This Land Is Their Land

Ok, I knew that the story of Thanksgiving taught in grade school was a myth, but until I read this book, I had no idea that this iconic event was so deeply embedded in a much larger, more complex relationship between colonists and Indians in Massachusetts.

Silverman explains why the Wampanoag forged an alliance with the Puritans and what a terrible price they paid for their decision. I was completely immersed in his richly detailed account of this early encounter between indigenous peoples and the interlopers who wanted their land.  

Historian Daniel Silverman tells the story of the Pilgrims amid recounting the experience of the Massasoit's Wampanoags who signed a defense treaty with Plymouth Governor John Carver that endured throughout the great chief's lifetime, about 40 more years. For me, one of the more telling vignettes in his account is that of the young Indian child forced to sing “This Land is Your Land” at a school Thanksgiving celebration on land that once had belonged to his people. His subtitle, "The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled Story of Thanksgiving" is appropriate to the history he relates, if… show more.

Histories of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony invariably focus on the English, because they wrote nearly all of the seventeenth-century records. Most historians today write with much more sensitivity about the Wampanoags and other Native peoples, but they rarely take center stage. David Silverman’s book is an essential corrective, not only to hagiographic accounts of the Pilgrims, but also to standard histories of New England that make little space for Native peoples after the time of initial colonization and conflict. Silverman, by contrast, chronicles a people that persisted and contended for their land and culture.