David J. Silverman

608 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
U N G R ATE F U L C H I L DR E N A N D
DAYS O F M O U R N I N G :
Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/4/608/1874135/tneq_a_00865.pdf by University of Oregon user on 13 November 2021

T W O WA M PA N O A G IN TE R P R ETATI O N S O F T HE
“F IR S T TH A N K S G I VI N G ” A N D C O L O N I A L I S M
TH R O U G H TH E C E N T U R I E S
david j. s ilverman
F OR centuries, the Wampanoags of what is now southeastern

Massachusetts have challenged the white patriotic fantasy of the
supposed First Thanksgiving in which friendly Indians grant Amer-
ica to Christian, democratic colonists and then disappear to make
way for the United States. Their counter-narratives feature two in-
terrelated critiques of colonialism that highlight its immorality and
call on its beneficiaries to extend basic compassion and justice to In-
digenous people. The earliest of these interpretations on record was
voiced by none other than Pumetacom, more commonly known as
King Philip, Metacom, or Metacomet, on the eve of the horrific con-
flict that now bears his English name. Pumetacom contended that his
father, Ousamequin (or Massasoit), had been like a “great man” or fa-
ther to the “little child” of Plymouth at the time of their encounter.
Ousamequin protected and succored the vulnerable settlement, but
once Plymouth and the other New England colonies reached their
figurative adulthood, they drove the Wampanoags into landlessness
and subordination. The colonists’ behavior, as Pumetacom character-
ized it, was marked by ingratitude, covetousness, and hypocrisy, con-
trary to their own self-serving accounts about how divine favor and
the superiority of European Christianity and civility triumphed over
Indigenous paganism and savagery. In Pumetacom’s hands, this his-
tory doubled as a declaration of war.
The next major iteration of this critique came 160 years later from
William Apess, the Pequot preacher to the Mashpee Wampanoags.
Apess built on Pumetacom’s great man/little child metaphor and ac-
cusation of betrayal to charge that white people’s ill-gotten gains
had subjected multiple generations of Indians to degradation, dis-
possession, and impoverishment in their own land. Like Pumeta-
com, Apess delivered his version of the colonial past at a time
when tensions between the Wampanoags and their white neighbors
were at a pitch, and Apess right in the middle of it. But whereas
DAYS OF MOURNING 609
Pumetacom’s history lesson in 1675 was a justification for war, the

Wampanoags in the nineteenth century were in no position to take
up arms against their oppressors. The best weapon they had was
moral suasion, which Apess employed by lecturing white audiences
that the Wampanoags and all other Indians were white Americans’

fellow children of God—indeed, many of them were Christians. As
such, they deserved the same dignity and compassion that any white
person would expect. The Wampanoags were especially deserving
because, just as Pumetacom had once argued, without them, white
America’s Pilgrim founders never would have survived. Neverthe-
less, white New Englanders reduced local Indians in every way they
could scheme. To prick their consciences to act like true Christians
who truly loved all of their neighbors, Apess counseled his “Indian
brethren” to hold the December 22 anniversary of the English land-
ing at Plymouth Rock and the 4th of July as “Days of Mourning and
Not Joy.”
The narrative thrusts of Pumetacom and Apess merged and burst
to the fore again in a Thanksgiving Day 1970 speech by Frank
(Wamsutta) James at the inaugural National Day Mourning protest
held at the base of the Massasoit statue overlooking Plymouth Rock.
James, a committed student of Wampanoag history, echoed Pumeta-
com by telling a history of the First Thanksgiving that pivoted on the
colonists’ betrayal of the Wampanoags’ largesse. Like Apess, he told
a moving story about how that ingratitude had driven his people into
poverty and despair, which white people not only ignored but seemed
to celebrate each Thanksgiving. Yet James stood out in appealing to
whites not as fellow Christians but fellow Americans and human be-
ings. It is a sentiment that has continued to ring through subsequent
National Days of Mourning held each year up to the present.
The great man/little child metaphor and the themes of betrayal
and mourning are a centuries-long Wampanoag intellectual tradition
in the people’s struggles against colonialism. The Wampanoags have
used these ideas to interpret some of the most important events in
their history—including King Philip’s War, the Mashpee Revolt of
1833, and the National Day of Mourning—as well as innumerable
smaller contests with colonial society. These themes were so reso-
nant with Indians confronting colonialism that they spread beyond
the Wampanoags to influence the diplomacy of other Native peoples,
as seen in numerous examples throughout the Northeast in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In more recent times, Native
people across the United States and beyond have adopted the practice
of setting aside Thanksgiving to mourn the people’s losses to colonial-

ism. Through such developments, the National Day of Mourning has
been a critical thread in a thickly woven societal conversation since
the 1960s about colonial evils. It is striking that today’s scholarship on
the history of Indian-colonial relations bears far more resemblance

to the perspectives of Pumetacom, William Apess, and Frank James
than to the Thanksgiving myth.1
The Wampanoag paramount sachem Pumetacom is rarely thought
of as a revisionist historian, but historical argument was at the cen-
ter of his agenda when he sat down to talk with a delegation of En-
glish magistrates from the colony of Rhode Island in the late spring
of 1675. The two parties gathered on the south shore of Montaup,
Pumetacom’s peninsular home, separated by just a small span of wa-
ter from the Rhode Island town of Portsmouth, and surrounded on
land by a growing roster of English towns. The Rhode Islanders, led
by their lieutenant governor and recorder of this meeting, John Eas-
ton, were there to encourage the sachem to agree to an arbitration
of the Wampanoags’ mounting tensions with Plymouth colony, and
they had good reason to anticipate success. As Easton explained, “for
forty years time, reports and jealousies of war had been so frequent
that we did not think that now a war was breaking forth.”2 This cri-
sis, however, was particularly acute. Plymouth had just arrested, tried,
and executed three of the sachem’s followers for the murder of John
Sassamon, another Wampanoag, in Wampanoag territory, which in
and of itself was an unprecedented breach of the tribe’s jurisdiction.3
1 Overviews of that scholarship include Susan Sleeper-Smith et al., eds., Why You
Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2015); Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Futures of Native Ameri-
can History in the United States,” Perspectives on History: The News Magazine of the
American Historical Association, 50, no. 9 (December 2012): 44–45; Ned Blackhawk,
“American Indians and the Study of U.S. History,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds.,
American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 378–401; Fred-
erick E. Hoxie, “Retrieving the Red Continent: Settler Colonialism and the History of
American Indians in the United States,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2008): 1153–
167. On New England specifically, Ethan A. Schmidt, “Beyond the New England Fron-
tier: Native American Historiography since 1965,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts
41 (2013): 82–111; Christopher Bilodeau, “Indians in Southern New England: Older
Paradigms and Newer Themes,” Reviews in American History, 39 (2011): 213–27.
2 Franklin B. Hough, ed., Narrative of the Causes which Led to Philip’s Indian War,
of 1675 and 1676, by John Easton of Rhode Island (Albany, NY: 1858), 6.
3 Yasuhide Kawashima, Igniting King Philip’s War: The John Sassamon Murder Trial
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); James P. Ronda and Jeanne Ronda, “The
Death of John Sassamon: An Exploration in Writing New England Indian History,”
Yet the Wampanoags expected that colonial “justice” would not end
there. They knew that Sassamon, just before his death, had warned
Plymouth Governor Josiah Winslow that Pumetacom was in the final
stages of plotting a multitribal, anticolonial war. History taught that, at
best, the English would use this charge to slap Pumetacom with steep

fines that he could clear only with land cessions, just as they had done
during another war scare in 1671.4 Most of the Wampanoags believed
the worst, that next “the English would hang Philip . . . that they
might kill him to have his land.”5 Consequently, Pumetacom agreed
to his conference with the Rhode Islanders not to negotiate but to
explain why he had already resolved to fight. His words ring through
Easton’s account more clearly than perhaps any speech by a Native
leader recorded by New England colonists of this era.
Pumetacom viewed the history of Wampanoag-English relations as
little more than the colonists’ failure to live up to the 1621 alliance
of mutual protection that the Mayflower passengers had made with
his father, Ousamequin. The son recalled that when colonists first
settled at Plymouth, Ousamequin “was as a great man and the En-
glish as a little child.”6 Ousamequin could have wiped out the infant
colony if he had wished. Instead, he held back its many Native ene-
mies, fed the starving newcomers, and granted them ample tracts of
land. Pumetacom conveniently left out that his father had made this
choice less out of altruism than a need for allies, for the Wampanoags
had been hobbled by a plague between 1616 and 1619, whereupon
the Narragansetts to the west began reducing them to the status of
tributaries. Pumetacom also sidestepped his father’s desire to become
the point man in trade with the English in order to consolidate his
American Indian Quarterly, 1 (1974): 91–102; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King
Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998),
21–47; James Drake, “Symbol of a Failed Strategy: The Sassamon Trial, Political Cul-
ture, and King Philip’s War,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19, no.
2 (1995): 111–41; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 123–24.
4 Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Con-
test for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2005), 96–98; Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before
King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 200–6; Brooks,
Beloved Kin, 119, 131–33.
5 Hough, ed., Narrative of the Causes, 4.
6 Hough, ed., Narrative of the Causes, 12–13.
authority over the loose Wampanoag polity.7 But Pumetacom was on

firm ground that Plymouth likely would have become yet another
English lost colony if it had not been for Wampanoag help under
Ousamequin’s leadership.
And how did Plymouth show its gratitude, decades later, now that

it had become the great man? For one, the colony had shown a dis-
turbing pattern of extinguishing Wampanoag lives whenever it suited
English political and material ends. Pumetacom cited the example of
Plymouth detaining and, he alleged, fatally poisoning his brother, the
sachem Wamsutta, back in 1662 because it resented his land sales
to Rhode Island and suspected that he was plotting an anticolonial
league.8 More recently were the executions in the Sassamon case. To
Pumetacom it did not matter if Wamsutta or the accused Sassamon
murderers had been guilty of the charges the English levied against
them, though he denied that they were. Neither the Wampanoags nor
any of their indigenous neighbors recognized the colonists’ jurisdic-
tion over anything Native people did in their own territory. If colonists
had complaints about such matters, their acceptable means of redress
was diplomacy with sachems, not unilateral English justice. The only
point that Indians would grudgingly concede was the colonists’ au-
thority over crimes committed by Indians within the bounds of En-
glish communities. As Pumetacom put it, “whatever was only between
. . . Indians and not in [English] townships . . . they would not have
us prosecute.”9
The aforementioned poisoning and executions were bad enough as
discrete events, but worse still was that they crystallized a vast array
of English wrongs. Pumetacom denounced the English courts’ dou-
ble standard of justice that “if twenty . . . honest Indians testified
7 Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of
New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 110–52; David J.
Silverman, This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and
the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 95–204.
8 Silverman, This Land is Their Land, 258–61; Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 50–52.
9 Hough, ed., Narrative of the Causes, 10. On jurisdictional disputes, Katherine
A. Hermes, “‘Justice Will Be Done Us’: Algonquian Demands for Reciprocity in the
Courts of European Settlers,” in Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The
Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2001), 123–49; Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, eds., Justice in a New World:
Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York:
New York University Press, 2018); Lyle Koehler, “Red-White Power Relations and Jus-
tice in the Courts of Seventeenth-Century New England,” Amer. Indian Cult. and Res.
Jour. 3, no. 4 (1979): 1–31; David V. Baker, “American Indian Executions in Historical
Context,” Criminal Justice Studies 20 (2007): 315–73.
that an Englishman had done them wrong, it was as nothing.”

Yet whenever “one of their worst Indians testified against any In-
dian [in the colonists’ disfavor], that was sufficient.”10 The English
also interfered in the hierarchical relationships of the Wampanoag
polity. About half of the Wampanoags, mostly on Cape Cod and the

islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, had adopted Chris-
tianity and sworn off Pumetacom’s leadership, as well as the re-
sponsibility to pay him tribute, fearing no reprisal from the sachem
because they enjoyed English protection.11 Then there was the En-
glish use of land deeds, a number signed by Native straw sellers,
to claim Wampanoag territory for their own exclusive use under
their own exclusive jurisdiction. The Natives’ expectation was that
their land sales, when legitimate, merely conveyed permission for
the English to settle among them, or, in other words, for the En-
glish to become part of Wampanoag society for the Wampanoags’
benefit.12 When Indians resisted, colonists flooded the contested
tracts with livestock and punished Indians who injured the animals
with trumped-up criminal fines and lawsuits. The point was to force
holdout Natives to release their claims and resign themselves to
the English interpretation of these sales.13 Such machinations gave
the colonists, as Pumetacom objected, “100 times more land than
now the king [meaning Pumetacom] had for his people.”14 To the
Wampanoags, then, English colonization was but a shakedown by
people with short memories and thin loyalty.
Given these patterns, Pumetacom asked rhetorically, why would he
put any faith in the negotiated settlement proposed by Rhode Island?
He presumed that the English would just use some technical viola-
tion as an excuse to confiscate his land and even murder him. After
all, when the Wampanoags and Plymouth had teetered on the edge

11 David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Commu-
nity among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–77, 84–93; Silverman, This Land is Their Land,
289–93.
12 Silverman, This Land is Their Land, 230–33, 238–39, 265–66; Brooks, Our
Beloved Kin, 29–30.
13 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Prob-
lem of Livestock in Early New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 51
(1994): 601–24; Robert E. Gradie, “New England Indians and Colonizing Pigs,” in
William Cowan, ed., Papers of the Fifteenth Algonquian Conference (Ottawa: Carleton
University Press, 1984), 147–69.
of war back in 1671, Pumetacom submitted his grievances to arbitra-

tion by Massachusetts and Connecticut only to have the purportedly
neutral English judges gang up and force him to submit in nearly ev-
ery particular. In the subsequent “agreement,” signed in the shadow
of English soldiers, Pumetacom confessed that he had indeed been

plotting with the colonies’ “professed enemies” and stockpiling arms.
In recompense, he would pay an unprecedentedly large fine of £100,
requiring still more land cessions of the sort that had produced this
war scare in the first place. Then, to twist the knife, the commission-
ers had Pumetacom formally submit his people not only to the King
of England but Plymouth too. He must have known that Plymouth
would cite this charade to justify even more aggression, but he prob-
ably reasoned that it hardly mattered because the colony was going
to do whatever it wanted regardless. As Pumetacom related this hu-
miliation, “all English agreed against them [the Wampanoags], and so
by arbitration . . . now they had not so much land or money,” so lit-
tle, in fact, “that they were as good to be killed as to leave all their
livelihood.” The events of 1671 convinced the Wampanoags once and
for all that there was no depending on English goodwill or fairness.
Diplomacy and arbitration were no longer possibilities, leaving war as
the Wampanoags’ only option. They had nothing left to lose.15
Yet Pumetacom gave the English a choice that forced them to con-
front the immorality of their enterprise. When the Rhode Islanders
cautioned that it would be suicidal for the Wampanoags to resort to
arms because “the English were too strong for them,” the sachem
retorted, “then the English should do to them [the Wampanoags] as
they did when they were too strong for the English.”16 That was to
say, he challenged the colonists to assume the role of the great man by
acting with generosity, restraint, and justice toward the Wampanoag
little child. Everyone knew this wish was futile, so the conference
ended there. Just days later, Pumetacom led a Wampanoag force
against nearby English towns, prompting a war that engulfed the en-
tire region and ultimately broke the back of Indian power in southern
New England.
Initially, Wampanoag resistance fighters were on the offensive,
sacking exposed English settlements and ambushing troops on the
15 Hough, ed., Narrative of the Causes, 8–9. On the “agreement,” see Pulsipher,
Subjects unto the Same King, 96–98; Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission, 200–6; Brooks,
Beloved Kin, 131–33; Silverman, This Land is Their Land, 279–87.
march. Furthermore, soon they had the support of the Nipmucs, Nar-
ragansetts, Pocumtucks, and Sokokis, who the colonists turned into
enemies by violating their neutrality, such as attempting to confis-
cate their arms and demanding the surrender of Wampanoag non-
combatants who had taken refuge with them. The English made

things worse for themselves by treating the thousands of Christian
Indians, who had pledged fealty to the colonies, as wolves in sheep’s
clothing. Massachusetts and Plymouth herded the Christian Indians
into island concentration camps, where they suffered malnutrition
and exposure. The warring Indians took advantage of these colo-
nial missteps to recruit new allies and accumulate victories in which
they took the lives of upwards of three thousand Englishmen, de-
stroyed sixteen colonial towns, and slaughtered eight hundred head of
cattle.17
By the late spring and early summer of 1676, however, the re-
sistance had begun to collapse. In February 1676, the Mohawks,
as a gesture of alliance to the young English colony of New York,
drove Pumetacom’s winter camp away from Dutch and French gun
markets on the Hudson River and eastward back into the teeth of
colonial New England troops. Also lying in wait alongside the En-
glish were the Mohegans and Pequots of Connecticut, and Christian
Wampanoags from Cape Cod, who, under duress, had sided with the
colonies from the beginning and were just as adept as the resistance
fighters in forest warfare. Meanwhile, anticolonial Indian forces suc-
cumbed to hunger and disease as they lived in cramped quarters on
the run away from their cornfields and fishing stations. Consequently,
throughout the summer growing numbers of them began to accept a
late English offer of quarter in exchange for switching sides, which
turned the war decisively in the English favor. Others managed to
avoid this terrible choice by escaping to the upper Hudson River Val-
ley or Canada, where they built new lives, but most of them never
made it that far.18
17 Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Phillip’s
War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958); James Francis Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil
War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1999).
18 Jason W. Warren, Connecticut Unscathed: Victory in the Great Narragansett War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the
Mohegans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 171–203, and Dominion and Ci-
vility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 162–65; Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the Same King, 134–59; Julie A.
Wampanoag mourning during this war, as emphasized later by

Apess and James, was so pervasive and powerful that it resonates even
in the victorious colonists’ own records. By June 1676, Indian pris-
oners were telling their English captors that Pumetacom was “ready
to die . . . for you have now killed or taken all his relations . . .

[and] almost broke his heart.”19 Those relations included his wife,
Wootonekanuske, and son, who colonists captured and sold (certainly
in the case of the son and probably in the case of Wootonekanuske)
into the horrors of overseas slavery. They were but two of the esti-
mated two thousand Indians—men, women, and children alike—who
the English sentenced to bondage, and not only in New England,
but as far away as the West Indies, Gibraltar, and Tangier.20 Some
of these poor souls had surrendered based on English promises of
mercy, only to discover that the terms were harsher than colonial offi-
cials had pledged. Worse still, some surrendering Indians learned too
late that colonial authorities would not spare any Native person they
suspected of having taken an English life. Massachusetts, Plymouth,
and Rhode Island held public executions throughout the summer and
fall of 1676.21 The English even exacted retribution on the dead. On
August 6, colonial forces discovered the drowned body of Weetamoo,
a female sachem and war leader and the sister of Pumetacom’s wife.
Authorities ordered her head to be severed and piked next to a hold-
ing pen full of Wampanoag prisoners. The English could not help but
Fisher and David J. Silverman, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts:
Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England
and Indian Country (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 113–34; Brian D. Carroll,
“From Warrior to Soldier: New England Indians in the Colonial Military, 1675–1763”
(PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2009), 23–77; Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney,
“Wattanummon’s World: Personal and Tribal Identity in the Algonquian Diaspora, c.
1660–1712,” in William Cowan, ed., Proceedings of the 25th Algonquian Conference
(Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993), 212–24.
19 Benjamin Church, Entertaining Passages Relating to King Philip’s War [1716], ed.
Henry Martyn Dexter (Boston: John Kimball Wiggin, 1865), 138.
20 Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and
the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 150–51 Lin-
ford D. Fisher, “‘Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves’: Indian Surrenderers
During and After King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory 64 (2017): 91–114; Lepore, Name
of War, 150–54.
21 Lepore, Name of War, 143, 145, 155, 156; Drake, King Philip’s War, 160–61;
Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the
End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 127–
29.
notice the prisoners’ “lamentation, crying out that it was their Queen’s
head.”22
A few days after this incident, Pumetacom was dead too, shot
down by a Christian Indian named Alderman. Filled with a venge-
ful spirit, Captain Benjamin Church had the sachem dismembered

and his head sent to Plymouth. There, on the very site where the
sachem’s father had allied and feasted with the Pilgrims, authori-
ties mounted their grisly trophy outside the town gate and left it
there to rot for twenty years.23 If Plymouth shipped Pumetacom’s
wife, Wootonekanuske into slavery, as most historians believe, her
husband’s decapitated head might have been one of the last things
she saw in her homeland. Later that week, Plymouth held a day of
thanksgiving praising God for saving the colony from its enemies.24
The Wampanoags never forgot this betrayal, and as some of them
dispersed in the wake of it, they carried the story and its lessons to
other Native people.
The great man/little child metaphor and charge of ingratitude fol-
lowed Wampanoag survivors in the wake of the war. Some of the
Wampanoags who warred against the English probably escaped to the
newly formed Hudson River town of Schagticoke, comprised mostly
of Connecticut River peoples under the protection of the Mohawks.25
Other Wampanoags likely took shelter with allies like the Nip-
mucs. Indeed, in 1700, Keensotuk, a figure identified as the “grand-
child of the late King Phillip, Sachem of Mount Hope,” appears to
have been living among the Wabaquasset Nipmucs near Woodstock,
22 William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England
(Boston, 1677), in Samuel G. Drake, ed., The History of the Indian Wars in New En-
gland, from the First Settlement to the Termination of the War with King Philip, in
1677 (Roxbury, MA, 1865), 1:265; Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with
the Indians in New-England [1676], in Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, eds., So
Dreadful a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676–1677 (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 138.
23 Church, Entertaining Passages, 150–52.
24 Hubbard, Narrative of the Troubles, 1:268; Mather, Brief History, 139.
25 On Schaghticoke, see Margaret Bruchac, “Schaghticoke and Points North:
Wôbanaki Resistance and Persistence,” Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704
(unpub. manuscript, Department of Anthropology Papers, University of Pennsylvania
Scholarly Commons, 2005), https://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/109?utm
_source=repository.upenn.edu%2Fanthro_papers%2F109&utm_medium=PDF&utm_
campaign=PDFCoverPages (accessed August 12, 2020); Tom Arne Mitrød, The
Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson
Valley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 87–90, 98; Rita Beth Klopott, “The
History of the Town of Schaghticoke, New York, 1676–1855” (PhD diss., State
University of New York at Albany, 1981), 11–39.
Connecticut and involved in diplomacy involving tribes across the

Northeast.26 Other Wampanoags probably lived among the Mohawks
after being captured by them during the war and later adopted. In
such capacities, Wampanoags could share their views with Native peo-
ple experiencing their own colonial struggles in the forms of epidemic

disease, chronic warfare with the French and their Native allies, and
the recent replacement of their trade partner, Dutch New Nether-
land, with English New York.27
It cannot be coincidental that echoes of Pumetacom’s speech to
Easton began to appear among Hudson Valley Algonquians and
neighboring Iroquoians in the wake of this diaspora. As early as 1684,
spokesmen of the Onondagas and Cayugas, Haudenosaunee confed-
erates of the Mohawks reminded officials from New York that when
their ancestors first met the English the newcomers were weak, “and
we a great people, and finding they were a good people we gave them
land and treated them civilly, and now since you are a great people
and we but a small, you will protect us from the French.”28 Usu-
ally when Haudenosaunee people recalled their ancestors’ first con-
tact story with Europeans, they told of meeting the Dutch on the
Hudson River and fastening their ship to a tree as a first step toward
trade and alliance.29 Now they had another story to tell.
Decades later, at a time when English encroachment on Native
land in the Hudson River Valley was growing acute, the metaphor
appeared again, this time in a speech by the so-called “River
Indians,” by which the English referred generally to the region’s Mo-
hicans, Esopus, and Wappingers but specifically to the people of
26 Memoranda concerning the Indians, delivered to Lord Bellemont by Mr. Rawson,

a Minister, June 21–24, 1700, CO 5/861, nos. 49, 49i.–v, CO 5/909, 170–77, CO 5/1083,
no. 23, Colonial State Papers Online.
27 Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois
League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early Amer-
ican History and Culture, 1992), and “Dutch Dominos: The Fall of New Netherland
and the Reshaping of Eastern North America,” in Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle
for Eastern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 97–
112; Jon Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701 (Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 2010).
28 E.B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of
New York, 15 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed Parsons, 1853–1887), 2:417.
29 Jon Parmenter, “The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt
in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition be Reconciled
with the Documentary Record,” Journal of Early American History 3 (2013): 82–
109.
Schagticoke.30 At a 1748 conference, the River Indians blended the

great man/little child metaphor with the customary Iroquois trope of
a sheltering tree to tell New York “when you first came to this country,
you were but a small people and we very numerous, we then assisted
and Protected you, and now we are few in number [and] you become

Multitudes like a large Tree whose Roots and Branches are very Ex-
tensive under whose Branches we take our Shelter.”31 Six years later,
the River Indians again invoked a time when the “the White people
were but small, [and] we were very numerous and strong.” The Indi-
ans’ forefathers, “seeing the White people so few in number, lest they
should be destroyed, took and sheltered them under their arms . . .
we defended them in that low state, but now the case is altered[.]
you are numerous and strong, we are few and weak; Therefore[,]
we expect you will act by us in these Circumstances as we did by
you. . . .”32 So went the futile refrain.
By the 1760s, various Northeastern people—Shawnees, Tuscaro-
ras, Mohawks, and others—were employing this theme too as they
increasingly found common cause in the face of colonialism.33 The
Delawares even adapted the great man/little child metaphor to their
status as “women” (or peacemakers) in intertribal diplomacy, as when
they told New Jersey: “Some of our old Men can remember when
the English were weak and few, and the Indians strong and many.
We nursed them up in our Bosoms and treated them as friends. We
are glad our Friendship hath continued so long, and hope it will al-
ways endure.”34 As late as 1906, there is the example of Mathilda
30 Mitrød, Memory of All Ancient Customs, 143–66; William A. Starna, From Home-
land to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600–1830 (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2013), 170–200.
31 O’Callaghan, ed., Docs. Rel. to the Col. Hist. of NY, 6:446.
32 Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607–1789: New England
Treaties, North and West, 1650–1776, ed. Daniel R. Mandell (Bethesda, MD: Univer-
sity Publications of America, 2003), 20:586–87.
33 Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1921–65), 3:210–11, 340, 11:99, 12:272; O’Callaghan, Docs. Rel. to the Col. Hist.
of NY, 8:121. For a later example, “Speech of John W. Quinney, Reidsville, NY, July
4, 1854,” Wisconsin Historical Collections (1933): 1:317. Generally, on this sense of
common cause, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North Ameri-
can Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992).
34 Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607–1789: New York
and New Jersey Treaties, 1754–1775, ed. Barbara Graymont (Bethesda, MD, Univer-
sity Publications of America, 2001), 10:275. On the Delawares as “women,” see Gun-
lög Fur, A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware
Bluesky’s commencement address from the Thomas Indian School on

the Cattaraugus (Seneca) Reservation in which she compared the first
colonists to “a little feeble plant,” which Indians set in their own land,
and though “they could have trodden them under their feet, they wa-
tered and protected them. In return, the White people gave them

rum which has slain thousands.”35 Pumetacom could not have said it
any better himself.
Everyday Wampanoags who remained in their coastal homeland
bridged the 150-year interval between Pumetacom and Apess by re-
peatedly emphasizing that white society’s betrayal of them caused
them to suffer and mourn. Though King Philip’s War was an un-
mitigated disaster for most Indians in southern New England, it
turned out to be just the first stage in a generations-long, multi-
front struggle to defend the people’s land, sovereignty, and even
lives. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the English seized
nearly all of the Wampanoags’ territory, leaving only a handful of
town-sized reservations for mostly Christian Indians who had allied
with the colonies during the war. Even those supposedly perma-
nent sanctuaries were not safe from poachers and squatters or from
creditors and corrupt guardians (often one in the same) who pressed
relentlessly for cessions to pay off the Indians’ unmanageable debts.
Through such underhanded means, white people totally dispossessed
more than a dozen Wampanoag communities, leaving, by Apess’s day,
just a handful of vulnerable reservations, such as Mashpee, Aquin-
nah, Chappaquiddick, Christiantown, Herring Pond, Betty’s Neck,
and Watuppa.36
The people’s sense of betrayal cuts through their complaints about
this exploitation. When Wampanoags who had served with Benjamin
Church in King Philip’s War petitioned Massachusetts for land in
1700, they cast it as a moral debt owed to them because “they have
Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Evan Haefeli, “Becom-

ing ‘A Nation of Statesmen’: The Mohicans’ Incorporation into the Iroquois League,
1671–1675,” New England Quarterly, 93 (2020): 425–33.
35 Mathilda Bluesky, “The American Indian of the Past,” 51st Annual Report of the
Board of Managers of the Thomas Indian School (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon, 1907), 22.
My thanks to Michael Leroy Oberg for this source.
36 Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern
Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), and Tribe, Race, History:
Native Americans in Southern New England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 2008); Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity
in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
done service for the English (having always been their friends).”
Mashpee struck the same tone late that year in a petition for debt re-
lief, underscoring that they had “assisted our English neighbors, both
in the former & late wars with their & our Indian enemies.” When
such appeals fell on deaf ears, as they so often did, they could quickly

turn into charges of ingratitude. After serving in Massachusetts forces
five times between 1725 and 1750, losing a leg and then sinking into
poverty without financial relief from the colonial government, the
Christian Wampanoag preacher William Simon of Titicut expressed
his regret that all his suffering occurred having “ventured my life
in defense of the English people.” He knew, like Pumetacom before
him, that thanklessness was at the heart of colonial society’s treatment
of his people.37
Yet it is the theme of mourning that echoes the loudest in
Wampanoag entreaties from this era. Colonial dispossession, after all,
denied the Wampanoags access to the sites where they had buried
their loved ones, where their history had unfolded, where they had
hunted, fished, gathered, and danced since time immemorial.38 The
Wampanoags knew the names and characteristics of every plant, ani-
mal, run of water, and hill in these places. They believed the Creator
had birthed their kind into their homeland to live in perpetuity. Con-
sider the strident terms the Mashpees used in a 1752 Wampanoag-
language petition to Boston to protest English trespass:
Oh! Oh!, gentlemen, hear us now, Oh! ye, us poor Indians . . . Oh! Hear
our weeping, and hear our beseeching of you . . . This Indian land, this was
conveyed to us by these former sachems of ours. We shall not give it away,
nor shall it be sold, nor shall it be lent, but we shall always use it as long as
we live, we together with all our children, and our children’s children, and
our descendants, and together with all their descendants. They shall always
use it as long as Christian Indians live. We shall use it forever and ever . . .
Against our will these Englishmen take away from us what was our land. They
parcel it out to each other, and the marsh along with it, against our will. And
37 The quotations in this paragraph are from Carroll, “Warrior to Soldier,” 395–96.
38 William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folk-
lore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986); Russell G.
Handsman, “Landscapes of Memory in Wampanoag Country—and the Monuments
Upon Them,” in Patricia E. Rubertone, ed., Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments,
Memories, and Engagement in Native North America (Walnut Creek, CA: West Coast
Press, 2008), 161–194; Christine M. DeLucia, The Memory Lands: King Philip’s War
and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018),
and “Terrapolitics in the Dawnland: Relationality, Resistance, and Indigenous Futures
in the Native and Colonial Northeast,” NEQ 92 (2019): 548–83.
as for our streams, they do not allow us peacefully to be when we peacefully

go fishing. They beat us greatly and they have houses on our land against our
will. Truly we think it is this: We poor Indians soon shall not have any place
to reside, together with our poor children. . . .39
Though one might be tempted to attribute the Mashpees’ pathos to

the custom of adopting a pitiful stance when approaching a stronger
party, the English-language version of the letter can only hint at the
extent of the agony it expressed. As the Wampanoag language-keeper
Jessie Little Doe Baird explains, a literal Wampanoag translation of
“take away from us what was our land” is something closer to “fall off
of our feet,” as if colonists were pulling up the people by their roots
from the soil in which the Creator had planted them.40 It is an apt
metaphor. Even today, Wampanoag people diagnosed with depression
commonly struggle with a feeling of helplessness as white society cuts
them off from their territory only to ruin it through overdevelopment
and pollution.41
The Wampanoags also mourned how, from the late 1600s through
the mid 1800s, white merchant creditors, courts, and government-
appointed guardians colluded to force them and their children into
indentured servitude to white farmers, householders, and whaling
merchants. Historian Margaret Newell goes so far as to call this pat-
tern “judicial enslavement” because the terms often lasted for several
years, even decades, and sometimes passed from one generation to
the next.42 Mashpee’s minister, Gideon Hawley, said much the same,
recalling that when he arrived in Mashpee in 1757 “every Indian had
his master. . . . These Indians and their children were transferred
from one to another master like slaves.”43 Behind such generalities
were countless episodes of heartbreak as the exploitation split Native
families apart, with the children often sent off to work for white mas-
ters who, as Apess characterized it, “used them more like dogs than
39 Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, eds., Native Writings in Massachusetts

(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), 1:154.
40 Jesse Little Doe Baird from the Anne Makepeace documentary, We Still Live
Here Âs Nutayuneân (Public Broadcasting Service, 2010).

41 Ramona Louise Peters, “Community Development Planning with a Native Ameri-
can Tribe in a Colonized Environment: Mashpee Wampanoag, a Modern Native Amer-
ican Tribe in Southern New England Seeking to Maintain Traditional Values and
Cultural Integrity” (MS thesis, California School of Professional Psychology, 2003).
42 Newell, Brethren by Nature, 211–36.
43 Hawley to Andrew Oliver, December 9, 1760, Gideon Hawley Journal, Congre-
gational Library, Boston, MA.
human beings, feeding them scantily, lodging them hard, and clothing
them with rags.” Is it any wonder that mourning was so pervasive in
Wampanoag appeals?44
The people’s grief was all the more pointed because the disrup-
tion of their face-to-face communities through such exploitation was

the main source of the decline of the Wampanoag language. By
1767, a grand celebration of the Lord’s Supper involving the Natives
of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard included a morning service in
Wampanoag and afternoon worship in English because though “the
Indians are fond of retaining their own Language . . . they gener-
ally however understand English, especially the younger ones among
them.”45 Just a generation later, fluent Wampanoag speakers were a
distinct minority in most communities. For much of the eighteenth
century, the Wampanoag tongue had been like beachfront dunes
holding back the raging colonial sea. Its erosion seemed as permanent
as the loss of shoreline, leaving the people feeling empty and vul-
nerable. In the late nineteenth century, botanist Edward Burgess vis-
ited the Wampanoag community of Aquinnah where elders told him
stories about Zachariah Howwoswee, who, when he died in 1821
at eighty-three, was the last Indian minister to preach in the
Wampanoag language. The elders remembered that whenever How-
woswee switched his sermons from English to Wampanoag “there
were but few of them could know what he meant . . . and they would
cry and he would cry.” Howwoswee knew his listeners could not un-
derstand his words, but hearing their people’s speech fostered a sense
of their collective history, suffering, and anxiety about the future. As
Howwoswee put it, speaking Wampanoag was a way “‘to keep up my
44 Apess, “Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Rel-

ative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained [1835],” in Barry
O’Connell, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pe-
quot (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 187. Generally on
these points, see Silverman, “The Impact of Indentured Servitude on Southern New
England Indian Society and Culture, 1680–1810,” NEQ 74 (2001): 622–66.
45 Boston News-Letter, No. 3351, December 24, 1767. Other evaluations of the rel-
ative predominance of the Wampanoag and English languages in Wampanoag com-
munities include Experience Mayhew, A Brief Account of the State of the Indians on
Martha’s Vineyard, appendix to his Discourse Shewing that God Dealeth with Men as
with Reasonable Creatures (Boston: 1720), 9–10; Samuel Sewall to William Ashhurst,
October 6, 1724, New England Company Recs., 7955/2, 10, Guildhall Library, Cor-
poration of London, London, UK; Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings, 1:179; “At
a Meeting of the Indians in Mashpee, July 28, 1754,” Gideon Hawley Letters, Mas-
sachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
nation.”’46 Hope could be found in a prophecy—which turned out

to be true—that the language would awaken after seven generations,
but as it slept, the people felt its absence deep in their hearts.47
William Apess wedded this profound grief to Pumetacom’s charge
of betrayal in his own challenge to white Americans’ self-serving,

sanitized histories of colonialism. Apess drew on a deep well of in-
fluences: a childhood of abuse and servitude; years of travel and
exposure to such radical influences as Black liberation literature,
abolitionism, Seneca Handsome Lake’s Indian revivalism, Methodist
egalitarianism, and time spent in Boston reading Indian and colonial
history. It all came together for Apess in the 1820s and 30s as he
authored lectures and pamphlets castigating whites for the Christian
hypocrisy of refusing to treat Native and black peoples as fellow chil-
dren of God deserving of worldly dignity. He found it particularly
ironic that New England Indians experienced so much degradation
at the hands of local whites even as white New Englanders sancti-
moniously decried the inhumanity of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Re-
moval policies. Apess’s criticism became even sharper in 1833 when
he became involved in the Mashpee Wampanoags’ campaign to regain
control over their community from state-appointed white guardians
who neglected their interests and profited personally from Native
resources. Apess’s role in halting white poaching of the Mashpees’
firewood and reclaiming the reservation’s meetinghouse from an in-
different white minister landed him in the Barnstable Country jail
for a month, but the so-called “riot” also generated an enormous
amount of productive publicity. Apess used it to take Mashpee’s case
to Boston, where he not only lobbied the government but twice de-
livered his newly authored Eulogy on King Philip at the city’s Odeon
hall. His white audience looked forward to the novelty of seeing a
well-groomed, educated Indian speak in public. Little could anyone
have expected to hear a revisionist account of the Pilgrim saga that
put the plight of Mashpee in the context of two centuries of colonial
wickedness.48
46 Edward S. Burgess, “The Old South Road of Gay Head,” Dukes County Intelli-
gencer 12 (1970): 22.
47 Little Doe Baird in Makepeace, We Still Live Here.
48 On Apess’s life, see O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, xiii–lxxvii; Philip F. Gura,
The Life of William Apess, Pequot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2015); Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography
of William Apess, Pequot (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press,
2017); Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of
In his Eulogy, Apess assumed Pumetacom’s intellectual mantle to

argue that Indians were the real heroes of Plymouth’s founding be-
cause they acted like model Christians whereas the supposedly saintly
Pilgrims behaved as villains and hypocrites. Apess meticulously laid
out how the Mayflower passengers introduced themselves to the

Wampanoags by desecrating their graves and looting their corn, then
had the audacity to turn to Ousamequin for help. Yet the chief, to his
moral credit, obliged, like a true Christian imbued with the principles
of charity and forgiveness. “No people could be used better than they
were,” Apess intoned. The Wampanoags “gave [the English] venison
and sold them many hogsheads of corn . . . Had it not been for this
humane act of the Indians, every White man would have been swept
from the New England colonies.” Echoing Pumetacom, he went so
far as to say that “Indians were as tender to them as to their own
children; and for all this, they were denounced as savages by those
who had received all the acts of kindness they could possibly show
them.”49
Apess also declared Massasoit’s son, Philip (or Pumetacom), to be
“the greatest man that ever lived upon the American shores” for lead-
ing his people in resistance rather than submitting to white indigni-
ties.50 Yes, the Wampanoags who fought back had lost their lives and
lands, but how could the sachem be blamed for his choice? Apess
invited his listeners to imagine Philip coming back to life to survey
the contemporary state of Native America and discover “how true
the prophecy, that the White people would not only cut down their
groves but would enslave them . . . Our groves and hunting grounds
are gone, are dead are dug up, our council fires are put out.” Still,
whites would not relent. They were intent either on “driving the In-
dians out of the states,” like Jackson, “or dooming them to become
chained under desperate laws,” like New Englanders. Either way,
there was no justice for Indians in a white America in which “there
is a deep-rooted popular opinion in the hearts of many that Indians
Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004),

97–159. On this episode in particular, see Lopenzina, “Letter from Barnstable Jail:
William Apess and the ‘Memorial of the Mashpee Indians,”’ Native American and In-
digenous Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 105–127; Donald M. Nielsen, “The Mashpee Indian
Revolt of 1833,” NEQ 58 (1985): 500–20.
49 Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal Street,
Boston [1836],” in O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 280.
50 Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip,” 290.
were made, etc. on purpose for destruction, to be driven out by White

Christians, and they to take their places; and that God had decreed it
from all eternity.” It was all the outgrowth of “a fire, a canker, created
by the Pilgrims from across the Atlantic, to burn and destroy my poor
unfortunate brethren.”51

In light of this sordid history, Apess proposed that Indians should
treat each December 22nd, the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing
in Plymouth, and every Fourth of July, as “days of mourning and not
joy . . . Let them rather fast and pray to the great Spirit, the Indian’s
god, who deals out mercy to his red children, and not destruction.”
Through such symbolic acts, modern Indians might awaken white
America’s conscience by serving as “the monument of the cruelty of
those who came before to improve our race and correct our errors.”
Would white people respond? Apess acknowledged that “I have some
dear, good friends among White people,” but admitted that “I eye
them with a jealous eye, for fear they will betray me.” This call by
Apess, for Indians to commemorate that they bore the burden of
white America’s triumphs and that white Americans needed to ac-
knowledge the shallowness of their Christian principles by refusing
to treat Indians as God’s creation, would continue to resonate with
the Wampanoags long after he was gone.52
The so-called Mashpee Revolt had the unintended effect of awak-
ing Massachusetts to its Indians’ anomalous condition as state subjects
without citizenship, prompting a number of official inquiries in which
the Wampanoags repeatedly voiced their principles about colonial
society’s unpaid moral debts. White investigatory committees hoped
to find Indians complaining that their odd legal status and receipt
of state aid made them no more than vassals, but the majority felt
nothing of the sort. At Chappaquiddick, Wampanoag elders explained
that since whites had swindled them out of nearly “the whole island
. . . they feel that they have the right to expect protection in the en-
joyment of the few acres left to them.”53 They feared that as citi-
zens “most of them would soon become the prey of shrewder and
sharper men outside, that the little property they possess would soon
be wrested from them and that they would be turned out, destitute,
51 Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip,” 305–6.

52 Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip,” 277, 286, 310.
53 F.W. Bird, Whiting Griswold, and Cyrus Weekes, Report of the Commissioners
Relating to the Condition of the Indians, Massachusetts House Doc. No. 46 (Boston,
1849), 11.
upon the cold charities of the world. The community would be con-
sequently broken up, and scattered among those who would have no
particular sympathy with them.”54 State commissioners encountered
the same opinion throughout Wampanoag country, as well as a belief
about the people’s entitlement to outside funds for the support of ed-

ucation, religion, and poor relief. The officials found it puzzling that
Native people “have a vague idea that the state has large funds drawn
from the sale of lands which would have been theirs . . . so that what-
ever they receive is but a just due.”55 After all, the Wampanoags had
once been the “great father” to the “little child” of Plymouth.
The era of Reconstruction finally ended the decades-long conver-
sation by galvanizing white authorities to foist on New England’s
Indian population the same rights that Republicans were fighting
to extend to freed people in the South. Hardly anyone in authority
would consider that whereas former slaves considered equality under
the law to be justice, most Indigenous people viewed it as an imposed
mechanism of colonial dispossession. The process involved dividing
the reservations into private property tracts, giving Mashpee and Gay
Head the status of towns, annexing the smaller former reservations
to neighboring white-majority communities, and declaring all Indige-
nous people to be full-fledged citizens and no longer Indians, as if
the two were antithetical. Some white proponents of this measure, at
their more honest moments, admitted that they thought of it, not only
as a matter of civil rights, but as the final step in a natural process of
Indian extinction in the face in white superiority. In their estimation,
the Wampanoags were too racially intermixed and adapted to white
ways to be classified as Indian any longer. Convinced as they were
that it was the fate or manifest destiny of Indians to vanish, they de-
fined any changes Indians had made to survive as steps toward that
end.56
Over the next century, white Americans did everything they
could to make that supposedly God-given process occur, including
54 John Milton Earle, Report to the Governor and Council, Concerning the Indi-
ans of the Commonwealth, Under the Act of April 6, 1859, Senate Document No. 96
(Boston, 1861), 24.
55 Earle, Report to the Governor, 13.
56 Ann Marie Plane and Gregory Burton, “The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchise-
ment Act: Ethnic Contest in Historical Context, 1849–1869,” Ethnohistory 40 (1993):
587–618; Mandell, Tribe, Race, History, 195–217; Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Last-
ing: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2010).
reducing Indians to romantic bit parts in the country’s history as ex-

emplified in the Thanksgiving myth. It was no coincidence that the
Pilgrims emerged as founding fathers in the mid- to late-nineteenth
century amid popular anxiety that the United States was being over-
run by Catholic and then Eastern Orthodox and Jewish immigrants

supposedly unappreciative of the country’s Protestant, democratic
origins and values. Nor was it an accident that “friendly Indians”
received a supporting role in the national founding story when the na-
tion was completing its subjugation of the tribes of the Great Plains
and far West. Better to highlight the Pilgrims’ religious and demo-
cratic principles instead of the Indian wars and slavery more typical
of the colonies. Through such means, northeasterners could define
the so-called black and Indian problems as southern and western ex-
ceptions to an otherwise inspiring national heritage.57
This invention became tradition by the early twentieth century and
has remained so in no small part through American schools holding
annual Thanksgiving pageants in which students dress up as Pilgrims
and Indians to reenact the First Thanksgiving. I remember partici-
pating in such a performance in which we sang “My Country Tis of
Thee,” praising America as a “sweet land of liberty” and the Pilgrims
as “my fathers.” The point of this exercise was to have a diverse group
of schoolchildren learn about who we, as Americans, are, or least who
we are supposed to be. Even students from ethnic backgrounds un-
connected to the Pilgrim myth would be instilled with the principles
of representative government, liberty, and Christianity while learning
to identify with English colonists as fellow whites. Leaving Indians
outside of the category of “my fathers” also carried important lessons.
It was yet another reminder about which race ran the country and
whose values mattered.
Lest we dismiss the impact of these messages, consider the expe-
rience of the young Wampanoag woman who told this author that
when she was in grade school, as the lone Indian in her class, her
teacher cast her as Chief Massasoit in one of these pageants and had
her sing “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.” At the
time she was just embarrassed. Now she sees the cruel irony in it.
Other Wampanoags tell of their parents objecting to these pageants
57 James W. Baker, Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday (Lebanon:

University of New Hampshire Press, 2009); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian
Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–
1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
and associated history lessons that the New England Indians were all
gone, only to have school officials question their claims to be Indian.
Authentic Indians were supposed to be primitive relics, not moderns,
so what were they doing in school, speaking English, wearing con-
temporary clothing, and returning home to adults who had jobs and

drove cars?
By 1970, Frank James, representing a new generation of Native
historian, had reached the limits of his patience with this nonsense.
James was born and raised in the community of Aquinnah, or Gay
Head, on Martha’s Vineyard, which had long ranked as one of the
poorest communities in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, James grew
up determined to succeed and represent his people. As a teenager,
he even adopted the Wampanoag name, Wamsutta, after the el-
dest son of Ousamequin who preceded Pumetacom in calling on the
Wampanoags to resist colonialism. James’s inner drive carried him all
the way to the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he stud-
ied trumpet and then to the Nauset Public Schools on Cape Cod
where he became director of music. His other passions were polit-
ical activism and the study of Wampanoag history, for he understood
that knowing the past was critical to reforming the present. What he
read in the primary sources made his blood boil because it bore little
relation to the Thanksgiving myth that weighed around his people’s
neck like a millstone.58
So when James was invited to speak at a state banquet celebrat-
ing the 350th anniversary of Plymouth’s founding, he saw it as a rare
opportunity to set the record straight in the unlikeliest of contexts
like Apess at the Odeon. Yet when he submitted a draft of his speech
for review, white officials rejected it as “too inflammatory.” James, for
his part, found an alternative script drawn up by the state to be so
“childish and untrue” that he pulled out of the event altogether. In-
stead, he drew up plans for a commemoration where there would be
no censors.59
Inspired by the “Red Power” movement for Indigenous rights and
justice, and almost certainly by the precedents of Pumetacom and
58 Profiles of James can be found in “Wamsutta Frank James Obituary,” Boston

Globe, February 23, 2001, B8; “Elder Passing: Wamsutta Frank James,” http://www
.nativeweb.org/obituaries/wamsutta.html (accessed July 22, 2020).
59 “Indian Charges Censorship, Spurns Orator’s Role,” Boston Globe, September 24,
1970, 3.
Apess, James organized a “National Day of Mourning” to be held on

Thanksgiving Day of 1970 at the site of the Massasoit statue overlook-
ing Plymouth Rock. In choosing this name, James hearkened not only
to National Days of Mourning held after the assassinations of John
Kennedy and Martin Luther King. He also reached back to Apess’s

Eulogy on King Philip. Like Apess incarnate, when James’s moment
came, he rose up before protestors from across Indian country, media,
and onlookers, and delivered the “inflammatory speech” that Mas-
sachusetts had tried to suppress.60
He began with the poignant assertion that he had the right to
the dignity of his humanity despite society’s efforts to diminish him
and his people. “I speak to you as a man,” he introduced him-
self, “a Wampanoag man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry,
my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction,” despite his
family and community suffering “poverty and discrimination, two so-
cial and economic diseases.” He acknowledged to his white listen-
ers that Thanksgiving “is a time of celebration for you—celebrating
the beginnings for the White man in America.” For James and the
Wampanoags, however, the day had doleful implications. “It is with
a heavy heart,” he explained, “that I look back on what happened to
my people.”61
In the tradition of Pumetacom and Apess, James proceeded to tell
a history of English-Wampanoag relations that turned the bedtime
story of the Thanksgiving myth into a nightmare. His conclusion was
that Ousamequin’s welcome of the Pilgrims “was perhaps our biggest
mistake” because the English had betrayed Wampanoag generosity.
He stressed, “We the Wampanoag welcomed you, the White man,
with open arms, little knowing it was the beginning of the end; that
before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be
a free people.” To James, following in the footsteps of Pumetacom
and Apess, the moral of the First Thanksgiving was that the English
60 Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for
Sovereignty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Troy R. Johnson, The Occu-
pation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen
Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee
(New York: New Press, 1996), esp. 171–268; Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Na-
tive: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
61 Frank James, “National Day of Mourning,” in Siobhan Senier, ed., Dawnland
Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2014), 455.
and their white heirs violated the friendship the Wampanoags had
extended them in their time of need to become oppressors. This is
the message that has echoed through subsequent National Days of
Mourning, which the United American Indians of New England have
continued to hold each Thanksgiving up to this very time.62

As to the question of how to move forward, James’s answer, like
his forebears’, was to confront this history, including the fact that “the
Wampanoag still walk the lands of Massachusetts.” James also urged
his fellow Americans to consider Indians as worthy of the same re-
spect as everyone else. “Let us remember,” he counseled, “the Indian
is and was as human as the White man. The Indian feels pain, gets
hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure,
suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh.” If the Ameri-
can people followed this counsel to extend compassion and acknowl-
edgement to their Indian countrymen and women, it would make
Thanksgiving Day, 1970, a new beginning toward what James called
“a more humane America, a more Indian America,” in which Na-
tive people could “regain the position in this country that is rightfully
ours.”63
In more recent times, Wampanoag reflections on colonialism and
Thanksgiving have tended to highlight the themes of mourning, em-
pathy, and healing favored by Apess and James instead of the charge
of betrayal levied by Pumetacom, though sometimes it is not far be-
neath the surface. A number of Wampanoag people take pride in
the attention their people receive during the Thanksgiving season
and see it as an opportunity to educate the general public. As Mash-
pee’s Bethia Washington says, “we always get called in the month of
November . . . The positive thing about this time of year is that we
are thought of. That opens the door to greater learning and under-
standing.” She laments, though, that “then we’re not here the rest of
the year.”64 Some of the people have followed the lead of Apess and
James to set aside Thanksgiving as a time for mourning and consid-
ering who they have lost, what they have lost, and for what purpose.
Roland Mooanum James, who has succeeded his late father, Frank,
in leading the National Day of Mourning protest, has no use for the
62 James, “National Day of Mourning,” 456.

63 James, “National Day of Mourning,” 457–58.
64 Quoted in “How to Talk to Kids about Thanksgiving,” https://www.npr.org
/sections/ed/2015/11/25/457105485/how-to-talk-to-kids-about-thanksgiving (accessed
July 22, 2020).
Thanksgiving celebration. As he declared at the 2017 rally, “Today we

say, ‘no thanks, no giving’.”65 No wonder. Wampanoag people widely
report feeling despondent whenever they consider that the acquisi-
tiveness and wastefulness of a colonial society shaped by a Christianity
and capitalism that has degraded the natural world and overwhelmed

traditional Wampanoag values such as community, giving, and mod-
esty. Others have shared their anguish over the scourges of depres-
sion and substance abuse among members of their community who
felt no control over their lives.66 They have also mourned because so
few outsiders seem to care. Some Wampanoag staff at the Plimoth
Plantation living history museum express this collective mourning by
painting their faces black the week of Thanksgiving. Their hope is
to open conversations with museum patrons who otherwise expect a
patriotic air. They say that change comes one mind at a time.
Mashpee Wampanoag tribal chairman Cedric Cromwell captured
these ambiguities effectively in a 2012 address. He remarked, “The
Thanksgiving holiday is a complicated day for our people. We are for-
ever intertwined with the American Thanksgiving myth, however in-
accurate it may be. Some of our people choose to observe this day as
a Day of Mourning. Some choose to celebrate in a thoroughly Amer-
ican way. Many choose a different path, spending the day with family
and friends but acknowledging our unique history and connection to
this day.”67 The response of Aquinnah’s Linda Coombs to the ques-
tion of how Wampanoags observe Thanksgiving is, “you could talk to
ten people and get ten different answers.” Yet nearly all of them, she
asserts, believe “that the whole concept of Thanksgiving as it’s gener-
ally seen or practiced in this country is kind of like a superficial layer
over what’s really on the ground.”68
65 “Native Americans Marking Thanksgiving with Day of Mourning,” November

23, 2017, Associated Press, https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2017/11/23/native
-americans-marking-thanksgiving-with-day-of-mourning (accessed July 22, 2020).
66 People of the First Light. Thanksgiving: A Native Perspective, https://archive
.org/details/PACTV_Summer_Documentary_2016_People_of_the_First_Light_-_An_
Indigenous_Perspective_on_Thanksgiving (accessed July 22, 2020); Episode 40—
Wampanoag Nation: Jonathan Perry—Native American,” LightupwithShua, June 12,
2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83F4XNugSOo (accessed July 22, 2020);
Aquinnah’s Tobias Vanderhoop in the Thomas Bena documentary, One Big Home
(Elephant in the Room Productions, 2016).
67 Wampanoag on Thanksgiving,” http://www.manyhoops.com/wampanoag-on-than
ksgiving.html (accessed July, 22, 2020).
68 “Wampanoag Historian on Surviving almost 400 Years of Thanksgiving,” http://
www.manyhoops.com/wampanoag-on-thanksgiving.html (last accessed July 22, 2020).
If anyone missed the point, the Mashpee Wampanoags have re-

minded them in recent protests of the Trump administration’s attempt
to take the people’s reservation out of the federal trust status it ob-
tained in 2015.69 Accompanying the tribe’s legal challenges to this
decision have been centuries-old moral arguments hinging on the

people’s role in the Thanksgiving story. Cromwell has observed, “It’s
hard to believe that we’re approaching the Thanksgiving holiday sea-
son[,] and we’re still fighting to retain 1/10th of 1% of our ancestral
homeland. Our ancestors gave the Pilgrims the land to establish Ply-
mouth Colony. Yet here we are.”70 Vice-chair of the tribe, and founder
of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, Jessie Little Doe
Baird, adds that “lost on most is the level of irony in this situation—
that while the tribe struggles to ensure that these lands are not taken
out of trust—we, along with 8 other sister tribes, paved the way for
the formation of these United States via treaties and Indian Land Ti-
tles granted to the Pilgrims on lands within the very same territory
that is now being stripped away.”71 One Mashpee Wampanoag who
marched in protest of this ruling carried a sign that read, “Without
us there would be no US,” making the same point.72 National news
media has taken notice, producing articles with such titles as “The
Native Americans Who Saved the Pilgrims Could Lose Their Land,
Again.”73 The great father/little child and betrayal themes live on.
If the public continues to insist on associating Pilgrim-Indian re-
lations with Thanksgiving, the least we can do is try to get the story
69 A useful overview is “The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s Crisis Within a Cri-

sis,” Harvard Crimson, April 17, 2020, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/4/17
/mashpee-wampanoag-scrutiny/ (last accessed August 13, 2020).
70 https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/november-2018-chairmans-column (last
accessed July 22, 2020).
71 https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/news/2018/9/10/america-moves-to-bite
-the-hand-that-fed-it-the-mashpee-wampanoag-sole-surviving-signatory-tribe-to-ame
ricas-first-indian-titled-land (accessed July 22, 2020).
72 Picture accompanying Rebecca Hyman, “Mashpee tribe’s casino land bill
re-introduced in Congress,” Taunton Gazette, January 8, 2019, https://www
.tauntongazette.com/news/20190108/mashpee-tribes-casino-land-bill-re-introduced-in
-congress (accessed July 22, 2020).
73 Debra Utacia Krol, “The Native Americans Who Saved the Pilgrims Could Lose
Their Land, Again,” November 21, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/vbabma
/the-native-americans-who-saved-the-pilgrims-could-lose-their-land-again (accessed
July 22, 2020). See also Nick Martin, “This is Crisis Colonization” New Republic, March
30, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/157091/crisis-colonization (accessed July 22,
2020); Maeve Higgins, “My Thanksgiving Learning Curve,” New York Times, Novem-
ber 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/opinion/first-thanksgiving-expat
-immigrant.html (accessed July 22, 2020).
straight with Wampanoag actors and perspectives at the center. Imag-

ine if instead of trafficking in the mythical Thanksgiving, American so-
ciety reckoned with the story as told by Pumetacom, William Apess,
and Frank James. The challenges are significant at several levels.
Many Americans are uncomfortable with the Native American past.

It tends to turn patriotic episodes inside out and heroes into villains
or at least deeply flawed heroes. It loosens white claims on morality
and authority. It raises political and cultural questions about justice. It
threatens to tear down monuments and rename buildings. But con-
fronting this darkness also promises to shed light, cultivate national
humility, and, perhaps most importantly, signal to Native people that
the country values them as fellow Americans with a distinct history
and status that deserves to be acknowledged and honored.
David J. Silverman is professor of history at George Washington Uni-

versity. His most recent book is This Land is Their Land: The
Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and Troubled His-
tory of Thanksgiving (2019).
T HE YO K E O F B O N DA G E : S L AVE RY IN
P LYM O U TH C O LO N Y
john g. turner
I N May 1680, Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth Colony, re-

sponded at length to a set of inquiries from Secretary of State
Henry Covington. Several of the questions concerned servants and
slaves. Of the latter, Winslow observed, “we have very few Except In-
dian women and Boyes taken in the late warr.” He added that “some
few [Africans] are brought in to Boston from Barbadose, Jamaica
and other English plantations” and that “of them fewer [are] breed-
ers.” Winslow further specified that enslaved African men and boys
were worth between twenty and thirty pounds each, “as they seeme
to bee better or worse.” Coventry had asked Winslow for the num-
ber of slaves in the colony, but Winslow provided no estimate, only

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608 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

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F OR centuries, the Wampanoags of what is now southeastern

Pumetacom’s history lesson in 1675 was a justification for war, the

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of setting aside Thanksgiving to mourn the people’s losses to colonial-

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authority over the loose Wampanoag polity.7 But Pumetacom was on

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that an Englishman had done them wrong, it was as nothing.”

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10 Hough, ed., Narrative of the Causes, 13.

of war back in 1671, Pumetacom submitted his grievances to arbitra-

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Wampanoag mourning during this war, as emphasized later by

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Connecticut and involved in diplomacy involving tribes across the

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26 Memoranda concerning the Indians, delivered to Lord Bellemont by Mr. Rawson,

Schagticoke.30 At a 1748 conference, the River Indians blended the

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Bluesky’s commencement address from the Thomas Indian School on

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Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Evan Haefeli, “Becom-

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as for our streams, they do not allow us peacefully to be when we peacefully

Though one might be tempted to attribute the Mashpees’ pathos to

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39 Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, eds., Native Writings in Massachusetts

Here Âs Nutayuneân (Public Broadcasting Service, 2010).

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44 Apess, “Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Rel-

nation.”’46 Hope could be found in a prophecy—which turned out

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In his Eulogy, Apess assumed Pumetacom’s intellectual mantle to

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Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004),

were made, etc. on purpose for destruction, to be driven out by White

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51 Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip,” 305–6.

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reducing Indians to romantic bit parts in the country’s history as ex-

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57 James W. Baker, Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday (Lebanon:

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58 Profiles of James can be found in “Wamsutta Frank James Obituary,” Boston

Apess, James organized a “National Day of Mourning” to be held on

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62 James, “National Day of Mourning,” 456.

Thanksgiving celebration. As he declared at the 2017 rally, “Today we

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65 “Native Americans Marking Thanksgiving with Day of Mourning,” November

If anyone missed the point, the Mashpee Wampanoags have re-