The Wampanoag Homeland

Twelve thousand years before a ship called the Mayflower dropped anchor in Provincetown harbor, people were living on this coast. They planted corn and beans in the river bottomlands, fished the bays with weirs woven from reeds, and built winter longhouses that could hold dozens of families through a Massachusetts January. They called themselves Wampanoag. Their homeland had a name: Patuxent, the place where the light reflects off the water.

The land the Pilgrims found in sixteen twenty was not wilderness. It looked empty because it had been emptied, and recently. Between sixteen sixteen and sixteen nineteen, a plague swept the New England coast, killing between seventy and ninety percent of the Wampanoag population in some villages. The disease was likely leptospirosis carried by European fishermen who had been working the Grand Banks for decades. Patuxent village, the settlement whose cleared fields and stored corn the Pilgrims found waiting, was a ghost town. Its people had died so fast there was no one left to bury them. The English saw cleared land and interpreted it as providence.

The man who became the Pilgrims' indispensable guide and interpreter was not a generous stranger from a distant tribe. He was a Patuxent man who had survived because he had not been there. Tisquantum, whom the English called Squanto, had been kidnapped by the English explorer Thomas Hunt in sixteen fourteen, taken to Spain to be sold as a slave, and eventually made his way to England before finding passage back to his homeland. He returned in sixteen nineteen to find his village gone. When the Pilgrims arrived the following year, Tisquantum was the only man alive who spoke both Wampanoag and English and had nothing left to lose in negotiating between them.

The Wampanoag are not a historical footnote. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, federally recognized in two thousand seven, maintains its government on Cape Cod today. The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, known as the Aquinnah, holds land on Martha's Vineyard. Both tribes have faced ongoing legal battles over their territory and sovereignty, including a federal effort in twenty twenty to strip the Mashpee Tribe's reservation status. The fight is not settled. The homeland is still contested.

What the Pilgrims called the New World was an inhabited, governed, named place that had simply, and catastrophically, lost most of its people months before the Mayflower arrived. That distinction matters. The land was not given. It was taken from people who had not yet recovered from dying.