Native America: Taking a Step Back from Plymouth Rock

Abstract

This essay revisits the moment of encounter between the Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoags from a decolonizing perspective, situating this historical moment and the actions that followed in the indigenous space of Wȏpanȃak, or Dawnland, rather than the typologically rendered space made famous in accounts by William Bradford and other puritan authors. Drawing on recent insights of indigenous scholars such as Lisa Brooks, Margaret Bruchac, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others, this essay maps out how local Native leaders like Massasoit, Samoset, and Philip drew English settlers into their protocols of diplomacy and shared responsibility for the land. The Wampanoags sustained the colony with their surplus agriculture and traditional ecological knowledge, without which none of the early English settlements could have survived. The English, however, were incapable of conceptualizing a relationship of reciprocity with America’s indigenous population, leading eventually to war and acts of genocide. This history, duly recorded from the settler-colonial perspective, has a parallel history that was recorded through the medium of wampum and survives through oral tradition. But to hear this alternative version, we must first learn to disentangle ourselves from the “desert wilderness” of colonial reporting.