Paulla Dove Jennings stands outside her home in Richmond. Jennings, the curator of the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Exeter, favors a Narragansett Indian casino in any community willing to host it so that the tribe can preserve its land in Charlestown.

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The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

Wherever Paulla Dove Jennings looks in Charlestown, she is confronted with loss.

The house where she lived for most of her youth, on Buckeye Brook Trail, is a vacant lot, only its rusty water pump still standing. The apple, pear and quince trees that surrounded it are long since cut down.

In many other places in town, the opposite is true: new houses have gone up on what once were pristine woods or spaces sacred to the Narragansett Indians. The trees no longer meet in a canopy over Shumankanuc Hill Road, where Jennings and her brother once went sledding.

Even the tribe’s own land isn’t immune: people come out in their 4-by-4s, tearing holes in the soil. “We don’t find out till later, when we’re cleaning up their trash,” she says. “They think, ‘There’s nothing there — it’s only the reservation.’ ”

There’s a sense of frustration in Jennings’ words, of helplessness and injustice — and also, later, of something far more disturbing.

JENNINGS, 67, is the curator of the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum, the Exeter museum that stands next to her family’s former Dovecrest Indian Restaurant, now the Nuweetooun School. On her car’s rear-view mirror, where some people dangle an air freshener or fuzzy dice, she has a miniature Indian headdress made of green and white plastic beads.

She lives in Richmond now. But from 1940, when she was a few months old, until 1955, she lived in Charlestown.

After reading that Katharine Waterman, president of the Charlestown Town Council, had given me a tour of the town soon after I came to South County in April, Jennings phoned me.

Waterman this summer had written a controversial e-mail in which she talked about the special privileges she saw the Narragansetts as getting in Charlestown. And during our tour, I wrote, she had brought me onto tribal land to show me the foundations of houses the tribe had begun to build, with federal money, but had not completed.

Jennings wanted to take me on a tour of her own, she said, one that would show me the Charlestown where she grew up.

WE MET yesterday morning in the parking lot at the Gentleman Farmer restaurant, where Route 2 meets Route 112, across from a construction site. That land was once owned by an old Indian family; Jennings said, but when it came up for sale, the tribe didn’t have the resources to buy it.

Today, the land holds a bed of gravel and a cinderblock foundation. “And all the trees were immediately taken down,” she said. “And look at that eyesore.

“If we had done that, the whole town would have been up in arms. It’s the crossroads of the town. And look at it.”

But now Jennings wanted to take me to the tribe’s land, just down the road.

We drove down unpaved one-lane roads past signs saying “No trespassing.” Jennings pointed out old stone walls, thick moss that is a mystical sign “the little people are all around us,” a house where her grandmother had lived.

And the Narragansetts have been on the land far longer than that, for thousands of years, she said. “The feeling of knowing that you walk where your ancestors have walked is powerful.”

She talked of the glories of the land in summer, the laurel and arbutus in bloom, the blueberries and blackberries growing — “all the things the Creator meant us to live by.” We saw the Indian Church, and she told how Indians, who had been forbidden to assemble, pretended to pray; they would discuss the issues that faced them until a non-Indian approached, and then “they would break into hymns.”

She showed me a spring, a 3-by-5-foot hole surrounded by rocks, with a trickle of water heading downstream from it. “Going toward the ocean. Which we no longer have access to.”

The spring was perhaps six inches deep, and half-full of fallen leaves.

“Somebody will come and clean it up,” she said. “It may be the little people; I don’t know. But the water is always fresh and clear.”

SHE WORRIES, though, that this will not be so forever. Houses are being built everywhere in the town, she said; “another road, another development.” And each of the new houses has a septic system, and the waste finds its way to the water.

“I know people like to get close to the water, and I understand that. But by the same token, people have to understand the water is for everyone, not just for one people.”

It’s this sense of stewardship of the land, she says, that makes her favor a Narragansett casino — far off Indian land, in West Warwick or wherever another community is willing to host one. That way, the tribe could make money and still protect its land from development.

“It’s not to say that tribal people don’t sometimes soil their land,” she said. “But this land is so sacred to us.”

She also favored the smoke shop the tribe briefly ran until a state police raid closed it in 2003. Jennings later was one of three Narragansetts, including her son, Adam, who sued the state police for their conduct during the raid, saying she had been slammed against a wall during it.

Jennings lost her part of case, but Adam won a federal jury verdict that a trooper used excessive force in twisting his ankle until it broke. Appeals in Adam’s case have continued since; in August, a federal appeals court affirmed the verdict, but sent the case back to the trial judge to consider more motions.

“It’s not about casinos,” she said.

“It’s not about a smoke shop. It’s about taking care of what you have. With a casino, we could guarantee this would be here for the next seven generations.”

WE HAD BEEN driving for 2½ hours, and it was nearly lunchtime. We returned to the parking lot at the Gentleman Farmer, and I asked her if she saw any hope for the future.

“I had hope up until the raid on the smoke shop,” she said. “Because we knew we were always safe on our land. And that was so devastating to all of us, particularly the children and elders. Because if you’re not safe on your own land, where can you be safe?

“I hear President Bush talk about the terrorists. The terrorists are here. The terrorists are us.”

It’s not that everything must remain the same, she said. “I don’t mind good change. I don’t mind limited development.”

She thought about a proposal to create a new “town center” in Charlestown, a district that would combine business with housing. “Why do you need a town center?” she said. “Let it be. Take what you have, and make it better.”

And then she told a story that — with its long-simmering, generation-spanning anger — took my breath away.

WHEN HER grandmother was still alive, Jennings said, she talked with her about the possibility that people would land on the moon. Her grandmother counseled against it; this could put the earth and moon out of balance. (And you know, Jennings added, that each time men have landed on the moon, tsunamis and other natural disasters have been the result.)

But perhaps, her grandmother continued, people could go elsewhere in the solar system, maybe to Mars. And if one white person went, they would all want to go.

“‘White people will go. And the black people want to go where the white people go.

“‘And we’ll have Mother Earth back.’

“And I always loved my grandmother for that. And I always tell my grandchildren that.”

She was a little misty-eyed now, remembering, and thinking.

“Yes, let ’em go. Take ’em from Charlestown first.”

arosenbe@projo.com