That meaning was added much later.

Tisquantum was almost certainly part of the world surrounding the gathering because of his role with the colony, but the famous modern tableau — Pilgrims and Indians sitting at one long table in symbolic unity — tells us more about later American memory than about the politics of 1621.

The Wampanoag were not guests entering an English nation.

They were members of a powerful Native polity dealing with a small foreign settlement inside their homeland.

The English were not yet the dominant society of New England.

They were fragile newcomers.

Tisquantum stood between them.

Seen from his biography, the setting is almost surreal.

He was helping English settlers survive on the ground where his own community had lived before epidemic disease killed most of them.

No surviving source records exactly what he felt about that contradiction.