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

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, took 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 explored 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.
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.
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Image: Territory of the Wampanoag, circa 1620. Credit: National Geographic Society.