November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.
It’s a real shame that the mythology surrounding the First Thanksgiving has obscured the actual history of initial interactions between the English settlers at Plymouth and the natives they encountered. Most liberals, btw, tend to be little better than the traditionalists when it comes to genuine knowledge about these complex events. They reject the Hallmark Card narrative, which is all well and good but then they replace it with their own substitute myth, which casts the white settlers as villains rather than heroes. As in all human history, there were heroes and villains on both sides (yes, there were two sides), and frankly if you’re not looking at it that way, you’re not seeing it.
At any rate, I’d venture to guess most American adults have never bothered to educate themselves about the actual Plymouth story after first learning the Thanksgiving thing in elementary school. If you’d like to learn more, I heartily recommend Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, which I wrote about here, and which I doubt very much will ever be surpassed. Philbrick presents three dimensional portraits of all the characters in the drama. My own people (literally) happen to be the Pilgrims (i.e. I’m descended from several of them). I write about them a lot, and will continue to do so. But today I thought I’d focus on the key native players in the drama in the context of the month-long series mentioned above.
The first native person the Pilgrims encountered was Samoset (c. 1590-1653). Samoset did not walk into the Pilgrims’ compound until March, 1621, around three months after they landed at Plymouth. He wasn’t local — he was an Abenaki, from the north, in what is now Maine.
There is much illuminating background that informs these first interactions which almost no one seems to know and are hugely important to getting a clear picture of the events. One is that the Pilgrims were not “discoverers” per se. The Mayflower was not like the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. The region that became New England and the Canadian Maritimes had been visited many times by trappers, traders, and fisherman over the previous several decades, and with increasing frequency by 1620. Some of the trading posts verged on settlements themselves previous to the founding of Plymouth. Thus the interesting fact that Samoset knew a little English and greeted the Pilgrims in their own language when they arrived. He happened to be visiting the local Wampanoags when the Mayflower arrived. For many weeks, the two groups regarded each other warily from afar, and then finally Samoset was sent to test the waters because he knew a little of the strangers’ language.
The other important fact to know is that in the century-plus since the arrival of Columbus, approximately 90% of the native population of the Americas had been decimated by DISEASE. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary, but the consensus is that it had been upwards of 50 million. The local people had no immunity for diseases the Europeans carried and thus they were essentially wiped out in large part prior to the armed conflict that devestated the survivors over the next centuries. When the Pilgrims arrived they stumbled upon many native encampments that were essentially ghost towns. Between 1614 and 1620 most of the natives of the region had been wiped out.
This brings us to Tisquantum, better known as Squanto (ca. 1585-1622). Squanto was the last surviving member of his tribe — and he’d survived because he’s been kidnapped by English sailors and sold into slavery in Spain so he was on the other side of the Atlantic during the epidemic. He worked his way to England, learned the language quite well, and then made his way home only to learn that everyone he knew had died. It’s a sad and haunting story, and it’s tempting (and common) to turn Squanto into a stereotypical victim, a variation on the “one-tear sad Indian” Iron Eyes Cody from the litter commercial. American liberals love to infantilize Native Americans, to reduce them to victims, and cuddly little mascots.
But Squanto was way more than that. He was a crafty diplomat. On account of his language skills, he was to become the primary liaison between Massasoit (ca. 1581-1661), sachem of the local Wampanoags, and the Mayflower Pilgrims. And without Squanto in the picture events might have played out very differently. Massasoit was not a pushover. He righly regarded the newcomers with a certain amount of distrust. (Indeed, it would be his son and successor, Metacom, or King Philip who would finally lead the war that Massasoit had been considering for decades). But at the time the Pilgrims arrived, the Wampanoag had other enemies, or rivals, the Narragansetts, in the region to their south. So Massasoit was presented with a choice: form an alliance with the English to make himself more powerful against the Narragansetts, or ally with the Narragansetts, with whom relations were strained, to expel the English. And Squanto steered him towards the former.
In so doing, Squanto made himself more important, and there is powerful evidence that he used this position to enrich himself, and that he frequently exploited the language barrier to cause all sorts of useful misunderstandings for his own benefit. In the end, both sides were very unhappy with him. Massasoit wanted him put to death. Philbrick conjectures that the “illness” that eventually took Squanto was in fact a poisoning by the Wampanoags. This is what they don’t tell you in the first grade when you’re drawing handprint turkeys.
Nor is it what they tell you in the Walt Disney production Squanto: A Warrior’s Tale (1994). This fact-deprived hagiography falls both thematically and chronologically between the studio’s lame and forgettable Three Musketeers remake (1993) and of course Pocahontas (1995). It’s a worthy topic, but the treatment here is largely fictionalized. As the title indicates, they have adapted Squanto into an action hero, when as we have seen, he had more of Richard III about him than Henry V. What an EXCELLENT play or movie or novel could be made about Squanto the schemer! This movie however is much more about his adventures, his escapes, his hand-to-hand combat, and even his battle with a bear! (Don’t worry, bear lovers, he uses his magical powers to sing the bear to sleep rather than gutting him with a weapon).
And the movie culninates with the First Thanksgiving, rather than the suspicious death of Squanto, because of course it does.
On the positive side, though, the movie stars Native American actor Adam Beach, who went on to many great screen roles after this, in such movies as Smoke Signals (1998), Joe Dirt (2001), Windtalkers (2002), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007), The Power of the Dog (2021), and many others, not to mention a fairly preposterous high-concept season of Law and Order: SVU (2007-2008).
Eric Schweig (Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans) plays Squanto’s friend Epenow. Michael Gambon plays a villainous slaver; Mandy Patinkin and Stuart Pankin play thoughtful friars who teach Squanto the ways of the English, and are clearly there just to balance out the scales so it won’t look like the movie hates Europeans. Irene Bedard (the voice of Disney’s Pocahontas the following year, and also in Smoke Signals) is the love interest, because of course Squanto needs a love interest.
Both critics and audiences dismissed the movie when it was released. The general consensus was that it is fit only for children, but only if you want to miseducate your children. Hence, it did not become the Thanksgiving classic that Disney was hoping for, or betting on, or whatever they thought they were doing by making this movie, not any more than the ones I mentioned in yesterday’s post.
But here’s one I might reccommend checking out for Thanksgiving this year, in honor of the centennial birthdays of Truman Capote and Geraldine Page! There was a 1967 TV adaptation of Capote’s story A Thanksgiving Visitor, adapted for the small screen by Frank and Eleanor Perry. Page won an Emmy for her role as Sook, based on one of Capote’s own relatives. It’s all on the seasonal theme of love and generosity, even towards those who bully and thieve from us. I don’t know know if many of us will be in the mood for that moral as we stand on the precipice of a regime in which many of us promise to be bullied and stolen from very much indeed. But on the other hand, such a spirit may help us keep our sanity during the dark times to come. A Thanksgiving Visitor is available on Youtube at the momet. Watch it for Page’s performance if nothing else.