#STORY OF THE PILGRIMS FULL#

The Native American past and present tend to make white people uncomfortable because they turn patriotic histories and heroes inside out and loosen claims on morality, authority and justice. We should put Wampanoags at its center and acknowledge the remarkable fact of their survival to this very day. If Americans continue to insist on associating Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Indians, the least we can do is try to get the story straight. Plymouth and Massachusetts celebrated their bloody victory with a day of thanksgiving.

These tensions culminated in King Philip’s War of 1675-76, in which the English killed thousands of Native people - including Ousamequin’s son, Pumetacom - and enslaved thousands more. After Ousamequin’s death in 1660, the English and the Wampanoags constantly teetered on the edge of war because of the colonists’ aggressive, underhanded expansion. Such dark themes are hardly the stuff of Americans’ grade school Thanksgiving pageants.Īnd the myth distorts history by highlighting the alliance while ignoring its deterioration. Squanto knew English because he had spent years in captivity in Spain and England before orchestrating an unlikely return home shortly before the Mayflower’s arrival. His use of Squanto (or Tisquantum) as a go-between with the Plymouth settlers also stemmed from the Wampanoags’ history of being raided by Europeans. To answer this threat, Ousamequin wanted the English to serve the Wampanoags both as military allies and as a source of European weaponry. Afterward, the Narragansett tribe to the west began raiding the Wampanoags. In 1616, a European ship conveyed an epidemic disease to the Wampanoags that over the next three years took a staggering toll on their population. The Wampanoags reached out to the Pilgrims not only despite this violent history, but also partly because of it. Rather, it followed a string of bloody episodes since 1524 in which European explorers seized coastal Wampanoags to be sold into overseas slavery or to be trained as interpreters and guides.

Generations of Native people had made it that way with the expectation of passing along their land to their descendants.Ĭontrary to the Thanksgiving myth, the Pilgrim-Wampanoag encounter was no first-contact meeting.

#STORY OF THE PILGRIMS FULL#

That is why Wampanoag country was full of villages, roads, cornfields, monuments, cemeteries and forests cleared of underbrush. Human civilization in the Americas was every bit as ancient and rich as in Europe. The Pilgrims did not enter an empty wilderness ripe for the taking. The Wampanoags, who are the Indians in this tale, have long contended that the Thanksgiving myth sugarcoats the viciousness of colonial history for Native people. Like Pocahontas and Sacagawea, the other famous Indians of American history, they help the colonizers and then move offstage. The Indians’ legacy is to present America as a gift to white people - or in other words, to concede to colonialism. The sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (whom the English know, from his title, as “Massasoit”), even agrees to a treaty of alliance with Plymouth.Īs for what happens to the Indians next, this story has nothing to say. Just when Plymouth seems destined to become another lost colony, miraculously, the Natives make contact through the interpreters Samoset and Squanto (the story sidesteps how these figures learned English, nor does it explain why the Indians suddenly became so friendly).

Meanwhile, the neighboring Indians (rarely identified by tribe), with whom the English desperately wish to trade for food, keep a wary distance. Yet sickness and starvation halve their population during the first winter and challenges their faith. They disembark at Plymouth Rock and enter the howling wilderness equipped with their proto-Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, and the confidence that they are God’s chosen people. The story goes like this: English Pilgrims cram aboard the Mayflower and brave the stormy Atlantic to seek religious freedom in America. Generations of Americans have told themselves a patriotic story of the supposed first Thanksgiving that misrepresents colonization as consensual and bloodless.

Story of the pilgrims