There are some moments in the archive that stick with you. For me, one such moment was seeing this 1668 deed for “Secunk” — a place now called Rehoboth, Massachusetts — in the stacks of the John Carter Brown Library my first week working there.
On the page was a signature line reading: “The marke of phillip Sachem,” and between those words, the bold pictographic mark chosen by Metacom (called “King Philip” by the English). I had read so much about Metacom, but had never before seen a stroke of pen on paper, chosen by him to represent himself.
Seeing that mark collapsed so much historical distance. These marks were not about myths, symbols, or abstractions, but human beings with relationships, responsibilities, griefs, humor, strategies, families, and dreams. Ancestors who lived and loved on these lands for millennia before the United States existed — and whose descendants are still here.
That moment became one of the sparks for Their Marks. It sent me searching for the lives, circumstances, and pictographs of Northeastern Native ancestors so often flattened, erased, trivialized, or rendered invisible within dominant historical narratives. Narratives that celebrate “American exceptionalism” while treating so many Native people as footnotes to someone else’s story.
I’ve come to think of them not only as evidence of Native presence, but as assertions of belonging. As forms of memory. As refusals. As calls across generations. If, for so many years, academia had known how (or been willing) to truly read these marks, perhaps the histories told about this place would have looked very different.
Every pictograph represents a person who understood themselves as part of a world shaped by land, kinship, language, diplomacy, innovation, spirituality, and responsibility. A person whose experiences were - and are - worthy of recording and remembering. A person whose descendants still carry those histories forward.
Their Marks, for me, has always been about calling ancestors back to us. About looking beyond colonial handwriting and legal language to the human beings who put hand to paper. About imagining fuller stories for them than the archive often allows. Stories tied not only to dispossession, but to endurance, creativity, governance, survivance, and dreams for the future.
