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

What was lost when 17th century English colonists renamed Indigenous places, when 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, Abenaki scholar and author 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. 

This is the third of a five-part series, The Power of Place, dedicated to the Indigenous view of the meaning of land and place in New England, past and present. Organized by the Partnership of Historic Bostons, a public-history non-profit.

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