Domination Consciousness, Partnership Possibilities, and the Birth of America’s Racial-Class System
By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D., Anthropology (UCLA)
New England’s bloodiest colonial war was more than a conflict of muskets and villages: it was a spiritual confrontation between domination consciousness and partnership consciousness, between fear-based hierarchy and relational balance.
Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett nations fought not only for land, but for a cosmology of reciprocity with nature.
Puritan elites fought not only for survival, but to maintain a fragile colonial oligarchy terrified of united underclasses. They fought to prevent indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous peoples from joining forces.
In this post, through a Jungian, existential, and transpersonal lens, we explore how King Philip’s War shaped the American patterns of race formation, class control, and imperial rivalry that continue today.
The Colonial Elite feared Slaves, indentured Whites, Indians, and many Paupers
King Philip’s War of 1675-1676 began long before the first shots were fired. It began when the balance between peoples deteriorated, when Puritan domination and Indigenous partnership cosmologies collided.
Massasoit, Chief of the Wampanoag Indians, had led all the Indian tribes between the Charles River, Mass., and Narragansett Bay, R.I., in forging a fragile peace with the Pilgrim Separatists of Plymouth half a century earlier.
By the 1670s, Pilgrims carved up Wampanoag hunting grounds. Pilgrim cattle destroyed Indian cornfields. Colonists established scattered “praying towns” on the Indians’ traditional lands and undermined the Indians’ traditional authority over these areas. When the Indians objected, Plymouth’s courts summoned Wampanoag leaders, punished them, and demanded land as payment.
Massasoit died in 1660. His son METACOM (Philip) believed the English poisoned Massasoit.
Philip, Wampnoag Sachem
The WAMPNOAG COUNCIL elected Massasoit’s eldest son, WAMSUTTA (aka ALEXANDER) as Sachem (Chief). Wamsutta started selling Wampnoag land to other English colonies. The Pilgrims captured him, and he died in captivity.
The Wampanoag Council voted Massasoit’s next son, METACOM, also known as PHILIP, as their next Chief. Philip kept peace with the English colonizers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island for many decades. He surrendered much of his tribe’s armament and ammunition, and agreed that they were subject to English law.
The encroachment continued until Metacom told the Wampanoag, If they rule us, we are no longer who we are.” War between the Pilgrims and the Indians broke out in 1675.
Dr. Lessin’s Anthropological Framework clarifies the contrasting attitudes of the Indians and Colonials. In domination-consciousness, the operating ideology of the Colonists, land was property. In contrast, in the Indians’ ethos of partnership/cooperation, land was a being that was a relation, a family member of the tribe.
Competition & Domination v Cooperation & Partnership are alternate Human Archetypes that can synergize
Domination consciousness (Enlil/Yahweh’s pattern) embraces hierarchy, fear control, rigid boundaries, and suppression of the Other.
Partnership consciousness (Ninmah/The Great Mother’s pattern) embraces reciprocity, flexibility, cooperative survival, and balancing of opposites.
A balanced, centered society allows both rivalry and unity.
Lessin’s fieldwork in Fiji [1970, Village of the Conquerors: Sawana, a Tongan Village in Fiji: Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon], illustrates how a society can embrace both competition and cooperation. In Sawana, the Capital of the Island of Vanua Balavu, two village halves (moieties) built halves of a communal hall. The slower team owed a feast to the to the team of the slower half. This turned competition into overall cooperation. No humiliation. No domination.
Societies shift like vibrating fields in a dynamic universe. Rigid domination collapses under stress; flexible partnership adapts.
King Philip’s War shows what happens when domination freezes and partnership is crushed. Sachem Philip tried to cooperate with the English for many years.
Indian & Pilgrim Spiritual Orientations Collided
Indigenous nations practiced a cosmology of relationship that encompassed spirits of river and forest, ancestors accompanying the living, harmony between humans and non-humans, and the land is a sacred partner, not property.
Puritans practiced a covenant of domination that dictated the dogma that “God” gave the land to the “elect”, that the wilderness was Satan’s realm, indigenous People were Satan-worshippers, and hierarchy and submission were the divine order.
Philip’s heroic attempts at cooperation with the Colonists were shattered when Indians murdered a Christianized Native named John Sassamon, and the Puritan court hanged three Wampanoag in retaliation. For the Puritans, this was civil justice. Local leaders whispered, Their courts judge us as if we are children. This world is no longer in balance. For Puritans, it was civil justice.
War became inevitable because the colonial elite worried that a multi-racial, multi-class partnership that would unite 1) indentured Europeans who fled harsh conditions and lived with Native tribes, 2) enslaved Africans who found refuge among Indigenous groups, and 3) poor white frontiersmen against them.
A Plymouth merchant wrote privately: If servant and Indian clasp hands, property is lost and order undone. This attitude embodies the Anunnaki-generated archetype of domination consciousness: divide the oppressed, prevent partnership bonds, weaponize fear, and create competition among the poor, Native and enslaved people. King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion (the same decade) triggered legal efforts to create racial caste, making poor whites identify with the elite rather than with Black or Native oppressed people. The Colonials used race as a branding device to reinforce their dominance.
King Philip’s War Pitted the Colonial Cosmology of extreme competition against the Indian ethos of cooperation
The war burned across five colonies. Twelve English towns were destroyed; dozens more were damaged. Nipmuc villages fell, Narragansett neutrality failed, and they were massacred in the Great Swamp Attack.
Both sides fought for survival, but their cosmologies diverged. Puritans believed defeat meant God’s anger. Native nations believed that an imbalance had opened the world to destruction.
Puritans reenacted the shadow of their domination-consciousness with rigidity, projection, terror, and punitive theology. Natives embodied their partnership consciousness with adaptiveness, reciprocity, and relational spirituality. The colonists’ fear-driven rigidity prevailed.
Colonial rivalries & the slave market exploded
Britain let New England handle the war, but later tightened control, using fear to justify stronger colonial governance.
France armed allied tribes and raided English frontiers. French commanders and Abenaki/Mi’kmaq warriors took colonists north, where some became servants, adoptees, or slaves. Some had children with their new communities.
Spain watched and waited, maintaining Native alliances in Florida and the Southeast.
Native slavery escalated massively. Slavers shipped thousands of Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuc captives to Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Azores, Spain, and North Africa, as well as to households in Boston, Providence, and Newport. Domination consciousness scaled up; partnership consciousness was scattered across oceans.
The Cost of Choosing Domination & Stifling Cooperation
Metacom was hunted and killed. His head was displayed on a pike in Plymouth for 20 years. His son was enslaved abroad. His people dispersed.
Puritans, though victorious, were traumatized. Fear hardened into doctrine. The results were stricter hierarchies. racial codes, suppression of Native sovereignty, environmental devastation, the Puritanization of domination as “order,” the elevation of elites as guardians of civilization, and the erasure of partnership possibilities.
The colonies chose fear instead of centeredness — domination instead of partnership — rigidity instead of balance. Puritans clung to rigidity and produced trauma. Indigenous peoples adapted for centuries but were crushed by imported domination consciousness amplified by guns, theology, and empire.
When domination becomes absolute, it destroys not only the oppressed but the dominator’s soul, cosmology, and future. Only partnership consciousness adapts to cosmic change.
This war was not simply a beginning; it set the archetype for American society.
📚References
Primary Sources:
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Increase Mather, A Brief History of the War (1676)
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William Hubbard, The Present State of New England (1677)
Secondary Sources:
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Jill Lepore, The Name of War
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Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence
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Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
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Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
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Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening
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