Whose Story?

One of the reasons we are traveling is to hear the stories that have been missing from our schools' curricula. We think it’s important for our girls to hear the voices that are usually missing in traditional classrooms. I know that our teachers are doing their best to give our girls an ace education, but there are so many missing narratives in our history that it would be impossible to hear all of them. We sometimes don’t even know where to start since, as the saying goes, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” So, one of the best ways to find those unheard voices is to go looking for them. Our visit to Provincetown, MA, on Cape Cod, is a great example. 

We stopped at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum during our visit to Provincetown. Why is there a Pilgrim Museum out on Cape Cod? Contrary to widespread popular belief, Cape Cod, not Plymouth, was the actual first landing place of the Mayflower. 

The museum used to have a wing called the Pilgrim Wing, which contained huge murals of the Pilgrims landing on Cape Cod that highlighted the events of "First Contact" from the Pilgrims’ experience and perspective. The murals depicted the Wampanoag people with mohawks, leather chaps, and identical stoic-gazed faces. At the same time, all Pilgrims were painted as individuals and, for some odd reason, were wearing pointy metal helmets reminiscent of late Middle Ages warriors. I remember seeing similar images in the textbooks I was given in the 70s and 80s. What a mess. 

The museum decided it was time to get with the 21st century and they took the murals down, replacing the whole exhibit with another one called “Our Story: The Complicated Relationship of the Indigenous Wampanoag and the Mayflower Pilgrims.”  This exhibit was curated with the Wampanoag tribe and a Native American creative agency called Smoke Sygnals.

What I remember learning, and probably most people remember learning, about the Mayflower is that a bunch of Pilgrims got on the ship and set out for the “New World” to escape religious persecution. They landed in Plymouth at "Plymouth Rock." But it was hard going, and they weren’t doing so hot. Luckily for them, a local tribe came along, and low and behold, one of them, named Squanto, could speak English! And he taught them how to farm and raise crops and plant corn and pumpkins, and soon enough, they were all dancing around with happiness in their pointy buckled shoes and their black and white starched collars at their great good fortune. When their first big harvest came in, they all sat down, Natives and Pilgrims together, to feast and give thanks for all the kumbaya happiness all around. 

Or something along those lines. Honestly, I don’t know all the details because I was always busy coloring my hand turkey or cutting out my construction paper pilgrim hat when my teacher was on about this part. But I do know that we have all been fed some colonized, white-washed version of this Thanksgiving myth and that if you try to point out, as folks do on social media every year in November, that this is not the true sequence of events, folks get their knickers pretty twisted up because “How dare you challenge the history we have been taught for years in our good, old American education system. We need our Thanksgiving plays and our Thanksgiving-week Pilgrim paper crafts, dammit!”

 Listen, if you are reading this, and my tone is annoying you, you might want to bail now. Fair warning. 

Before we set out for the museum, I tried in vain to find a good video about the Mayflower landing that included any information about Cape Cod, didn’t refer to Columbus or “his discovery,” or didn’t repeat the Thanksgiving myth in all its whitewashed glory. (And as a sidenote, whatever you do when you go to YouTube, avoid any and all things that have PragerU on them. Just. Don’t go there.) Anyway, I was going to show them a video of the Mayflower myth and then see what the Cape Cod Museum would have to say, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Skip the video. Off to Provincetown, then. 

Okay. So. When we got to Cape Cod, I for sure already had by now learned that story was a bunch of bullshit. And I had done a bit of research, enough to know that it didn’t go down that way. So we set out to that site intentionally to see the “Our Story” Exhibit. And here is what we learned. 

*Official Disclaimer: This is transcribed as accurately as I can remember from our visit or could find in my research, and all historical inaccuracies and snarky commentary are my own.

The Mayflower carried not only the Pilgrims who were coming to this continent to escape religious persecution but also tradesmen and other folks who saw an opportunity to make their fortunes and a new life for themselves. Their motives had nothing to do with escaping religious persecution. It was a mixed bag on that boat.

I am fascinated by this. There must have been some interesting tensions between old Goodwife Martha and Mr. William Mullins, the Cordwainer. I mean, he’s just there trying to make some shoes. He doesn’t need you harping on again about the sin of drink, Martha. Let a man have his gin. 

Sorry, I digress. 

Anyway, the Mayflower landed on the end of Cape Cod by accident. They were aiming for Virginia, but the winds and weather blew them north. These things happen. I tried to explain to the girls what life was like before GPS, but they stared at me blankly. 

The Mayflower folks made landfall on the end of Cape Cod and were there for a little more than a month. While there, the folks on the Mayflower signed a compact called creatively, the Mayflower Compact, which outlined a way of governing themselves. I explained to the girls that it was a lot like our “Classroom Agreements,” sort of a “How to Get Along” contract. Since they were not all Pilgrims and they were adrift in the “wilds,” they decided they needed to come up with a contract so they didn’t go all Lord of the Flies on each other. Or whatever the Mayflower-era version of Lord of the Flies would be. You get my drift.

Anyway, this was a one-pager that basically said, “We will all still obey the King, be Christians, and follow the rule of law, which we haven’t established yet, but when we do, we will follow it, and we will all work together for the good of the collective.” (Follow the King? Really? That was the first thing you decided to put on the list? Clearly, I cannot relate to a Pilgrims’ mindset).

Here is the important thing. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. By the time they arrived on Cape Cod, the European invasion had already preceded them by 100 years. Europeans had been trampling about willy-nilly on and off for a century. And with that invasion, Europeans brought sicknesses and a lot of disgusting diseases like Smallpox and Chickenpox. Illnesses that wiped out entire villages of Indigenous peoples. Because the Indigenous folks had not been exposed to these things and had no immunities. We know this part. 

But did you also know that by the time the Mayflower folks landed, they thought they had found an uninhabited space? They were like, “Hey, look. No one lives here. Sweet.” In fact, the Wampanoag tribes had suffered immeasurable loss due to epidemic illness by then. Some estimates state that more than 100,000 Wampanoag people had been wiped out. And, of course, there were still Wampanoag people there, but they were decimated.

Sidenote: We learned that as many as 90% of Indigenous people on this continent were killed by diseases brought in by Europeans. 90% is not a typo. 

Once the Mayflower passengers landed, they found the caches of the Wampanoag people buried in the sand. At the Cape Cod National Seashore visitor center, the girls and I had already seen examples of the jars and storage containers they used to store things like wild rice, corn, and dried fish. These storage jars were buried in caches deep in the sand to keep them fresh and cool—nature’s pantry!  

The Pilgrims and tradesmen couldn’t believe their good fortune in finding these caches. Did someone just leave all this sweet food here? What luck. Must be God. He probably buried this here for us. (That’s Goodwife Martha, of course. Mr. Mullins is sulking in the corner cause, alas, God forgot to bury the gin). 

So they took the dried goods for themselves. I mean, I guess I can’t blame them. I’ve never been a shipwrecked religious nut stranded in a foreign land, but I am not gonna lie. I might have done the same thing if I was religious-nutty enough to believe that God had willed this for me. But ick–they also desecrated the Wampanoag ancestral burials, I'm guessing, as they were carelessly digging away in the sand for all of God's buried treasure. That part leaves me wondering what the hell they were thinking. 

Predictably, the Wampanoag people who were still there were not happy. They had actually been watching these folks for a while. This ship was carrying women and children, and they seemed like they might not be the heinous invaders that normally came rolling through. But then they started raiding the pantry and worse- the graves. 

Needless to say, the first contact was not peaceful. That is what those highly inaccurate cartoon murals the museum originally had were trying to depict. There was gunfire. And arrows. Although no one died on either side, there was a melee. Which my girls agreed was to be expected. I would definitely be pissed if someone just came into my kitchen and took all my food, then went out and started defiling my ancestor's graves. 

Anyway, the Mayflower folks got back on their boat to explore somewhere else because “Hey, we can take a hint. We are outta here.” The winds blew them on over to the mainland. They landed in Plymouth. This is the landing we learned about in our textbooks while we were cutting out construction paper Pilgrim hats. And this time, they came upon the decimated remains of a Wampanoag village that had been wiped out by–you guessed it. Disease. “Yay,” they exclaimed. “God wants us to live here instead,” So they founded "Plimouth Plantation."

In Plymouth, the remaining Wampanoag had beef with the Narragansett, a nearby Indigenous tribe. The Narragansett were somehow not nearly as affected by the epidemic plagues, so now they outnumbered the Wampanoag. And so, for just this brief moment in history, the interests of the Mayflower folks and the Wampanoag folks aligned. When the Mayflower folks started flailing around with absolutely no knowledge of how to survive off the land, and after losing a number of their own people, they turned to the Wampanoag for help. 

The Wampanoag weren’t dumb. They knew an opportunity when they saw it. They suggested a mutually beneficial relationship. Weapons for food. As in”, Sure, we will help you figure out how to plant stuff if you help us out with weapons so we can fight off the Narragansett people.”  Much of this alliance was brokered by a Patuxet fellow named Tisquantum, who happened to speak English. 

Side note: Tisquantum is the man’s real name, not Squanto. It needs to be highlighted that he spoke English because he was kidnapped and sold in the European slave trade before making his way back to America. This part is often left out. The exhibit dedicated some space to honoring the fact that many Indigenous folks were kidnapped and taken back to Europe to be exhibited as “oddities” or sold into slavery. Please, let’s never leave that out again. 

Because of the alliance, the Wampanoag were able to defend themselves against the Narragansett, and the Mayflower folks lived to see another summer. But here’s the thing: If the tribe had not been wiped out by the plague, this may have been a totally different story altogether. That alliance was one based on need, and it was the direct result of the European invasion. So, that brings us to Thanksgiving. 

The feast of indigenous foods that took place in October 1621, after that first successful harvest, was certainly one of thanks. But it also symbolized the rare, peaceful coexistence of the two groups, which happened out of necessity and tragic circumstances. 

Why did I dedicate a whole blog to the Thanksgiving story when it is clearly Halloweentime, which everyone knows is my favorite holiday and deserves an entire blog post of its own? It was something the girls asked me when we were at the museum that struck me.

Travis and I wandered through the exhibit talking to the girls and to each other. We shared bits of info as we went, and our tone was, “Did you know this?” “I never knew this part.” “Wow, that’s the first time I ever thought about this part that way.” 

One of the girls asked, “Don’t you know this history already? Why are you so surprised?” We had to explain that what we learned as children didn't align with the story being told here from the Indigenous perspective. They asked why the whole story would not be taught. 

And we paused. And then we told them, “History was written by white people. Mostly by white men. And those white men wrote down the history that made their own ancestors and their own people sound good and often left out the hard and painful parts. Also, throughout history, white men have been leaving out other people’s stories and perspectives. Only recently have we been able to hear those stories and perspectives. We are hearing much of this for the first time ourselves.” 

Which is crazy. We are in our 50s. 

I know some folks are uncomfortable with hearing narratives that shift what they have been taught or told as kids. I know that many people in this country think that studying things about the realities of the slave trade and the genocide of Indigenous people, for example, is somehow “Un-American” or will somehow teach our white children shame or to hate white people. As an educator, I have heard all of the arguments.

But I promise you, my white kids are not learning to “hate white people.” They are learning to listen to stories with empathy and curiosity. They are learning to ask questions. They are learning that they have immense privilege and to appreciate that privilege. 

And besides, I would ask, what is more American than opening our hearts and truly listening to the stories of all of the people who live here, no matter how painful or how damning they may be? What is more American than having the freedom to hear multiple perspectives and to be able to reach our conclusions based on those? After all, we tout ourselves as a “Melting Pot.” And there is no way I can reasonably explain to my kids that the history of this Melting Pot is based on only one single perspective. 

Whenever we go to a site, we use this question to guide us: “What story does this place want to tell us?” 

After our visit to Provincetown, I realized I had been leaving out the next two most important questions: “Whose story is being told? And whose story is not being told?” 

And that is why we travel. Sometimes, the best way to find stories that aren’t being told is to go out there and look for them.