Review: "This Land Is Their Land," David J. Silverman

 

By Paul Carrier

When the Pilgrims experienced their first successful growing season in 1621, they held a harvest festival in Plymouth that was attended by the Wampanoag tribal leader Massasoit and some 90 of his men. But as David J. Silverman explains in This Land Is Their Land, we are woefully ignorant of the events that preceded and followed that celebration, at least from a Wampanoag perspective.

For example, Massasoit was a title, not the actual name of the sachem Ousamequin. The Wampanoags initially steered clear of the Pilgrims in 1620 not because they were unfamiliar with Europeans but because they had had violent encounters with them in the past.

When the Wampanoags finally did come to the aid of the newcomers, their motives were not purely altruistic; they sought a military ally in their perennial conflicts with the nearby Narragansett Indians. And those five decades of peace that supposedly existed between Wampanoags and colonists? It's a gross oversimplification.

This Land Is Their Land is an eye-opening corrective that explores the history of the Wampanoag people in a context far broader, deeper and longer than that offered by the Eurocentric Thanksgiving story.