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Abstract: This article challenges recent scholarship which claims that Tisquantum, like other Native Americans who traveled the early modern Atlantic, was thereby positioned to lead his people in resisting or otherwise engaging with Europeans. The English kidnapping of Tisquantum and twenty-six other Wampanoags in 1614 sparked the onset of full-scale Wampanoag resistance to English colonization, and inspired competing English and Wampanoag narratives about Tisquantum and his legacy. The article follows Tisquantums movements through highly racialized, imperial spaces in Málaga, London, and Newfoundland as he observed the workings of empires and their overseas ambitions. His return home with Englishmen led him to be distrusted and seized by fellow Wampanoags. After Plymouth colony was established, Wampanoags allowed Tisquantum to translate and help broker an alliance with the newcomers, but soon regretted that decision as Tisquantum sought to build his own power base. Wampanoags and Plymouth made peace only after Tisquantum died in 1622.
keywords: Tisquantum, Plymouth colony, Wampanoag, Patuxet, New England, Native American enslavement, captivity, Red Atlantic, mistranslation
In one of the most iconic scenes in popular American history, an Indian named Squanto surprises the "Pilgrims" by welcoming them-in English-to his homeland. He brokers a treaty in which his own people welcome the starving refugees and helps them survive by teaching them to grow corn. In the fall, they all celebrate a bounteous Thanksgiving together. The story has broadened over the ensuing four centuries, continually reassuring colonists and Americans that their displacement of Native Americans was legitimate. By now, many people know that the story is more troubled, that Tisquantum (his given name) had been abducted in 1614 from his home at Patuxet and sold as a slave in Málaga. They know too that he managed to get free in Málaga and make his way to England and New- foundland, where he perfected his English. We know that his return to Patuxet and the subsequent arrival of the Mayflower followed a catastrophic epidemic and led not only to a treaty with Plymouth, but to violence and the colonization of Wampanoag and other New England Native peoples.
As one who explored this history during the 1980s (Salisbury, "Squanto"; Manitou 101-29 passim), I have been drawn back to it by recent scholarship on Indigenous Americans in "the Atlantic...