Only a fraction of their nation survived. By the time the Pilgrim ships landed in , the remaining Wampanoag were struggling to fend off the Narragansett, a nearby Native people who were less affected by the plague and now drastically outnumbered them. For a moment of history, the interests of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag aligned. When the Pilgrims landed in New England, after failing to make their way to the milder mouth of the Hudson, they had little food and no knowledge of the new land.
The Wampanoag suggested a mutually beneficial relationship, in which the Pilgrims would exchange European weaponry for Wampanoag for food.
With the help of an English-speaking Patuxet Indian named Tisquantum not Squanto; he spoke English because he was kidnapped and sold in the European slave trade before making his way back to America , the Pilgrims produced a bountiful supply of food that summer.
For their part, the Wampanoag were able to defend themselves against the Narragansett. On April 1, , President Richard Nixon signs legislation officially banning cigarette ads on television and radio. Nixon, who was an avid pipe smoker, indulging in as many as eight bowls a day, supported the legislation at the increasing insistence of public health advocates. On the same day, rival network NBC debuts its own On April 1, , an undersea earthquake off the Alaskan coast triggers a massive tsunami that kills people in Hawaii.
In the middle of the night, 13, feet beneath the ocean surface, a 7. The nearest land was Unimak The attempted coup in Munich by right-wing members of the army and the Nazi Party was foiled by the government, and Hitler was charged with high treason.
Despite his conviction, Hitler was out of They were with a group of Native Americans gathered for a day of mourning in response to the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving. By Olivia B. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Nov. Visitors to the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum pause to examine a new exhibit about early interactions between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe in Provincetown, MA on Aug. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription.
He spoke fluent English, because he had lived for several years in Britain. But Massasoit worried that in a crisis Tisquantum might side with the foreigners.
Samoset—the third member of the triumvirate—had appeared a few weeks before, having hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an English ship that was plying the coast. Because Samoset also spoke a little English, Massasoit had first sent him, not Tisquantum, to meet with the foreigners. On March 17, , Samoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed into the circle of rude huts in which the British were living.
The colonists saw a robust, erect-postured man wearing only a loincloth; his straight black hair was shaved in front but flowed down his shoulders behind. To their amazement, this almost naked man greeted them in broken but understandable English. The two sides talked inconclusively, each checking out the other, for a few hours.
They spoke with the colonists for about an hour. Then, Massasoit and the rest of the Indian party suddenly appeared at the crest of a nearby hill, on the banks of a stream. Alarmed, the Europeans withdrew to a hill on the other side of the stream, where they had emplaced their few cannons behind a half-finished stockade.
A standoff ensued. Finally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that later led to his selection as colony governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and carrying a sword, he waded through the stream and offered himself as a hostage.
The colonists took the sachem to an unfinished house and gave him some cushions on which to recline. Massasoit wore the same deerskin shawls and leggings as his fellows and, like them, had covered his face with bug-repelling oil and reddish purple dye.
Around his neck hung a pouch of tobacco, a long knife and a thick chain of the prized white shell beads called wampum. The meeting between the Wampanoag and the English colonists marked a critical moment in American history. The foreigners called their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous Pilgrims. As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the services of Tisquantum, usually known as Squanto. In the s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values.
A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier, Capt.
Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians. My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that Squanto had demonstrated the proper way to plant it—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds. Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving.
In our slipshod fashion, we students took notes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading. He moved to Plymouth after the crucial meeting and spent the rest of his life there, during which time he indeed taught the Pilgrims agricultural methods, though some archaeologists believe Tisquantum picked up the idea of fish fertilizer from European farmers, who had used the technique since medieval times.
But America: Its People and Values never explains why he so enthusiastically helped the people who had invaded his homeland. Skipping over such complexities is understandable in a book with limited space. The lack of attention, however, is symptomatic of a larger failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives.
Much the same is true of the alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth. From the Indian point of view, why did he do it? The alliance was successful from the short-run Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, because it ensured the survival of Plymouth Colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England.
All of this was absent not only from my high-school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on. This omission dates back to the Pilgrims themselves, who ascribed the lack of effective Native resistance to the will of God. Vietnam War-era denunciations of the Pilgrims as imperialist or racist simply replicated the error in a new form.
Whether the cause was the Pilgrim God, Pilgrim guns or Pilgrim greed, Native losses were foreordained; Indians could not have stopped colonization, in this view, and they hardly tried. But beginning in the s, historians grew dissatisfied with this view.
Their work fed a tsunami of inquiry into the interactions between Natives and newcomers in the era when they faced each other as relative equals. More than likely Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. The Wampanoag, in turn, were part of an alliance with the Nauset, which comprised some 30 groups on Cape Cod, and the Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay.
All of these people spoke variants of Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family, the biggest in eastern North America at the time. In Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light. Ten thousand years ago, when Indians in Mesoamerica and Peru were inventing agriculture and coalescing into villages, New England was barely inhabited, for the excellent reason that it had been covered until relatively recently by an ice sheet a mile thick.
As the sheet retreated, people slowly moved in, though the area long remained cold and uninviting, especially along the coastline.
Because rising sea levels continually flooded the shore, marshy Cape Cod did not fully lock into its contemporary configuration until about b. By the end of the first millennium A. Scattered about the many lakes, ponds and swamps of the cold uplands were small, mobile groups of hunters and gatherers.
Most had recently adopted agriculture or were soon to do so, but cultivated crops were still a secondary source of food, a supplement to the wild products of the land. Because extensive fields of maize, beans and squash surrounded every home, these settlements sprawled along the Connecticut, Charles and other river valleys for miles, one town bumping up against the other. Along the coast, where Tisquantum and Massasoit lived, villages tended to be smaller and looser, though no less permanent.
Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rivers and coastline did not roam the land; most shoreline families would move a minute walk inland, to avoid direct exposure to winter storms and tides.
Each village had its own distinct mix of farming and foraging—one adjacent to a rich oyster bed might plant maize purely for variety, whereas a village just a few miles away might subsist almost entirely on its harvest, filling great underground storage pits each fall.
Bragdon, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary. In the Wampanoag confederation, one of these quicksilver communities was Patuxet, where Tisquantum was born at the end of the 16th century.
Tucked into the great sweep of Cape Cod Bay, Patuxet sat on a low rise above a small harbor, jigsawed by sandbars and so shallow that children could walk from the beach hundreds of yards into the water before it reached their heads. To the west, maize hills marched across the sandy hillocks in parallel rows. Beyond the fields, a mile or more away from the sea, rose a forest of oak, chestnut and hickory, open and park-like, the underbrush kept down by expert annual burning.
But the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village. A fire burned constantly in the center, the smoke venting through a hole in the roof. It was also less leaky than the typical English wattle-and-daub house. Around the edge of the house were low beds, sometimes wide enough for a whole family to sprawl on together; they were usually raised about a foot from the floor, platform-style, and piled with mats and furs.
Going to sleep in the firelight, young Tisquantum would have stared up at shadows of hemp bags and bark boxes hanging from the rafters. Voices would skirl up in the darkness: one person singing a lullaby, then another person, until everyone was asleep.
In the morning, when he woke, big, egg-shaped pots of corn-and-bean mash would be on the fire, simmering with meat, vegetables or dried fish to make a slow-cooked dinner stew.
0コメント