Colonial discourse must be read with skepticism. As colonists entered the New World, their correspondence with colonial officials overseas was marked with rhetoric to justify their occupation. To gain financial support from the English Crown, colonists codified the landscape of New England in ways that replicated the logic of conquest. The indigenous persons whom they encountered were not human, they were savages; the lands were unoccupied—they were but territories of vast wilderness. But the inhabitants were not savage; nor was the land an untamed, navigable wilderness:

…in Pocasset, on the east side of Kteticut (Taunton River), [was] the great waterway of the Wampanoag country. At the center of Pocasset was the river Quequequachand, a series of fishing falls, which led to Watuppa, a pair of spring-fed ponds. Namumpum [Weetamoo] maintained a town, with her kin, by the deep pool at the falls, but they relied on a vast ecological range, including cedar swamps to the south and forested uplands to the north. They maintained several planting fields, including one at Nonaquaket, which lay to the south of the cedar marsh, beside crystalline coastal waters, with river trails flowing southeast from the marshes to the coast at Acoaxet. A key riverside trail passed by the east side of Nonaquaket pond, leading south to the neighboring Saunkskwa Awashonk’s territory of Sakonnet and north through Pocasset’s forests to Cohannet, where the Pocasset trail joined the Kteticut path, branching west to Ousamequin and Wamsutta’s territory of Pokanoket.  In the heat of July, Pocasset families would have been living on the coast and ponds, fishing, gathering shellfish, harvesting plants from the salt and cedar marshes, and returning periodically to check the growth of their planting fields. (Brooks, ch.3  1-2) 

Since contact, colonists were forced to compete with a complex Indigenous political system upon which centuries of alliances and kinship networks had been built. [see Native homeland map] Though Englishmen may have been writing as if they were dominating Native/colonial relations, it was the English who had to interact with Native territories, peoples, and systems of Indigenous diplomacy. Colonial writing could suggest authority, but on the ground settlers had to entreat for meetings in deep time Native homelands. As early as 1621, representatives of Plymouth Colony Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins spent a night at Teticut in Wampanoag territory where “thousands of men have lived” (Emery 26-7). Of his visit, Winslow commented on “the ground [being] very good on both sides, it being for the most part cleared” (27). The river was also of interest to Winslow: “Upon the river dwelleth Massaoyet”-- its close proximity to the Atlantic bay via Narragansett Bay would allow “A shipp [to] go many myles up it” and “a shallop to the head of it,” as the “Salvages report” (Emery 27). Timber, a limited resource in England, seemed abundant in the ecologically diverse territory: “There is much good Timber, both Oake, Walnut-tree, Firre, Beeche and exceeding great chestnut trees” (Emery 27; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 110).

Perhaps the most telling piece of Winslow’s recollection was his connection of the lands at Teticut to familiar spaces back home: “The country in respect of the lying of it, is both Champanie and hilly, like many places in England” (Emery 27). Emery’s History of Taunton provides an insightful passage on the original Taunton in the county of Somerset in England, which demonstrates that while colonists may have been looking for landscape reminiscent of “home,” this land speculation was also a calculated attempt to establish settlements in spaces that were abundant in ecological resources and in close proximity to pathways of transportation:

Cotton Mather noted “That the reason why most of our towns are called what they are, is because the chief of the first inhabitants would thus bear up the names of the particular places there [in old England] from whence they came” (Mather quoted in Emery 24). Mather’s emphasis on Taunton settlers being the “first settlers” again exposes the ways in which colonial texts must be interpreted with apprehension; while the landscape may have reminded colonists of the motherland, they were not breaking ground on an unpeopled territory.

Sustained Native occupancy, Indigenous political authority over territory, and inhabitants who were adept at navigating the lands and waterways contradict notions of colonial "ownership." Yet colonists began to systematically disaggregate the homelands of Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples. The initial step in this process of dismemberment was through the re-naming of space.