European colonization repeatedly relied on doctrines and assumptions that treated land as available when it did not conform to European patterns of permanent settlement, fencing, or written ownership.

Epidemic devastation made that process even easier in parts of New England.

The colonists could encounter cleared fields with few residents and interpret the landscape as providentially prepared.

From a Native perspective, the same landscape could be a place of recent mass death.

Tisquantum stood at the exact intersection of those interpretations.

He knew why the fields were open.

He knew who had lived there.

He knew the place before it became Plymouth.

That knowledge makes him uniquely important to the moral history of the colony’s founding.

He was not only a translator between languages.