Indigenous Languages, History, and Accepting People for Who They Are: The Case of Squanto

 Squanto: A Native Odyssey by Andrew Lipman (Yale University Press, 2024)

 Reviewed by Matthew Sparacio

In May 1619, the man whose own community at Patuxet called him Tisquantum was returning home. Four hundred years later, popular culture remembers him by a different name, Squanto. For five long years, Tisquantum had pinballed across major centers of a dynamic Atlantic World. Captain Thomas Hunt captured Tisquantum in the Wampanoag homeland, then tried to trade him for profit in Málaga, Spain. By the time that Rebecca Rolfe, née Matoaka (then Pocahontas) visited London in 1616, Tisquantum likely already lived in the English capital. Their paths may even have crossed. His English host, John Slany, was one of many investors (including several women) playing the colonization game. He believed the Patuxet man’s skills fit best in Newfoundland trying to smooth over relations between the Beothuk and the growing English fishing community. From there, Tisquantum convinced Thomas Dermer to sail south and return to the Wampanoag lands he grew up in, to what is today called Cape Cod Bay. Dermer was no stranger to the region, having explored New England under the infamous Captain John Smith in 1614. Working as an interpreter for Dermer, one can imagine the excitement building inside Tisquantum as the Englishman’s vessel sailed ever closer to home in 1619.

Dermer penned the only record we have of Tisquantum’s return. It is brief: “I arrived at my savage’s native country (finding them all dead).”  

As Andrew Lipman explains in this fine new work, Squanto: A Native Odyssey, the fraught description of Tisquantum’s return in 1619 – like so many other moments experienced by the individuals who made up “vast early America” – is a form of violence in print. Dermer’s terse parenthetical aside obscures the magnitude of loss suffered throughout New England by indigenous peoples.. It also offers little insight into Tisquantum’s own reaction to the horrific sight he beheld (128). Historians (most notably Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Saidiya Hartman) have long recognized how silences in the archives rob later generations of oppressed communities of any degree of historical certainty, interfering with their attempts to claim historical presence and relevance.

For Native American communities in particular, the archive in print intentionally created a historical memory that relegates Native peoples to the past while mythologizing the “firsts” of settler colonialism – the “first” explorers, the “first” towns, the “first” churches, the “first” sustained laws and political systems. The list goes on. All these “firsts” comprise a convenient timeline that accounts for American exceptionalism while insidiously assuming the completed wholesale elimination of indigenous peoples. In this framing, the “last” Indians either resist or aid the “first” settlers. And the outcome is never in doubt. One need not look any farther that the masterful work of White Earth Ojibwe historian Jean O’Brien, whose research highlights how Native peoples like Tisquantum’s family, friends, and kinfolk in Patuxet have been literally written out of existence in New England. Dermer’s readers, therefore, were not alone if they assumed that all of Tisquantum’s kin passed away during “the Great Dying.”

In Squanto, Lipman meticulously deconstructs these assumptions about Native erasure. It is powerful, in part, because his subject has long assumed a leading role in establishing the “first” Thanksgiving holiday –a national celebration not established until 1863 as civil war threatened to rip the United States apart (191-192). If American citizens today have heard of Tisquantum at all, it is likely because tradition tabbed the man from Patuxet as singularly responsible for helping the religious refugees who came to be known as “Pilgrims.” Tisquantum instructed these newcomers on how to plant vegetables, fish, and live off the land in the place they called Plymouth Colony. And if we take Dermer’s statement that all Tisquantum’s people died in 1616 as true – and Lipman says we shouldn’t (131-134) – then Squanto represents perhaps the most important of all the “last” Indians in American history. Through his singular aid and sacrifice the Pilgrims survived to establish the time-honored institutions of representative governance and religious freedom.

With Lipman’s retelling, however, Tisquantum is no longer a preface to eventual American success. He is instead a nuanced, complicated, and perhaps even emotionally tormented figure. In other words, Tisquantum is just like us. Here is a man who fostered connections within the Wampanoag world as well as with Europeans. Here is a reluctant traveler who often felt like a fish out of water. And here is an individual who had ambitions that he believed would benefit the communities he served as well as himself.

And, like most of us, Tisquantum took himself a little too seriously. He aspired to be (and even perhaps appointed himself as) atoskauwou, or “lord,” of Plymouth’s neighboring Nemasket community. After years of seeing the English use military force to establish colonial order in Newfoundland and in New England, Tisquantum adopted a bully’s mentality to push for trading agreements between Native coastal towns and Plymouth. Tisquantum’s attitude led English colonial leaders like William Bradford to observe that he wanted “only to make himself great in the eyes of his Country-men” (2). He even claimed control over the plagues that periodically ripped through Native communities to cow others into following him (171). These decisions directly challenged the regional authority of Massasoit. But unlike the influential sachem (“chief”), Squanto could not claim traditional sources of social power, so the rest of the Wampanoag homeland, called the “Dawnland,” shunned him.

It was, however, Tisquantum’s “way with words...[that] defined his character” (182). To tell the story of the Patuxet interpreter, a man whose adult life seemed to be defined by communication, Lipman unsurprisingly turns to language: how Wampanoags defined themselves and others, how they learned the ties that bound their society and wider world together, how they spoke with others, and the obstacles they faced when confronted with speakers of other languages (Native and European alike). Relying on the tireless work of Wampanoag linguists like Jessie Little Doe Baird, co-founder of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, Wampanoag social and political landscapes shine in Squanto. The few direct quotes by Native speakers that are retained in the English colonial records are peeled back to reveal important details about indigenous life through Lipman’s discussion of the absentative tense, which he views as essential in reconstructing Wampanoag understandings of loss and change due to the passage of time and crisis (25-26). Wampanoags used a specific conjunction to designate missing or dead kin, for example, referring to a son or daughter as nuneechanay (“my late or absent child” with the root neechan for “child”) (26, 87). Similarly, the title that other members of the community gave a child, a man, or a woman mattered, as they often signified specific roles, maturity, and status within a town or the wider Wampanoag society (21-22).

But as the introduction to this review notes, Tisquantum traveled widely throughout the Atlantic World. He learned to converse with many different audiences. As someone captured and taken from his home, Tisquantum faced obstacles during his years in Europe when he was forcibly immersed in early modern Spanish and English soundscapes that differed significantly from his home in Patuxet (106-107). Tisquantum was also frustrated in Newfoundland by the Beothuks’ unwillingness to allow him access to the community so he could begin learning their language (108-11). They may not have trusted Tisquantum with their knowledge, but the English at Plymouth depended on him for survival. By teaching the Plymouth settlers about the natural world and how it sustained them, Tisquantum became a kind of language teacher himself, taking on the role within Wampanoag tradition associated with the Crow, a figure who served as a messenger for a powerful manitou (spirit) that delivered knowledge about growing corn and beans (30-31, 152).

The true value of Squanto: A Native Odyssey, therefore, can be found in the elegant ways that Lipman recovers Tisquantum’s humanity – meaning both his character strengths and flaws – by foregrounding Wampanoag language and culture, a foundation of Native American and Indigenous Studies research methodologies. Lipman privileges Native agency even more so than in his first book, the 2016 Bancroft Award-winning Saltwater Frontier. Lipman’s Squanto continues the recent renaissance of critical early colonial New England studies, which began with the 2018 publication of two highly acclaimed works that reexamine the war started by Massasoit’s son, Metacom: Lisa Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War and Christine M. DeLucia’s Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (both from Yale University Press). All these works provide indigenous-centered methods and sources, enriching our understanding of the first colonial moments in this nation’s history. And although it is set in the early seventeenth century, Squanto’s tale is fitting for our own times with its emphasis on identity, community, and resilience.

Matthew Sparacio is a lecturer of colonial and Native American history at Georgia State University. He mostly posts about dogs and pizza on instagram @calumetsncrowns .