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. 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.