By Thomas Lecaque
Boston, emerging from the radioactive mist. Broken towers and elevated highways—a world without the Big Dig—with scattered communities of survivors clinging on to relics of a long-lost past. Fallout 4—the sixth full game in the series—takes the player to 2287 AD, 210 years after a nuclear war in an alternative history timeline.[1] It takes them to a Boston consumed with memories and rhetoric of the past—Minutemen in colonial-esque garb, mercenaries running around in 1970s and 80s white power militia cosplay, a neo-medieval fascist organization with Knights in science fiction armor. Radiation altered ghouls. Government virus shaped Super Mutants. All of the weird and wacky retro-futuristic tropes of the Fallout franchise, this time in a Boston still deeply shaped by its colonial history.
What the game does NOT have, though, is Native Americans. None, anywhere. No references to them, no institutions, no members of a sovereign nation or tribal polity or outpost or anything. No museums. No statues. No evidence of their legacy, let alone their present. Not in Boston, not in Natick, not even on Mount Desert Island in the expansion Far Harbor. There’s no Peabody Museum at Harvard to hold artifacts, and no commemorative plaque on Matthews Hall to remember the “Indian College” of the 1640s, because there is no Harvard. No Museum of Fine Arts, so no exhibits of Native art and artifacts, North American or Mesoamerican or anywhere else. The Abbe Museum doesn’t exist in the remnants of Bar Harbor. Deer Island has no memorial to the murder of the “Praying Indians” forcibly interned there during King Philip’s War. No mural of John Elliot in the State House. Native Americans have, quite simply, been erased from post-apocalyptic New England, but also from the pre-apocalyptic East Coast. Fallout 3, set around Washington D.C., does the same thing. It is an East Coast without any Natives, without any memorials to a Native past or present, without an acknowledgement of the history of the America-that-was including indigenous groups and people. It is only in their most recent game, Fallout 76, that Bethesda acknowledges a Native presence in the landscape, and even then, only as archaeological sites—a window dressing as part of the attempt to make West Virginia into something Other.[2]
Read more: Fallout 4 and the Erasure of the Native in (Post-Apocalyptic) New EnglandAs Abbie Hartman, Rowan Tulloch and Helen Young point out in their article, “Video Games as Public History: Archives, Empathy and Affinity,” video games have become a common way that the public engages with historical material—I have written numerous articles for Age of Revolutions on Empire: Total War on why that can be a problem. This is absolutely true for video games set within a particular past—Hartman, Tulloch, and Young look at Valiant Hearts, set during the First World War—but is also true for the way video games fill in historical gaps for the unwary. Fallout 4’s erasure of a Native presence in New England is patently absurd for a historian, but it is also just the most recent leg in a much longer process. As Jean O’Brien showed in 2010’s Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, nineteenth-century New England local historians were engaged in the same kinds of work: creating a history of New England where a Native past had to be established as having ended, so that “history” could begin. This is the process of “firsting,” which she describes as “assert[ing] that non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice” (xii). And however absurd that feels now, Fallout 4’s mythical past starts with the Minutemen and the American Revolutionary War, eliding any other possible antiquity to the Boston region. Now, the nineteenth-century histories O’Brien worked with also deal with a key end point:
Central to all of this is the construction of an origin myth that assigns primacy to non-Indians who “settled” the region in a benign process involving righteous relations with Indians and just property transactions that led to an inevitable and (usually, drawing on the Romanticism that conditioned nineteenth-century sensibilities) lamentable Indian extinction. Thus, the “first” New Englanders are made to disappear, sometimes through precise declarations that the “last” of them has passed, and the colonial regime is constructed as the “first” to bring “civilization” and authentic history to the region. Non-Indians stake a claim to being native—indigenous—through this process. In stark contrast to the narrative construction, New England Indians actually “last,” and remain vibrant peoples into the future. (xv)
Fallout 4 takes this even further by eliminating Natives entirely. There is no lasting, because there is no first, no presence, no existence. The “first” New Englanders in Fallout are Revolutionaries, who are hearkened back to as the basic faction your character is encouraged to join, the Minutemen—and then engage in large scale settler colonialism across the waste. Far from using that to engage with the history of Native-settler relations in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the settlements you can build involved clearing ghouls—zombies—or Super Mutants—monsters—or raiders—bandits—or various mutated fauna. These settlements are all named after the structure they occupy—Hangman’s Alley or Starlight Drive-In and such—and you recruit settlers, build structures and farms and defenses. They create a place-world, as Lisa Brooks’ uses in her 2008 The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, but one that continues to reinforce the absence of indigeneity in post-apocalyptic New England—it acts as the antithesis of her book (xxii-xxv). Even Native place names are removed from the game. Of the 325 named locations in Fallout 4, only 6 have Native origins—three bodies of water (Neponset Park on the Neponset River, Lake Cochituate, and Lake Quannapowitt), a safehouse codenamed Ticonderoga, and the two ruined towns of Nahant and Natick.
We unfortunately already know that science fiction, fantasy, and pop culture artifacts across forms of media routinely elide the living presence of Native Americans and Native polities across the country, not just in the past but the present and the future. But a post-apocalyptic America devoid of Native Americans is an absurdity, because history has shown that Native polities, communities, and individuals have already navigated multiple apocalypses caused by settler colonialism—plague, war, environmental catastrophes, occupation and dislocation, and repeated genocidal campaigns. There are two federally recognized Native tribes in Massachusetts—the Mashpee Wampanoag and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah)—and two state-recognized Native tribes—the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs and the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe[3]. Why would the nuclear bombs of 2077 wipe them out, and leave… Boston… intact? Paul Kelton shows in Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs, that smallpox’s ravages were monstrous, for example, but,
Had the Cherokees been left to themselves to deal with the outbreak of infectious diseases, they likely would have fared fairly well and their population numbers would have rebounded to where they were before smallpox’s arrival. Cherokees knew enough about Variola in 1759 to limit their exposure to the disease and cut off their villages from outside contact when an epidemic was known to be occurring. The British invasions, though, made it difficult for the Cherokees to arrest the spread of the disease. British armies gave germs the currency they needed to do their deadly damage, while their concerted effort to starve the Cherokee into submission weakened bodies for those with active infections and served as a devastating aftershock for those who had survived their bouts with colonial germs. European colonialism did not give the Cherokees much room to deal with an epidemiological crisis on their own or recover from it once it happened. (135-6)
The same can be said of so many other assaults of Native groups—the drowning of the farmland in Oceti Sakowin reservations by the US Army Corps of Engineers, for example, with the active continued assaults on food sovereignty and land holding by the US government continuing the devastation[4]; the Clinton-Sullivan Campaign on 1779 to destroy food supplies and housing of the Haudenosunee during the American War of Independence; or the relocation of the Unangax̂ people during World War II to derelict cannery buildings in southeast Alaska, deprived of food housing, and medical care[5]. It is the settler colonial invasions on the back half of pre-existing traumas that make these events apocalyptic, even as Native communities endure, adapt, survive, and thrive.
Fallout 4 is not attempting to tell a story about Native erasure. It is not trying to tell a story about Native Americans at all—a problematic topic across all of the Fallout franchise, but one particularly notable since Bethesda Softworks’ acquisition of the series. At best, Fallout is fascinated with white tribalism as an extension of settler colonialism after the apocalypse. In the first two games in the franchise, “tribals,” primitive groups on the outskirts of the larger settlements who wield javelins and use healing powder as medicine, exist on the margins as threats to the settled territories: a Western, in the worst way. In Fallout: New Vegas, made by Obsidian Entertainment, there are mentions of actual Native nations, either surviving outside of the game or incorporated into the primary villain’s Legion. In Fallout 3, the one group described as “tribals” are more Lovecraftian than anything else, swamp cultists in Point Lookout State Park, Maryland. Nothing like this exists in 4, which would be a relief, except it happens at the expense of any kind of indigeneity outside of Mayflower Descendant white nonsense. It is this lack of care, nuance, and deliberate erasure that tells the real story.
At the very least, we should ask what making sure a Native presence in post-apocalyptic New England would do for the game. It’s not just about better history, a thing that we as historians may desperately want but which is not necessarily the aim of game designers. But for a game about surviving in a world after the apocalypse, about diverse communities attempting to rebuild, the lack of any Native presence cheapens the vision. All we have is the blandest and emptiest vision of settler colonialism—building forts, arming militia, never engaging with a changing landscape or movements of people or values, traditions, and lifeways that are held on to across space and time. Where are the Wabanaki in Far Harbor, adapting to the mist and the Super Mutants and the Cult of the Atom destroying both nature and lives? Where are Haudenosaunee emissaries coming in to negotiate with the Commonwealth? Where are the Wampanoag reclaiming their homelands, bit by bit, as a faction to be negotiated with, or joined, or simply understood? The problem of how Fallout 4 chooses to erase Native Americans is that is does it so casually, without thinking, without contemplating the reason or the impact. The disregard is because they see no need to have Native Americans as part of the story of America—the Revolution, the Cold War, the retro-futuristic post-apocalypse, none of it. And that casual disregard, in an AAA studio’s flagship series, cannot be dismissed simply as laziness. It is a problem in our popular historical vision of the past, that historians must engage with, must fight, must try again and again to change.
Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, located on Baxoje, Meskwaki and Sauk lands. His primary research area is on religious violence and apocalypticism from the crusades in the High Middle Ages through the holy wars of colonial North America, but he teaches broadly in medieval world, vast early America, and video games and history courses. He can also be found @tlecaque.bsky.social.
Further Reading:
Brooks, Lisa. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hartman, Abbie, Rowan Tulloch, and Helen Young. “Video Games as Public History: Archives, Empathy and Affinity.” Game Studies 21:4 (December 2021). https://gamestudies.org/2104/articles/hartman_tulloch_young
Kelton, Paul. Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs. An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518-1824. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.
O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Round, Phillip H. Inscribing Sovereignties: Writing Community in Native North America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024.
Endnotes:
[1] See Kathleen McClancy, “The Wasteland of the Real: Nostalgia and Simulacra in Fallout,” Game Studies 18:2 (September 2018), https://gamestudies.org/1802/articles/mcclancy for a nuanced game studies discussion on the nature of the Fallout series.
[2] Jess Morrissette, “Dark as a Dungeon: Fallout 76 and the Coal Mining Industry,” First-Person Scholar, April 17, 2019, https://www.firstpersonscholar.com/dark-as-a-dungeon/ does a good job introducing the particularities of how the game interacts with West Virginia’s identity.
[3] The Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe was recognized by the state in November 2024, under Executive Order 637, signed by Governor Martha Healey. https://www.mass.gov/doc/executive-order-herring-pond-wampanoag-tribe/download
[4] See Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso Books, 2019); Heather Randell and Andrew Curley, “Dams and tribal land loss in the United States,” Environmental Research Letters 18:9 (2023), DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/acd268, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acd268 ; and “Episode 272: The Effects of Dams on Tribal Lands, with Heather Randell,” Resources Radio with Daniel Raimi, February 20, 2024, https://www.resources.org/resources-radio/the-effects-of-dams-on-tribal-lands-with-heather-randell/
[5] Read Holly Miowak Guise, Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2024).
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