List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Dina Gilio-Whitaker. Indigenous Studies Expert. She is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. Updated November 17, It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men.
The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?
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These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. In the 17th century, when the Wampanoag first encountered the early settlers, Ousamequin had a vision of how we could all live together. There was 50 years of peace between the English and Wampanoag until he died in King Philip's War was a brutal, month battle between the expanding English colonists and a confederation of local Indian nations led by Massasoit's son Metacom. Peters tells Smithsonian. Having their ancestors back in their burial place and acknowledged is a big deal for the Wampanoag.
I would hope Americans would be interested too. Massasoit made it possible for the colonization of this continent. Little is known personally of Massasoit except that he was physically vigorous and when treating with the whites "grave of countenance and spare of speech.
For his part, despite his authority, Massasoit was in a threatened state. Disease had recently swept through the tribe, ravaging his people. And he had enemies eager to take advantage of the sharp reduction in the number of his warriors. To the west, across Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay roved the powerful Narragansett tribe, eager to slaughter both Massasoit and the Wampanoags. To the east, the English, whatever their troubles, were rumored to have valuable trade goods and strange, new, fire-breathing weapons.
Caught in the middle, then, between his traditional enemies to the west and the English on the coast to the east, Massasoit may well have thought he had little choice than to throw in his lot with the potentially helpful newcomers. As to the situation of the English, when the Mayflower sailed back to England in the winter of , it left behind a group of men, women, and children almost totally unprepared to deal with the realities of their new situation in a wild land.
Around them as they shivered in their brush huts against the New England cold was the "howling wilderness," an endless, impenetrable forest full of, so they had heard, bloodthirsty savages, wolves, and, some thought, devils. The new settlers knew neither how to hunt, fish, plant, or build adequate shelters. They had few supplies to carry them through to spring. In their grinding circumstances, staying alive itself became the foremost issue.
One by one they started dying of malnutrition, disease, and gnawing hunger. Only half of them survived that first winter, and those who remained, weakened, confused, had little hope for the future. It seemed they would soon all be gone, dying thousands of miles from home on this wild, foreign shore, their bones dragged into the forest by the fierce beasts who would consume their dead flesh. Thus, when Massasoit and his 60 warriors stepped out of the wilderness and stood on the hilltop fearsomely looking down on Plymouth, and the few able-bodied colonists left scrambled for their guns, then slowly realized they were confronting not enemies capable of killing off the remainder of the weakened settlers but friendly human beings who would give them food in exchange for baubles and, on top of that, help protect them against marauding tribes, Massasoit seemed a Godsend, a blessing sent by Providence.
What we have, then, in this meeting is not so much two human groups coming together in mutual benignity but in pledged cooperation, each for its own, self-serving advantages. Actually, the situation was far more convoluted than the immediate interactions of these two, small groups, and to catch the complexities requires some comment on the historical background behind the meeting of Massasoit and the colonists.
Insights into this can be seen in the related story of Squanto, famous to schoolchildren for helping the Plymouth settlers even before the friendship with Massasoit began. Years before, in , an English sea captain had kidnapped a number of Indians in the area where the Plymouth colonists would later land and sold them as slaves in Spain. Through a fantastic turn of events, monks ransomed Squanto, who made his way to England and from there gained passage to his homeland.
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