Did the Pilgrims Fight the Natives?

A huge part of the way we remember the pilgrim's story is the way that they interact with the indigenous people who are living in the area around Plymouth when they arrive. There was a lot of instability in Native American life at the time that the pilgrims arrived in 1620. There had been European contact at least for a century, maybe longer. And part of what that had meant was the introduction of diseases that were not native to the Western Hemisphere. We will never know exact numbers. It's just the evidence doesn't survive. But it's clear that there was immense mortality.

What that did is sort of destabilize relations between the various Native American tribes. We often, again, sort of group the Native Americans or just call them Indians. It's just this homogeneous group. But the reality was it was many, many small tribes with uneasy relations. Some were allies. Some were rivals and so forth. Well, so the pilgrims arrived with this area devastated. In fact, Plymouth, the site that they choose for their settlement, had been the site of a Native American village that had been pretty much wiped out by disease.

In fact, one of the first things they discovered is a hidden store of grain that had been part of a burial site. And they actually appropriate that and benefit from it, all of which is to say the particular Native Americans that they encounter have lost a lot of their population. They're vulnerable to other Indian rival groups, and they see the pilgrims actually as a potential other Native American groups. Had the pilgrims arrived 100 years earlier, before the Native American people had been devastated by disease, they might have just pushed them back out into the ocean. They would've been done with them. But they actually, I think, believe that they need them.

So what develops is a kind of uneasy kind of alliance between the closest group, which was called the Wampanoag, and the pilgrims. One of the things that I always sort of cringe at is that we often remember that Thanksgiving celebration is this of warm and fuzzy multicultural moment where people overcome their differences and really, you know, recognize their common humanity.

I don't imagine it that way. The reality is, I think the relations were often very tense. We can still admire their ability to sort of work through that and have a serviceable relationship, but I don't think they were ever very comfortable.

When a different pilgrim named Edwin Winslow describes the celebration, he tells us that some Wampanoag came among them. He doesn't say that they were invited. There's no historical source to say that they were invited to the celebration. He says that they showed up. And then the next, almost the next thing he says is that the pilgrims exercised their arms. That's the exact quote. But he didn't mean to do this. He means they got out their guns and they practiced a military drill. And again, in my mind, I'm thinking in part that's a reminder to the Wampanoag of their military capabilities.

It was a not-so-subtle, probably, message. So, obviously, to say there's a relationship there, I think we can applaud the fact that it didn't lead immediately to war between those two groups. In fact, they're allies for several decades, but it's not an easy or comfortable or probably even very warm relationship. It's a tense relationship.