Thread by @RachelMcGonagi1

RT from 2017 you might find interesting:
As Turkey Day winds down this year, let me lay some Indigenous Peoples history on you that you may have never heard, only tangentially related to the tradition of big, harvest feasts.

I lived in Plymouth, Massachusetts for about 15 years.

During the summer between high school and college I worked at Plimoth Plantation, at the Wampanoag Indian Program. Now this was 30 years ago, and the program there has changed, to be sure, but one element I was instructed on to the point I could give 30 minute lectures on was...

the Tragic Case of Tisquantum, more colloquially known as Squanto. All the information I learned came from primary sources where available, from the Plantation archives and from research done by Nanepashemet, who was my teacher.

Most Americans know Tisquantum only as the man who greeted the Pilgrims in the spring of 1621 and taught them how to plant corn, and who somehow miraculously knew English.

But he was a very complicated man, whose idea to help the English may not have been his own.

Tisquantum was from Patuxet, the area right where the Pilgrims would eventually settle. Tisquantum himself was of the Wampanoag (also sometimes called Pokanoket) Nation.

The Pilgrims were not the first English to appear on the shores of Massachusetts. Not by a long shot. Traders had been coming through for years, after furs, fish, sassafras, and gold.

And, unfortunately for Squanto, they wanted Natives, to sell or show off back home.

One such Englishman, named Thomas Hunt, lured 20 Patuxet men (Tisquantum among them) aboard his ship with the promise of trade, and then "secured" them and sailed away. He picked up 7 more men, from the Nauset tribe on Cape Cod, before heading for Malaga, Spain.

There, Hunt sold them as slaves.

How Squanto got from Spain to England isn't known, but once he was in London, some 5 years later, he lived with a merchant and shipbuilder, who eventually sent him, indentured, to Newfoundland and into the path of John Dermer, a ship's captain.

Squanto convinced Dermer to bring him to New England, for Dermer would find riches there, he swore, and Tisquantum would help him.

Alas for Tisquantum, Patuxet had been entirely wiped out by illness, likely brought by the English, while he had been gone.

Can you imagine?

Captured from your home and family, taken to a strange land, and when you finally manage to return, everyone you ever knew is dead.

So Squanto stayed with Dermer, trying to act as go-between with various rather-hostile-to-the-English tribes, since English "kidnappings" of Native People was still going on. And the English didn't have the finesse of the French traders, even if they weren't kidnapping people.

Eventually, even Tisquantum was looked on with some suspicion by other tribes in the area because he was helping the hated English.

Things came to a head when Dermer's ship was attacked by the Capawack on what's now Martha's Vineyard.

Their sachem, Epanow, had been kidnapped and held for ransom previously. In the ensuing battle, Dermer was mortally wounded, and Tisquantum was taken captive by the Capawack.

They then turned him over to Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoag.

That fall, the Pilgrims arrived.

Half of the settlers died that first winter.

In the spring, Massasoit hoped to broker some kind of deal with these English -- who, with women and children among them, were different than all the other traders. Better or worse, he could not know.

Massasoit needed help to stave off hostilities from a rival tribe to the south, the Narragansett, who had not suffered the same losses from illness that the Wampanoag had.

So Massasoit sent Squanto and one of his own men, Samoset, to check out the settlement.

Perhaps these English settlers, with their women and children to protect, would be interested in a mutually beneficial agreement to aid each other if threatened by a 3rd party.

To sweeten the deal for Squanto, Massasoit promised him his freedom if he was successful.

And he was.

Squanto helped with a treaty between the Wampanoag & the Pilgrims that lasted til after Massasoit's death. He taught the Pilgrims how to plant "Indian" corn in mounds, with fish as fertilizer. How to let beans climb the corn stalks and the squash cover the ground to reduce weeds.

He helped them learn the fur trade, taught them survival skills, acted as interpreter between the colony and its many Native neighbors.

In fact, he lived with the English for the rest of his life, and became a good friend of Governor Bradford's.

He also played the English off the Wampanoag like a pro.

He enriched himself variously, by telling the settlers, for instance, that Massasoit planned to attack, and could only be appeased through gifts... which he would then keep for himself.

Sometimes he told the Wampanoag that the Pilgrims stored the plague in barrels, and that they'd release it if they weren't given gifts, which.... well, you get the idea.

Tisquantum had been hard done by.

The English had taken him from his people and enslaved him. Massasoit had used him for his own ends. He had lost his entire family.

It's not terribly surprising he'd want some of his own back.

But when Massasoit cottoned on to what Tisquantum was up to, he felt quite betrayed, and sent word to the Pilgrims that they should turn him over for execution, or they should kill Squanto themselves.

He even sent along a knife for them to do the job.

The Pilgrims demurred.

Bradford had found him too valuable as an interpreter, and Squanto had been an enormous help in quelling several actual hostile actions before they turned into battles.

So Tisquantum stayed with the Pilgrims, continuing to teach them about the land around them, going on trade expeditions (though not to Massasoit's people, obviously) and assisting in other ways.

It was on one of these trips, in 1622, that he became suddenly ill and died.

He was mourned by the English, Bradford in particular, who wrote about him extensively in his letters. And for many years, he was hailed as the epitome of the "Noble Savage," (a term thankfully out of favor) and celebrated as the man who saved the Pilgrims.

But he had his own motives, his own grievances that needed redressing. His flaws, his talents, his (possibly immense) emotional baggage from losing all of his people to some illness.

Tisquantum's story is complicated. In the end, he was no myth, but human. Like all of us.
/fin