Its telling builds the empathy that has been sorely lacking when it comes to Native American lives. The Wampanoag, which translates to Easterners, inhabited the eastern part of present day Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Wampanoag members were not even invited, but they showed up. "We're lucky to be one of them. He engineered an escape and returned to his people on Martha’s Vineyard. All Rights Reserved. And, after generations of trading secondhand and thirdhand for coveted European goods from neighboring Native peoples, the Wampanoag would finally gain a firsthand source and considerable trading power. Steven Peters, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, stands in a gallery opened for Native American Heritage Month. “How are we supposed to improve on this sorry record if we don’t understand the sorry record?” asked Silverman, a George Washington University professor. In this version of the Thanksgiving story, the holiday commemorates the peaceful, friendly meeting of English settlers and the Wampanoag tribe for three days of feasting and thanksgiving in 1621. He and other Mashpee and Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe members have been working with museums and on platforms such as Vimeo to elevate the history of the indigenous people who lived in the region for thousands of years before the Pilgrims arrived. Years later, relations turned sour, leading to war, many deaths, and great diminishment of the Wampanoag tribe. To bring the commemorations into the 21st century, Pecoraro and her group worked to elevate the voices of the Wampanoag, who still live in southern New England. 'First Thanksgiving' Wampanoag Tribe Faces New Epidemic | Time permanent protection through an act of Congress. This Thanksgiving, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe is hoping to educate the public on the history of the holiday. By Wesley Lowery Globe Staff, November 24, 2013, 12:00 a.m. Mashpee Wampanoag tribe members sprinkled tobacco over a fire at a Thanksgiving celebration. In late March, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that there was not a basis for the tribe’s 321 acres of tribal land in Mashpee and Taunton, Mass., to have reservation status because the tribe supposedly didn’t meet the definition of Indian. “There’s a place where those things do belong, as a point that we don’t make that mistake ever again.”. NEW YORK — Members of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe appeared in Thursday's 94th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Title. Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. More recently, the Trump administration has been working to revoke reservation status for hundreds of acres of previously recognized Mashpee Wampanoag tribal lands. In 1963, these two tracks crossed when President John F. Kennedy, whose family frolicked in the home of the native Nauset and Aquinnah people on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, immortalized them in his own Thanksgiving Day proclamation, baking the plaits together like the bread broken and shared in the mythic first Thanksgiving feast. We are not given the decency of even having the name of us as a people mentioned,” says Deetz. “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and contrary to law,”. We didn’t go away, we adapted. You can unsubscribe at any time. The Pilgrims spent only a few weeks of 1620 in the Wampanoag village of Patuxet, which they would rename Plimoth (now Plymouth), and they certainly didn’t step off onto Plymouth Rock. Four hundred years ago, the Wampanoag were reeling from an epidemic that nearly wiped out the village of Patuxet. "We weren't used to diseases here," said Hazel Currence, an elder with the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe, which lived in Patuxet. His remarks were censored and he declined the invitation and made his speech instead in the shadow of the statue of Massasoit on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day. Don't believe everything your kindergarten teacher told you, Pilgrims’ arrival in Provincetown 400 years ago spawned a clash of cultures, The beginning of American democracy on Cape Cod, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. In three years, once populous villages like Patuxet, where the Pilgrims would eventually settle, were “utterly void” of people, as English explorer Thomas Dermer wrote. The Wampanoags were the tribe who dined with the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving, and their farming and hunting techniques helped the Europeans survive their first harsh winter in Plymouth. We survived. The COVID-19 pandemic has only compounded the feeling of loss as participants remember fellow Native Americans who have died of the coronavirus, especially in the Navajo Nation. In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth's governor, John Carver, declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. The individual tribes spoke the same language, had similar cultures, were friendly with each other but were politically sovereign. Initially, “a lot of native people associated firearms with epidemic disease because what they know is when Europeans show up, and fire their guns, shortly thereafter, people start dying of epidemic disease.”. After an arduous process lasting more than three decades, the Mashpee Wampanoag were re-acknowledged as a federally recognized tribe in 2007. “I think the only way forward is to understand the history the way that it happened,” Steven Peters, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, said. That same year, Tisquantum, later known as Squanto, and 19 other Wampanoag men were lured on to an English ship, taken captive and sold into slavery. The colonists were very thankful, and invited the Wampanoag to a celebration in the fall. Jessica Rinaldi—The Boston Globe/Getty Images, Biden to Propose Citizenship Path for Immigrants, Jack Ma Resurfaces After Vanishing From Public. It is this feast of 1621 which was celebrated between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians that is widely considered the first Thanksgiving celebration. reportedly vetting a Native American to be Interior Dept. Hendricks-Miller doesn’t like to use the word survival as much. Allowing the Pilgrims to settle and establishing diplomatic relations with them, even providing aid, brought risks but also reward. The more historically accurate telling is gaining a foothold in small circles, as members of the Herring Pond, Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes; Michele Pecoraro, executive director of Plymouth 400, who is helping lead the anniversary commemoration; and Silverman bring the documented facts to light. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com. The Wampanoag to whom TIME talked all expressed a feeling of “eerie” déjà vu, marveling at how much hasn’t changed in 400 years in some respects. “Even though it’s inaccurate, we can’t just bury it,” he said. When Paula Peters was in second grade in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, listening to a teacher talk about Plymouth colony and the Mayflower, a student asked what happened to the Native Americans who helped the Pilgrims settle, the Wampanoag. They lived in wetus, which were dome shaped huts formed of tree limbs and covered with tall, th… The Wampanoag consisted of many different smaller tribes, which totaled about 15,000 people before the arrival of Europeans. Regardless of whether it was rooted in historical fact, it became accepted as such. But there is a big difference between these ancient and ongoing celebrations and the Pilgrims' first harvest festival which led to the establishment of the National holiday now known as Thanksgiving. Massasoit (who was actually named Ousemequin) was the sachem (leader) of the Pokanoket Wampanoag, a local Native American society that had begun dealings with the colonists earlier in 1621. It doesn’t start there because those things never happened, despite being immortalized in American mythos for generations. For many Wampanoag, Thanksgiving has always been considered a day of mourning because of that epidemic and the centuries of American Indian removal policies that followed. Without modern knowledge of how diseases spread, Wampanoags attributed it to the supernatural spirits and gunpowder. Part of my everyday being is telling people that we’re still here.”. With Tisquantum acting as a broker, the two groups worked out a kind of alliance through a series of visits, exchanges and the belief, at least on the part of the Wampanoag, that this small band of Pilgrims would stay just that: small. Every year, news outlets and social media are a-buzz with Thanksgiving themes. Then, early settlers and Native Americans break bread side by side. The 51st annual National Day of Mourning will still take place at Plymouth Rock. But on Tuesday, historian David Silverman and Wampanoag tribe member David Vanderhoop set the record straight, sharing the true story of the first Thanksgiving in a conversation hosted by the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. “When the colonists came over in the 17th century, they had to get rid of us in one form or fashion or another whether it as converting us, moving us, annihilating us, or shipping us out of the country into slavery, and I just wish people knew that because this history is not yet well known, but that’s what it took for America to be what it is today and for people to sit down to have their Thanksgiving dinner.”. Each sachemship was independent but had relationships with the other sachemships, all coming under the purview of the great sachem. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our. Further threatening the existence of the Wampanoag, the Narragansett Tribe, their powerful western rivals, were left largely untouched. We have a chance to reclaim our language and our history and re-educate people. It’s a bittersweet memory. Only Squanto was immortalized in the Pilgrim story. There’s a reason this part of the story did not make it into school history books and pageants or get remembered on Thanksgiving. Turner said, “For the most part, Thanksgiving itself is a day of mourning for Native people, not just Wampanoag people.” At noon on every Thanksgiving Day, hundreds of Native people from around the country gather at Cole’s Hill, which overlooks Plymouth Rock, for the National Day of Mourning. “We are once again 400 years later, in the midst of a pandemic and in the midst of a land grab and argument over jurisdiction and the ability of colonial law to recognize the rights of the people being colonized,” says Deetz. Today they make up two federally recognized tribes, Mashpee and Aquinnah—the two largest communities of Wampanoag—as well as several other tribes recognized by Massachusetts. “We’re still here,” she prefers to say, “considering all that we’ve been through. In a little more than 50 years, European settlers would vastly outnumber the indigenous people, with growing settlements such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north and Rhode Island to the south. So by 1620, the Wampanoag, as Peters describes, were in a “difficult spot,” shaped by years of volatile contact with Europeans, slavery, regional threats to their power and a mysterious, devastating illness. When the Mayflower pilgrims and the Wampanoag sat down for the first Thanksgiving in 1621, it wasn’t actually that big of a deal. The decision to help the Pilgrims, whose ilk had been raiding Native villages and enslaving their people for nearly a century, came after they stole Native food and seed stores and dug up Native graves, pocketing funerary offerings, as described by Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow in “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth,” published in 1622. “In order to balance something like this, you have to swing the pendulum a little more to one side.”. Their role in helping the Pilgrims survive by sharing resources and wisdom went unacknowledged that day, according to accounts of the toasts given by Pilgrim leaders. The first national Thanksgiving Day did not invoke the Pilgrims at all. ISBN. The Wampanoag also have a family meal on the federal holiday, but it’s one of several Thanksgivings they celebrate throughout the year, to honor different harvests. The native life doesn’t hold the same value. Massasoit weighed the risks and concluded it was better to have the danger on his side than have to face it. In June, a federal judge called Interior Department’s decision “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and contrary to law,” and said the agency would have to re-analyze the question of whether the tribe is entitled to reservation land, while correcting all the errors that led to its original decision. Now there are estimated to be 4,000-5,000. At the same time, colonists were pressing deeper and deeper across the region. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. As for that 1621 feast — the supposed genesis of today’s Thanksgiving tradition — there was a small feast, but the Wampanoag were not invited, they showed up later. The congregation of Puritans within the Pilgrims did break off from the Church of England for religious reasons, but that brought them to Holland, where they were free to practice their religion. We didn't go away, we adapted.". In the fall of 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag shared an autumn harvest feast. “I do believe that the way we’ve gone about it is as balanced as we could make it,” Pecoraro said. “I raised my hand, and I said no that’s not true, I’m a Wampanoag, and I’m still here. The guns, knives and armor the Pilgrims carried would intimidate enemies threatening Wampanoag territory. Several months later, after receiving help and protection from the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims held the harvest feast that would form the crux of the Thanksgiving myth centuries later. But perhaps the best starting point, according to Peters and other historians, is 1616, when a lethal pandemic tore through many Wampanoag villages. 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. 27. “We needed a friend,” Peters said. The Mashpee tribe has also had its own challenges internally, as its chairman was arrested on Nov. 13 and charged with accepting bribes in connection with plans to build a casino. “No one has acknowledged these atrocities happened,” Peters said, bringing up King Philip's War. Wampanoag people have always held many seasonal thanksgiving ceremonies. Since then, Peters, a Mashpee Wampanoag tribe member, has promoted education about the real history behind the Thanksgiving holiday. secretary, 400 Years After the ‘First Thanksgiving,’ the Tribe That Fed the Pilgrims Continues to Fight for Its Land Amid Another Epidemic. “I don’t think anyone at that point would have gone into an agreement with the Pilgrims if they knew how quickly they would multiply and start arriving,” Peters said. Now, every year in the United States, many people celebrate this day as Thanksgiving. It’s hard to separate the Pilgrims from what the United States would eventually become, Silverman said. “I think if we can get people to come to terms with the history and the way it happened, they can start to look at Native American lives on the same plane as European lives,” he said. In 1616, before the Pilgrims’ arrival, a still-mysterious disease caused an epidemic that decimated an estimated 75% to 90% of the 69 villages that made up the Wampanoag Nation back then. The stories of disease ravaging the Wampanoag population, which so closely mirror that of the modern pandemic, are just one of many aspects that get left out of America’s Thanksgiving history. Write the basic details on the board. “Yet when we talk about it, there’s zero empathy. The Wampanoag have survived and clung to their culture despite centuries of systemic removal from their land, destruction of their culture and denial of their rights. But when you’ve been telling a story one way for four centuries, any change feels like a monumental one, she said. But the matter is not resolved, and while the tribe awaits Interior’s new decision, it is hoping for permanent protection through an act of Congress. “It would have been a hugely complex situation.”. Find out why. But while our nation’s inaugural harvest party was a crust-free affair, squash were a staple for the Wampanoag tribe that mixed with … “If you ask the general public, even educated people, that's the most common explanation. Weetoomoo Carey, 8, left, and Jackolynn Carey, 5, Wampanoag Nipmucs from Mashpee, look across to the Mayflower replica anchored near Plymouth Rock on Nov. 26, 1991. It also is not the one you’ll find at Pilgrim Memorial Park in Plymouth, home of the famed Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II, a replica of the cargo ship turned people carrier the Pilgrims crammed into to cross the Atlantic. After that harvest, they honored him with a feast. The Thanksgiving Day Celebration Originated From a Massacre In 1621, though Pilgrims celebrated a feast, it was not repeated in the years to follow. Author. In the early 17th century, some estimates say there were more than 40,000 Wampanoag people in New England. "Out of the 69 tribes of just Wampanoag people who lived here pre-contact, only three — the Herring Pond, the Aquinnah and the Mashpee, plus a band of Assonet peoples, are still here," said Troy Currence, a medicine man with the Herring Pond Tribe. Tisquantum, who spent time in Spain and London, would later return to Patuxet, and he and Epenow would play important roles in burgeoning Wampanoag-Pilgrim relations. It’s easy to believe they arrived here seeking religious freedom and intending to eventually form their own country based on those ideals, he said. By the 1670s Massasoit was dead and his son Wamsutta had died after he was imprisoned in Plymouth for negotiating a land sale to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Wampanoag weren’t invited to this feast originally, according to Tim Turner, Cherokee, manager of Plimoth Plantation’s Wampanoag Homesite and co-owner of Native Plymouth Tours. Many Wampanoag hoped that the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing would be a galvanizing event to remind people that the Wampanoag still exist, but many of the commemorative events have been cancelled, postponed or moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Or in 1614, when a Nauset (Cape Cod) tribe member named Epenow was captured by Europeans and kept in bondage for three years. They probably ate vegetables, seafood and maybe a duck or goose. several other tribes recognized by Massachusetts. It’s kind of like a resounding mantra, we’re still here.”. secretary, which could help as well. Silverman, David J. “At that point, it really changes your perspective.”. Peters usually holds a “prayer fire” in her yard, gathering around a fire pit, offering tobacco (putting it in the fire) where prayers are said to remember ancestors and express gratitude generally. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, also known as the People of the First Light, has inhabited present day Massachusetts and Eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years. On a parallel track, the story of the Pilgrim forefathers coming to the New World and founding America for religious freedom gained steam, as New England Protestants wielded the myth to gain the top spot in the country’s cultural hierarchy, above Catholics and immigrants, according to historian David Silverman in his book “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.”. Not all Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. That contact with Europeans “brought plague and disease and pretty much almost wiped us out, so it’s not as much a cause for celebration,” says Kitty Hendricks-Miller, 62, Indian Education Coordinator at the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. They were with a group of Native Americans gathered for a day of mourning in response to the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving, Suzanne Kreiter—The Boston Globe/Getty Images, The Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers, including Jonathan James-Perry (L) and Kitty Hendricks Miller (C) perform at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Nov. 29, 2019 in Boston to commemorate Native American Heritage Month. “Being a Wampanoag person in this time of year, it’s always striking that we tell this story of the Pilgrims and the Indians, and yet the Wampanoag people are often times left out of this telling of this story. This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. But in the same way the real story stretches back before the arrival of the Pilgrims, it stretches forward. The head of another of Massasoit’s sons, Metacomet, better known as King Philip, was mounted on a pike outside Plymouth Colony as a warning, and the descendants of Massasoit, the Pilgrims’ great “protector and preserver,” were captured and sold into slavery in the West Indies. Massasoit has gone through a bit of a rebrand in the ensuing centuries to be painted as the “protector and preserver” of the Pilgrims — as it says on the statue dedicated to him overlooking Plymouth Rock. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared a Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday of November, looking to reconcile a country in the throes of the Civil War. When the Mayflower anchored off what is now known as Provincetown, the Pilgrims found themselves not in a vast, untouched land held for them by divine providence, but amid indigenous people wary and distrustful of Europeans, and the complex politics of rival tribes. … As these debates were happening among the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims, most of whom were still living on the cramped and creaking Mayflower, struggled to survive the winter. A group of about 100 men and Massasoit came not to celebrate but, according to Peters, mostly as a reminder that they controlled the land the Pilgrims were staying on and they vastly outnumbered their new European neighbors. It also has an ally in President-elect Joe Biden, whose tribal nations platform indicates he’s on the side of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe—and Biden is reportedly vetting a Native American to be Interior Dept. A lot of the significance behind the meal has been created over the years, spawning many myths and misconceptions that Wampanoags and Native Americans in general have been debunking ever since. In fact, all we know about the meal known as “the First Thanksgiving” in 1621 comes from a couple of paragraphs written respectively by prominent figures in Plymouth Colony, Edward Winslow and Governor William Bradford, suggesting to experts that it wasn’t a big deal at the time. As Silverman writes in his book, future annual encounters between the two would follow this same high-tension pattern. Long before the arrival of the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag held frequent Thanksgiving-like celebrations, giving thanks in the form of feasts and ceremonial games. Teach students about this period in American history with Thanksgiving activities, resources, lesson plans, and teaching ideas about the voyage of the Mayflower, the daily life of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, and the first Thanksgiving … “For me, that’s a really important place to start, because you understand the big decisions that were made,” Peters said. “It’s somewhat ironic that on the 400th anniversary of acknowledging this point in history, we are forced to stay home and stay separate and feel that fear and uncertainty and some of the things that my ancestors were dealing with in a much more severe fashion,” adds Aquinnah Wampanoag Councilman Jonathan James-Perry, 44, who is featured in an online exhibit Listening to Wampanoag Voices: Beyond 1620 hosted by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Wampanoag adults have memories of being a kid during Thanksgiving season, sitting in school, feeling invisible and having to wade through the nonsense that teachers were shoveling their way. Washington's move came more than a century after the so-called "first Thanksgiving" in 1621 at Plymouth, Mass., featuring the Pilgrims and members of the Native American Wampanoag tribe. ", A nation diminished: Pilgrims’ arrival in Provincetown 400 years ago spawned a clash of cultures, Mayflower Compact:The beginning of American democracy on Cape Cod. At the same time, Peters does not think Thanksgiving should go the way of Confederate statues and names of slaveholders on buildings as the nation reckons with its history. He spoke English and carried a subtle message — the Wampanoag were ready for peace or war with their new neighbors, and the Pilgrims needed to make their intentions clear. The historically accurate story of the Pilgrims and the founding of Plymouth Colony 400 years ago this month is not in most school history books. That survival was made possible with help from the Wampanoag, the piece left unsaid at the feast that would become Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. “When she mentioned we’re all dead, that was devastating,” Peters, 61, recalled to TIME. Sachems ruled by the will of the people. But his decision to allow the Pilgrims to stay at Patuxet and eventually provide them aid after they were driven off the Cape, Peters said, had less to do with a sense of dutiful benevolence and more to do with a careful weighing of circumstances and outcomes. suggesting to experts that it wasn’t a big deal at the time. Trying to move that focus, as Michele Pecoraro and Plymouth 400 have done for their commemoration, comes with pushback — people saying they shouldn’t use their organization and the 400th anniversary to disparage the Pilgrims. 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