April 15, 2026 By Tim Miller Dempsey
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
– President Donald J Trump
I was fifteen years old the first time I heard the word Holocaust. It was a fall day my freshman
year of high school, and I was talking with a friend in the assembly hall at my school. She used it
matter-of-factly, referring to the murder of six million Jews during World War II, and my first
instinct was to think she was being dramatic. That moment has stayed with me for forty years,
not because I was ignorant, but because I wasn’t. I had been taught about the war. I knew people
died. I just had no idea of the scale, the intent, or the word for it, because my previous school in
small town Wisconsin had given me a version of history carefully trimmed of those things. What
I carried wasn’t ignorance. It was a false confidence, the feeling of already knowing something I
had never actually been shown. When someone finally used the right word, I didn’t recognize it.
Now I have been teaching history for the past 28 years, and it is my job to say the word genocide
where it applies and not to demean it through omission or minimization. Because of my own
experience, I know how important it is to say the word. Genocide. One of the courses I teach is
about King Philip’s War and the genocide that took place on Deer Island in Boston Harbor.
Hingham has its own direct connection to what happened on Deer Island, a connection most
residents never encounter because we have only recently grappled with the idea that genocide
was worth teaching, and worth remembering.
In 1675, King Philip’s War tore through New England. It remains, in proportion to population,
the deadliest war in American history. Metacom, the Wampanoag sachem who had taken the
English name King Philip, had watched decades of colonial courts and fraudulent deals strip his
people of their territory. When the colonists demanded he sign away the Wampanoag’s
remaining territorial claims entirely, he refused. The war that followed was savage. Native forces
burned colonial towns across Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Colonial forces massacred Native
men, women, and children, and sold thousands of survivors into slavery in the West Indies. Men
from Hingham fought in it. Captain John Jacob of South Hingham commanded troops at the
Narragansett Swamp Fight in December 1675, where an estimated 600 Narragansetts were
slaughtered. His son, also named John, was shot and killed near his father’s house in Hingham
the following April, the only person killed by enemy action in our town during the entire war.
Wompatuck, the namesake of our state park, and the Massachusett sachem whose people's land
became Hingham, did not join Metacom. His people, the Massachusett at Ponkapoag, had done
everything the colonists asked. They converted to Christianity, moved to designated praying
towns, and built stockade fencing around their settlement to demonstrate their loyalty to the
British. They believed that if they cooperated, stayed close to the English, and remained
unthreatening, they would be protected. They were wrong. In October 1675, colonial authorities
rounded up the Massachusett people and marched them to the Charles River, where they were
loaded onto boats in shackles and transported to Deer Island in Boston Harbor. At that time, Deer
Island was a true island separated from mainland Boston. It was a barren strip of land, wind-
hammered in winter, offering no shelter, no adequate food, and no way out. Settlers on the
mainland were encouraged to shoot anyone who tried to leave. Slavers came to take people off
the island for sale in Barbados and Jamaica. More than 500 people died there over that winter, of
starvation, exposure, and disease. Families watched each other die slowly in the cold. Those who
survived were in many cases too sick to recover. Some tribal members and historians call Deer
Island the site of America’s first genocide. The word fits. They weren’t put there to suffer, they
were put there to die.
After the war, Wompatuck’s son Charles Josias Wompatuck signed a quitclaim deed in 1685,
surrendering the Massachusett people’s remaining legal claim to Boston and to Deer Island itself.
The colonists sought the deed specifically because surviving Massachusett people were asserting
a claim to the island where the remains of their murdered family members' remains were. We
don’t know exactly what Charles Josias felt when he signed this deal. It is not hard to imagine
that he probably felt tremendous pressure to sell with the Deer Island genocide less than a decade
old. It was the colonists’ greatest bargaining chip. When he made that deal, he signed away his
people’s claim to the ground where their murdered dead lay. Deer Island, and what lay beneath
it, passed entirely out of his people’s hands.
Later, in the 1990s, the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (The MWRA) built the sewage
treatment plant on Deer Island. Tribal governments asked to be informed of construction and to
be allowed to conduct their own archaeological survey. The MWRA agreed, then backed out.
The agency was caught removing soil containing bones from the island and dumping it in the
Quincy Quarry, in violation of its commitments to the tribes. The remains of people murdered in
1675 almost certainly lie today in a landfill in Quincy.
Deer Island was not the only site of this genocide. Overflow from Deer Island sent more people
to Long Island, also in the harbor. Hundreds more died there. A burial ground remains on Long
Island today. In 2018, Boston proposed building a drug treatment campus on the island. This
facility is desperately needed during the growing opioid crisis. The Chaubunagungamaug
Nipmuck tribe asked to intervene in the related court case, arguing there were ancestral remains
on the island that needed protection before any construction began. Suffolk Superior Court Judge
Robert Ullman ruled against them. The tribe had no standing. The bones of genocide victims
became a procedural obstacle that was easily overcome by a system that refused to say the word.
Genocide has echoes, and they are still reverberating in Boston Harbor 350 years later.
Last year was the 350th anniversary of the Deer Island genocide. There was no serious public
recognition. While we are deep in celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the
Revolutionary War, it is worth noting that the anniversary of the Deer Island genocide passed
quietly without any ceremony. We continue, still, not to say the word.
Now this.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” President Trump wrote
that last Tuesday as a negotiating tactic, to force Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz for oil
shipping. A ceasefire was reached ninety minutes before his deadline. The crisis passed. The
news moved on.
But something was established that cannot be unestablished. A president of the United States
used the threat of genocide as a bargaining chip, in writing, in public, and it worked. It wasn’t a
secret backroom conversation. He posted it on Truth Social. Every government on earth has
noted it. Every future negotiation will carry it forward. History doesn’t forget.
I teach the echoes from 1675 genocide of Native Americans. They run through Boston Harbor,
through a quarry in Quincy, through a courtroom where a tribe was told it had no standing over
the graves of its murdered ancestors, through the tent encampments of Boston's underserved
addiction crisis at Mass and Cass, and through the water treatment plant on Deer Island. The
echoes of that genocide have been reverberating for 350 years, and yet we still cannot say the
word.
The colonists used the Deer Island genocide as leverage to extract a land deed from a grieving
son. Last Tuesday, the President of the United States used the threat of exterminating an entire
civilization as leverage to open an oil shipping lane. He got what he wanted. The world took
note. Every government watching this negotiation has filed it away for future use. The echoes of
what happens in moments like these travel further than we can track and last longer than we
expect. We know this. We have 350 years of evidence from our own local community. And still,
we moved on without saying the word.
Sources Used
King Philip’s War and the Deer Island Internment
National Park Service. “Deer Island.” Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/places/deer-island.htm
National Park Service. “Long Island.” Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. https://home.nps.gov/places/long-island-boston.htm
Partnership of Historic Bostons. “From Paradise to Prison.” https://historicbostons.org/blog-1/deer
Cultural Survival. “Legacy of Genocide Resurfaces in Boston as Construction Planned on Burial Site.” July 27, 2019. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/legacy-genocide-resurfaces-boston-construction-planned-burial-site-0
Jennings, Julianne. “Deer Island: A History of Human Tragedy Remembered.” Indian Country Today, September 12, 2018. https://ictnews.org/archive/deer-island-a-history-of-human-tragedy-remembered
Blatt, Martin. “King Philip’s War and the Cultural Landscape of Boston.” Mass Humanities, September 2018. https://masshumanities.org/ph_king-philips-war-and-the-cultural-landscape-of-boston/
Wompatuck, Charles Josias, and the Land Deeds
Massachusetts Historical Society. “Wompatuck’s Lease: Tribute, Tobacco, and Land in Colonial Massachusetts.” Beehive Blog, March 2023. https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2023/03/wompatucks-lease-tribute-tobacco-and-land-in-colonial-massachusetts/
Massachusetts Historical Society. “Deed for Boston, 19 March 1685.” Object of the Month. https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/indian-deed-for-boston-2006-09-01
Wikipedia. “Charles Josias Wampatuck.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Josias_Wampatuck
The Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag. “Life of the Indigenous Massachusett at Ponkapoag Plantation.” https://massachusetttribe.org/life-of-the-indigenous-massachusett-at-ponkapoag-plantation
Hingham and the War
“Hingham Military History.” Rootsweb. https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~blackwell/books/ma/Hingham1893/h1military.html
Wikipedia. “Hingham, Massachusetts.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hingham,_Massachusetts
The Quincy Quarry and MWRA
Hearn, Dylan. “The Troubled Past and Future of the Boston Harbor Islands.” Medium, October 2020. https://dylan-hearn.medium.com/the-troubled-past-and-future-of-the-boston-harbor-islands-970c6ca34027
The Long Island Bridge and Tribal Standing
WBUR News. “Court Denies Tribe’s Request For Environmental Review Of Long Island Bridge Project.” February 24, 2020. https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/02/24/quincy-long-island-chaubunagungamaug-nipmuck-council-intervention
Atlas Obscura. “Will Plans for Boston’s Long Island Erase Its Indigenous Past?” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/long-island-boston-harbor
Trump’s Threats Against Iran
CNN. “What to Know About Trump’s Threat to Bomb Iran’s Infrastructure.” April 7, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/07/middleeast/iran-trump-deadline-infrastructure-what-we-know
NPR. “U.S. and Iran Agree to 2-Week Ceasefire, Suspending Trump’s Threat to Annihilate Iran.” April 7, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/07/nx-s1-5776377/iran-war-updates
CBS News. “U.S. and Iran Reach 2-Week Ceasefire Ahead of Trump’s Deadline.” April 7, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iran-war-trump-deadline-power-plants-human-chains-israel-train-strikes/