Squanto’s Welcome to His New Neighbors

By Elder David Jay Webber

In 1620 the Mayflower Pilgrims established their “Plymouth” settlement on land that previously had been the summer residence of the native American Patuxet people. All of them had, however, died in a widespread regional epidemic just a few years previous.

Only one member of the Patuxet tribe was still alive: Tisquantum, or Squanto, who was in England when this happened. Before the epidemic hit, he had been taken captive by an unscrupulous English sea captain and sold into slavery in Spain. Here he was ransomed by some kind-hearted Franciscans. It is believed that they instructed Squanto in the Christian faith and baptized him, before he departed for England in the hope of catching an English ship back to his homeland. While waiting for such an opportunity he learned the English language. He was then transported across the Atlantic by the explorer Thomas Dermer in 1619 – only to find that his entire tribe had been wiped out, and his village abandoned. But before long the village would no longer be abandoned, because the Mayflower Pilgrims would make the remnants of that village to be their new home.

A severe critic of the Pilgrims offered this criticism of their supposed disrespect for the place where they settled, and for the native people who had formerly lived there, in a PBS documentary about the Pilgrims:

“And one of the sad tragic ironies is that the place that the Plymouth colonists settle on for their location is the village that was perhaps the hardest hit of all the Wampanoag villages – Patuxet – to the point where there are bodies lying on the ground that cannot be buried, because there are no [surviving] relatives. And from a Native perspective, you would not reoccupy those places. So people must have thought the Pilgrims were insane to come and settle in a place where there’s been so much death and loss.”

And this critic spoke even more disparagingly of the Pilgrims by saying this:

“They did not view native people as humans. They saw them almost as beasts and vermin – who were cleared away by God’s pestilence to make room for God’s chosen people. And so I think it’s necessary to ask who the savages were. Were they the people who had lived in this territory for millennia? Or were they these people who forced themselves in to someone else's home?”

It is highly ironic, however, that Squanto did not share this negative assessment of the English settlers. This critic presumed to speak on behalf of the “outraged” native

people, but the one native person who would have the most right to be outraged, was not outraged at all. Not only did Squanto not mind the Pilgrims moving into his former village, but he moved back there himself, and lived with the English until his own death in 1622. He saw the Pilgrims, who endeavored to live by their Christian convictions, to be decent people – like the Spanish Franciscans who had rescued him from slavery. They most definitely respected Squanto as a fellow human being, whose help and friendship they greatly valued. And Squanto was glad to welcome them as his new neighbors in his own old village.

Squanto returning John Billington from the Nauset,

(from a 1922 storybook for children)