It entered it.

The Closing Contradiction

Tisquantum’s entire life can be compressed into one contradiction without reducing it to a slogan.

The English made him useful to Plymouth by first harming him.

His kidnapping created the language skill the colony later depended on.

His years away kept him alive while epidemic disease devastated Patuxet.

His survival left him without the community to which he had planned to return.

His unusual knowledge then made him valuable in a new political order built partly from that devastation.

The same sequence that saved his life also destroyed the life he expected to resume.

That contradiction is why his story remains so powerful after four centuries.