Whose Name, Whose Place?  Native Placenames in Southern New England

The Partnership of HIstoric Bostons tells the story of early Boston, Massachusetts, and the wider 17th century world. Join our public history events to explore topics from myths about Puritans to early anti-vaxxers to the fate of Native peoples incarcerated during King Philip's War.

Partnership of Historic Bostons

Dr. Frank Waabu O'Brien recovers the voices of Native people this unique history of New England placenames asks: whose place is this?

Enslavement & Resistance: New England 1620-1760

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Native names dot the map of New England, but many Native names were lost or distorted by English colonists. Dr. Frank Waabu O'Brien explores the history of Native placenames in southern New England and asks: whose place is this? Join us for Whose Name, Whose Place?, the third of our fall series, The Power of Place: An Indigenous View of Land, Place and Belonging in Early New England and Today. To register for other events in our series, click <a href="https://historicbostons.org/upcomingevents" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">here</a>. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Aquidneck, Natick…. Native names dot the map of New England, mingling with the English imports the Puritans so eagerly renamed their new abodes. How many Native placenames names remain? How many were lost to colonization? Sociolinguist and placename expert Frank Waabu O’Brien, Abenaki and former president of the Aquidneck Indian Council, takes a unique look at the history of Native placenames, their linguistic mangling by colonists and both their slow erasure and survival. What was lost in this re-naming, as Shawmut (in fact, probably originally Mashauwomuk) became Boston and Hassanemesit became Grafton? Did erasing the original names serve to erase, culturally, the people? Did new names become a claim to the land itself? Should we be restoring the original names to their places? And how do we even know what those original names were?In this fascinating presentation, Frank O’Brien explores the meaning of individual Algonquian words to reconstruct, where possible, the landscape- and culture-specific meanings hidden within many colonial versions of Native names placed on the New England landscape, and to rescue those long thought lost. Placenames have the power to convey the living history of people and their languages. Despite the distortions of time and renaming, recognizing Native names reminds us that this was, and is, a Native place. Join us in this important and unique exploration of New England placenames. Frank Waabu O’Brien A member of the Abenaki Nation, Dr. O’Brien is the author of Understanding Indian Place Names of Southern New England and other books on Southern New England Native culture and language. He is the former president of the Aquidneck Indian Council, a disabled Vietnam veteran, and was a career civil servant and mathematician for the Department of Defense. Note: This Zoom presentation will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel and website <a href="https://historicbostons.org" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">www.historicbostons.org</a>Image above: Territory of the Wampanoag, circa 1620. Credit: National Geographic Society.Image below: Dr. Frank Waabu O'Brien.

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