Quotes About Wampanoags

Wampanoags did not lose their land any more than Indians elsewhere on the continent. No, colonists and their successors took it through every means at their disposal.

Throughout the 1680s, Plymouth ordered Wampanoags "out of the country" for crimes like theft, assault, and rape to which colonists would normally receive corporal punishment and fines.

If the Wampanoags are as much our fellow Americans as the descendants of the Pilgrims, and if their history can be as instructional and inspirational as that of the English, then why continue to tell a Thanksgiving myth that focuses exclusively on the colonists' struggles rather than theirs?

Getting beyond the sanitized Thanksgiving myth to tell a more accurate history of that encounter involves reckoning with a point made by many Wampanoags today: that their storied welcome to the English was a terrible mistake, born out of the horror of a disease without a name.

The Thanksgiving myth casts the Wampanoags in 1620 as naive primitives, awestruck by the appearance of the Mayflower and its strange passengers. They were nothing of the sort. Their every step was informed by the legacy of the many European ships that had visited their shores and left behind a wave of enslavement, murder, theft, and mourning.