Julianne Jennings at Prospect Park in Providence, where a statue of Roger Williams overlooks the city.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PROVIDENCE — Since he first trudged through the woods to found Providence, Roger Williams has been variously called an American statesman, a canny trader and a champion of religious freedom.

Julianne Jennings, a Native American, would like to add a few more labels to the list.

Indian fighter.

Slave trader.

“We have to stop the lying,” says Jennings, 48, an author and adjunct professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College.

In her Non-Western Worlds Native Americans class, Jennings offers what she says is a “more balanced” view of New England’s feel-good, Indian summer past. Her goal? “To decolonize America’s classrooms.”

As part of her effort, she’s urging the state Department of Transportation to erect a plaque on South Main Street, one designed to give Rhode Islanders a new –– and darker –– picture of the state’s founder.

Relying on 17th-century letters and town hall records, Jennings says that Williams sent Indian prisoners from King Philip’s War to the Caribbean, Portugal, Spain and Africa, where they were sold as slaves.

He was also a steely strategist during the bloody Pequot War, argues Jennings. At one point, she says, Williams told Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop to attack a Pequot fort in Mystic, Conn., at night, so that the “English, being armed, may enter their houses and do what execution they please.”

In May 1637, a band of New England Colonists did just that. They set Pequot dwellings on fire and shot the natives as they fled from their homes, killing hundreds of Indian men, women and children.

Not everyone is comfortable with the new picture.

“It’s certainly not the portrait we paint of Roger Williams,” says Mary A. Channing, president of the Roger Williams Family Association.

“To call Williams an Indian hater is just plain wrong,” adds Rhode Island author and historian J. Stanley Lemons. In fact, Williams was responsible for 40 years of peace with the Narragansett Indians and other tribes. “Rhode Island did not have an Indian problem” until a Colonial militia from Connecticut, Plymouth and Massachusetts attacked the Narragansetts during King Philip’s War, he said. “Until then, Rhode Island was neutral.”

Williams did participate in the sale of Indian captives, but the money was used by the Colonists to rebuild Providence, largely destroyed in the war. Although the Narragansetts did not harm Williams, they burned down his home, Lemons said. “He was a man of his time. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t believe in slavery” in the 1600s, he said. When he referred to Indians as “barbarians” and “savages,” he was only using the language of the time.

“I’ve had people scream at me, ’How dare you do this!’ ” says Jennings, who is a member of the Cheroenhaka Nottoway tribe from Virginia.

She shrugs. In 2007, she received a RIC award for her work as an advocate against violence toward Native American women. Her Indian name is Strong Woman.

“I’m only providing a fuller picture of the man,” she says. “It makes Roger Williams a more complex and interesting figure.”

AS A YOUNG GIRL in South Providence and East Providence, Jennings went to Indian powwows and heard tribal stories from her father, part African-American and part-Nottoway and Eastern Pequot Indian.

One day a schoolteacher told Jennings that all the Indians in the region were dead. “I really had a problem growing up with that.”

The Indians who survived the Colonial wars worked “side by side” with the region’s Africans, and that closeness “eventually gave birth to communities of color, transforming the looks, language and lore of the Indians in this region,” Jennings says.

Local clerks further obscured the identity of the Indians by classifying them as “Colored, Negro or Black” and even “White” on census records and birth certificates, a move that helped disenfranchise the Native people, she says.

Two centuries later, Jennings is fighting back.

In 2007, she changed her birth certificate classification from black to Native American, “not to reject my African-American heritage,” but to recapture her Indian past, she says.

She also coauthored a book, A Cultural History of the Native Peoples of Southern New England: Voices from Past and Present.

A year later, she got her master’s degree from RIC –– the first Native American to do so in RIC’s anthropology department.

She credits the idea for a Roger Williams plaque to Richard Lobban, a former RIC department chairman and professor who now teaches at the Naval War College in Newport.

Lobban, she says, helped establish a Black Heritage Trail in Providence.

The trail is great, she says, “but where are the Native American plaques? When I walk through Providence, I see 70-foot statues of white colonizers looking down on me.”

John Brown, the Narragansett Indian tribe’s historic preservation officer, endorses the public sign “in principle.”

“Correcting the past can be painful,” he says.

pdavis@projo.com