You are looking out at what Captain John Smith, sailing this coast in 1614, called “the Paradise of all those parts.” For thousands of years, these islands were thriving farmlands and fishing grounds tended by the Massachusett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuc peoples. Deer Island was the most striking: large, abundant, its mounds of corn visible from the water. Within decades of English arrival, it would become a prison.

In 1675, Native tribes across Massachusetts rose up against English colonists encroaching on their lands. The conflict, known as King Philip’s War, was the bloodiest war in colonial American history. The English colonists faced a question about the Native people who had converted to Christianity and lived in the so-called “Praying Towns,” settlements established by the Puritan missionary John Eliot. These were Native people who had adopted English dress, customs, and faith. These were people who had lived peacefully alongside the colonists for years, many of whom actively aided the English war effort as scouts and translators. 

In October 1675, the same month the Indian Exclusion Act banned Indigenous people from Boston’s streets, the Massachusetts General Court ordered the forced removal of all Praying Town Native people. Hundreds were transported by boat to Deer Island. The island offered no shelter, no adequate food, no firewood against the brutal New England winter. Hundreds died of cold, starvation, and disease in the months that followed.

Those who survived were released after the war, but their towns had been destroyed, their lands seized, their communities shattered. When you look out at these islands today, you see the same water, the same light, the same quiet beauty that the Massachusett people knew for thousands of years. But that beauty is not innocent. It holds the memory of what was done here, and the knowledge that paradise, for some, became a prison.