metacom faced a very complex moment that his father and brother never had to face. In June 1675, war erupted with an Indigenous attack on Swansea, in present-day south-eastern Massachusetts.

How the war turned

At the outset, the advantage lay with Metacom's forces. According to author Michael Tougias, they quickly adapted hit-and-run tactics into ambushes, and the English were reeling. Tougias has argued that had all the tribes in New England united, they would have pushed the English back into a ring around Boston - but many Native people did not join, and the balance tipped.

Several pressures converged against the alliance:

• •Metacom's bid for a Mohawk alliance backfired: the Mohawk preferred fur trading with English colonists, and attacked Metacom's men.
• •The Narragansett joined Metacom but lost heavily in an engagement remembered by the colonists as the Great Swamp Fight, and by Indigenous people as the Great Swamp Massacre.
• •The Mohegan and the Pequot fought alongside the colonists.
• •Christian-converted "Praying Indians" who sided with the colonists were relocated by colonial authorities to Deer Island in Boston Harbor; running low on supplies in the winter, hundreds died there.
• •Colonists retaliated at scale, in engagements such as the Great Swamp Fight and the Turners Falls Massacre, pressing the war at all seasons.

Brad Lopes, education and public programs manager at the Aquinnah Cultural Center and an Aquinnah Wampanoag member, described what his ancestors confronted.

Donald "Strong Turtle" Brown Jr, official historian of the Pokanoket and a descendant of Metacom, called it a war of attrition, in which people surrendered because they were starving, or dying from exposure to the elements.

Defeat, death and legacy

The war ended where its tensions began. On 12 August 1676, John Alderman guided an expedition under Benjamin Church to Metacom and killed the Pokanoket sachem at the tribe's stronghold of Mount Hope, in present-day Rhode Island. Metacom's head was displayed on a stake outside Plymouth, and his wife and son were sold into slavery.

The toll was extraordinary: an estimated 800 dead on the colonial side, and three to five thousand Indigenous slain, the highest death toll per capita of any war in colonial American or US history. The victorious English sold many into slavery and executed others on Boston Common. One people held out: in Maine, the Wabanaki continued fighting until 1678 and, unlike many of their counterparts, got to remain on their land.

Nor did the questions behind the war disappear, De Lucia said. In some ways they intensify - the theft of Native lands, US attempts to diminish Native sovereignty - and by the American Revolution the issues had not gone away.

Commemoration and recognition today

For the 350th anniversary, the official response has been quiet. The governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island did not respond to separate inquiries as to whether their state held, or is planning to hold, a commemorative event.

The communities at the war's center remain present, though unequally recognized:

• •Federally recognized Indigenous communities remain in New England: the Wampanoag in Massachusetts, and the Narragansett in Rhode Island.
• •Metacom's own community, the Pokanoket, have not received federal recognition.

Recognition has come from other quarters. Brown said Brown University in 2024 returned 255 acres of the tribe's ancestral land - Mount Hope in Bristol - to the Pokanoket tribe, one of the largest land-back grants to a non-federally recognized tribal community. And Brown said a Rhode Island General Assembly Senate Resolution, S1034, passed last year, officially acknowledges the Pokanoket tribe as the ancient and ongoing stewards of their ancestral land.