![]() The Wampanoag Trading Post and Gallery is featuring an exhibit of artwork and movies by and about the tribe at its Mashpee Commons location and at a vacant storefront across the street. Steven Peters, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, stands in a gallery opened for Native American Heritage Month. “At that point, it really changes your perspective.” He and other Mashpee and Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe members have been working with museums and on platforms such as Vimeo to elevate the history of the indigenous people who lived in the region for thousands of years before the Pilgrims arrived. “I think the only way forward is to understand the history the way that it happened,” Steven Peters, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, said. “How are we supposed to improve on this sorry record if we don’t understand the sorry record?” asked Silverman, a George Washington University professor. The more historically accurate telling is gaining a foothold in small circles, as members of the Herring Pond, Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes Michele Pecoraro, executive director of Plymouth 400, who is helping lead the anniversary commemoration and Silverman bring the documented facts to light. It also is not the one you’ll find at Pilgrim Memorial Park in Plymouth, home of the famed Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II, a replica of the cargo ship turned people carrier the Pilgrims crammed into to cross the Atlantic. The historically accurate story of the Pilgrims and the founding of Plymouth Colony 400 years ago this month is not in most school history books. Kennedy, whose family frolicked in the home of the native Nauset and Aquinnah people on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, immortalized them in his own Thanksgiving Day proclamation, baking the plaits together like the bread broken and shared in the mythic first Thanksgiving feast. In 1963, these two tracks crossed when President John F. Plymouth Rock sits next to Plymouth Harbor. Regardless of whether it was rooted in historical fact, it became accepted as such. ![]() On a parallel track, the story of the Pilgrim forefathers coming to the New World and founding America for religious freedom gained steam, as New England Protestants wielded the myth to gain the top spot in the country’s cultural hierarchy, above Catholics and immigrants, according to historian David Silverman in his book “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.”Īs Americans looked for an origin story that wasn’t soaked in the blood of Native Americans or built on the backs of slavery, the humble, bloodless story of the 102 Pilgrims forging a path in the New World in search of religious freedom was just what they needed, according to Silverman. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared a Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday of November, looking to reconcile a country in the throes of the Civil War. ![]() The first national Thanksgiving Day did not invoke the Pilgrims at all. Lincoln’s first Thanksgiving Day didn't mention Pilgrims An interpreter, wearing a mask because of the COVID-19 pandemic, works in a replica of a period house at the Pilgrim Village at Plimoth Patuxet living history museum.
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