This book tells the history of the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts and Rhode Island from their first contacts with Europeans in the early 1500s, through their near extinction, and their revival today. This is the tribe made famous by Thanksgiving, a time that many members now celebrate as a National Day of Mourning.
The author is a professor of Native American history at George Washington University, and he deftly draws on historical sources, oral histories, and archaeology to tell the unhappy narrative of this tribe. It seems that our traditional story of Thanksgiving—local Indians helping the friendly Pilgrims get settled in a new land—is far from the truth. In fact, as soon as they first landed on Cape Cod, the Pilgrims stole the Indians’ seed corn, desecrated their graves, and enslaved their people.
But out of a mutual necessity, they forged an alliance in March of 1621 against a common enemy, the Narragansett tribe to the south. It was in this context that the Wampanoag chief Ousamequin (Massasoit) and ninety of his warriors visited Plymouth for the first Thanksgiving. The alliance benefitted all parties with mutual defense and expanded trade. But as English colonization continued to expand, it couldn’t last. Indian lands were being encroached on, and there were more provocations. This uneasy alliance lasted for some fifty years until the outbreak of King Philip’s War in 1675, when the tribes of New England tried to expel the English colonizers in a bloody conflict that sealed the doom of Natives in the region.
More than 3,000 Natives fell to gunfire and disease in King Phillip’s War. Another 2,000, mostly women and children, were forced into slavery. The Wampanoags and their Indian allies were all but extinguished.
Nevertheless small Wampanoag settlements somehow survived in New England, and the tribe reasserted itself in the latter part of the twentieth century. Since 1970, Wampanoags have tried to tell their version of the story through the annual National Day of Mourning in Plymouth on our Thanksgiving Day. Professor Silverman tells their story in this engaging history. It is not a pleasant one.
