Only after that did the man remembered as the Pilgrims’ helper become an interpreter between newcomers and a Native political world already transformed by disease, loss, and European intrusion.

The familiar Thanksgiving story begins with his usefulness to the colonists.

His actual story begins with a home.

Patuxet Before Plymouth

Before there was Plymouth Colony, there was Patuxet.

Patuxet was a Wampanoag community on the coast of what is now Massachusetts.

Its people belonged to a much larger Indigenous world of villages, kinship networks, sachemships, trade routes, seasonal movement, diplomacy, farming, fishing, hunting, and ceremony.

Wampanoag history in the region stretches back thousands of years.

Archaeology confirms deep Indigenous presence across southern New England, while Wampanoag oral traditions place their people in these homelands from time immemorial.

Patuxet was not an isolated settlement waiting to be discovered by Europeans.