"We Are Building for Our Children": Crafting Intertribal Activism in Southern New England

Intertribal organizing has long been a feature of resistance to settler colonialism in southern New England. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shared material culture practices facilitated ongoing intertribal connections and activism. The emergence of the Rhode Island–based organization the Sons and Daughters of the First Americans (SDFA) in 1937 illuminates how twentieth-century intertribalism in the Native Northeast constituted a continuation of these practices and responded to uniquely unfolding local settler colonial policies and narratives. The SDFA worked to recover and disseminate Native histories to assert the active presence of Native peoples in Rhode Island after the state's attempt to detribalize the Narragansett Indian Tribe in the late nineteenth century. The SDFA's focus on the creation of material culture, with members crafting, displaying, and selling their handicraft, communicated their continued existence and ensured the transmission of cultural knowledge to the next generation of Native children. For the SDFA, material culture practices did not only encompass handicraft, but the continuation of their relationships with historical landscapes, gathering places, and architectures. The study of these material culture practices reveals how twentieth-century intertribal activism in southern New England maintained Indigenous knowledge away from colonial sites of meaning-making while also intervening in false narratives of Native disappearance.