He could become central to Plymouth without belonging to Plymouth in the way later mythology imagined.

That complexity is not a problem to solve.

It is the reason his biography matters.

The best way to honor the evidence is to leave him complicated.

He was not born to become Squanto.

He was born into Patuxet.

History took him across an ocean, brought him back to a devastated homeland, placed him between Native and English political worlds, and then remembered him for only the final fraction of that journey.

The fuller story puts the missing years back.

And once they are back, the familiar Thanksgiving figure becomes something far more human: a survivor whose greatest skill was born from captivity, whose homecoming became another loss, and whose brief return to his homeland changed the history of a colony that would later make him a symbol.

Why The Story Should Begin Before Plymouth