It is “What had already happened to him before he met them?”

That question restores chronology, and chronology restores meaning.

Before he translated for Plymouth, he had been kidnapped by an English captain.

Before he guided colonists through Wampanoag country, he had spent years learning to navigate the English Atlantic world.

Before he showed settlers how to obtain food from the landscape, he had returned to find the Native community that taught him that landscape devastated by disease.

Before he stood inside a celebrated alliance, he had already experienced the consequences of European expansion in its most personal forms: forced removal and epidemic loss.

Once those facts are placed first, his later choices become more difficult to romanticize and more difficult to condemn simplistically.

Helping Plymouth did not erase the kidnapping.

Manipulating political relationships did not erase the trauma of his homecoming.

His usefulness to English colonists did not make him less Native.