'For centuries our story has been marginalised': Native Americans reflect on the Mayflower 400 years on

Four hundred years ago, and after a few failed attempts to cross the Atlantic, the Mayflower began its now historic voyage, carrying more than 100 English Pilgrims to a new life in America.

What happened next is taught in curriculums across the globe: the landing of the Pilgrims on the east coast of the present-day US a few months later; the founding of Plymouth Colony; and the meal shared the following autumn between the settlers and the indigenous population that had helped them, an occasion which gave rise to the tradition of Thanksgiving.

It is this simple narrative which features prominently at the start of many histories about US nation-building.

However, the Wampanoag people, whose ancestors had lived for millenia in the territory where the new arrivals established themselves, have a different story to tell.

Paula Peters, an independent historian and a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, tells The Independent: "I feel very strongly that the Mayflower story can't be told without telling the Wampanoag story.” 

It is one of colonialism, which brought disease, war, slavery and other hardships along with it.

The Wampanoag, who had been devastated by a disease brought by outsiders shortly before the Mayflower’s arrival, were to sustain further heavy losses while fighting alongside other tribes against the colonisers in Philip’s War, a notoriously bloody conflict that started in 1675. 

And their population was further reduced when survivors from the war were sold into slavery to places such as Bermuda, where people who can trace their ancestry back to these Wampanoag slaves still live.

According to Peters, this story of “slavery... plagues... mistrust and... land-takings” is one which has long been confined to the margins of history. At an event in 1970 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing, when Frank James, a tribal leader known as Wampsutta, was set to speak, Peters recalls its organisers censoring the content of his speech.  

"They [the planners] wanted to contain history between 1620 and 1621 and just talk about what happened in that very convenient period of time,” Peters explains.

Instead, Wampsutta delivered his original speech to hundreds of Native Americans on Coles Hill, a spot overlooking Plymouth Rock, thereby starting the annual National Day of Mourning, which remembers a story at odds with the usual Mayflower narrative.

Peters believes the discourse around the Mayflower is now beginning to change, commenting that the commemoration events this year are a marked improvement from previous ones because “there is a good deal of sincerity” on the part of those planning them. “They genuinely want to know the Wampanoag story,” she adds.

“For centuries our story has been marginalised and in some places just erased. Now we're at a place where we're able to tell our story in our voice to an international audience and not be censored. That is a huge difference in the way that we're being treated,” Peters says.

The largest three international initiatives to mark the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower have all sought Wampanoag voices, according to Ms Peters. These are: Plymouth 400, Mayflower 400 and Leiden 400, based in the US, England and Holland respectively, countries which are all tied to the Pilgrims’ story. 

The story of two wampum belts

A few years ago, Peters spoke to Jo Loosemore, who works on the Mayflower 400 project, about a belt that had been taken from the Wampanoag nation in the late 17th century. 

Made of tiny white and purple beads from whelk and quahog shells, the cultural treasure belonged to the Wampanoag leader Metacom and was seized by the English after they killed him in 1676. It was later shipped to England – ostensibly to be presented to King Charles II – but no one knows where it ended up. 

And a search around the British Museum’s collection did not yield up any further clues, Peters says. However, the independent historian’s conversation with Loosemore did lead to a project to create a new wampum belt for the 2020 milestone, one painstakingly made by Wampanoag artisans over the course of many months.

The symbols depicted on it were chosen after a consultation with the community and include a white pine tree, the roots of which reflect the Wampanoag’s creation story.

The belt, which is considered “unfinished” because new stories can always be added to it, will tour the UK as part of an exhibition called Wampum: Stories from the Shells of Native America, which starts in Southampton this week.

Jason Widdiss, a citizen of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe who was the wampum bead manager for the project, says it was an honour to work with artists from across the Wampanoag nation and “to be a part of the rebirth of this form of native communication". 

“This belt represents a significant step in reclaiming our cultural identity,” he says. 

Returning to Metacom’s wampum belt, Peters remains optimistic that at least part of it has survived and will be found one day. She believes the exhibition could help achieve this goal. 

“If the people in the UK knew what a wampum belt was, maybe they'd know what I was looking for,” she says.

Another Mayflower initiative 

Samantha Maltais, a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, is also keen to share her community’s history with a wider audience, and to have indigenous voices heard more loudly. 

In March, she started discussions with Survival International, an organisation which campaigns globally for tribal people’s rights, and their talks led to the creation of the charity’s #MayflowersKills campaign.

Maltais, a consultant on the campaign, tells The Independent that the project was born out of “concerns over what the narrative was going to be for the 400-year anniversary”. It aims to amplify the Mayflower story from an indigenous perspective, with a series of stories due to be published online on Wednesday 16 September, the day the Mayflower left the English shore.

Discussing the decision to use the plural “Mayflowers” as part of the campaign’s name, Maltais says: "We didn't want to restrict these conversations to my tribe or even the United States in general. We wanted to show that the Mayflower comes in many forms and that this is a symbol of contact that affects so many more indigenous communities.”

Similarly, Marial Quezada, Maltais’ colleague, mentions that the #Mayflowers initiative is closely linked to the charity’s campaign to protect uncontacted tribes around the world today: "A lot of threats that face uncontacted tribes today in the Amazon for example are ones that faced indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago.”

Maltais speaks of the continued effects of colonialism in communities such as hers, apparent today through issues such as poverty. However, she emphasises that these peoples are above all “resilient” and should be viewed as “survivors rather than as victims”.

Expanding the teaching of indigenous history and culture in the US

Ed Schupman, who works at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC, has been on his own mission to reform how Native American history is taught in schools. 

Schupman, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, manages Native Knowledge 360°, the NMAI’s nationwide educational programme, which launched two years ago to address gaps in the teaching of indigenous history and culture in schools across the US.

After analysing how Native Americans are taught about in the country’s textbooks, Schupman and his team found that the same eight to 10 stories were widely used, including one about Pocahontas.

Referring to thousands of years of indigenous cultures, languages and history, Schupman tells The Independent: “How can that boil down to eight or 10 stories that really never include Native voice or perspectives? That are often presented from the perspective of United States nation-building."

Native Knowledge 360° works to change this by producing teaching materials across the curriculum and by providing teacher training in conjunction with tribal communities across the country. Its resources include topics such as the Fish Wars, a civil-rights-era protest movement to uphold Native American tribal fishing rights in the north-west.

The programme aims to encourage teachers not just to cover indigenous topics in history lessons but in other educational disciplines too, including politics and art classes. 

The Native Knowledge 360° initiative has already had some notable successes: its curriculum materials are now in use in every state and they have been adopted into Washington state’s curriculum. Although Mr Schupman reflects that educational change is necessarily “gradual” because “deeply entrenched practices” are hard to unravel, he is optimistic for the future.

Discussing his hopes, he says: "I'd love to see a world in which Native Americans and other marginalised people are viewed as part of the fabric of the society - and not seen as separate, and not seen as that unit that is done in November.”