The historical Tisquantum is memorable because he is difficult.

He forces readers to confront the fact that assistance and colonization can exist in the same story.

He shows that a person harmed by English expansion could later help an English colony survive.

He shows that Native political life involved disagreement, ambition, and competing strategies rather than one unified response to Europeans.

He shows how language can become power.

He shows how epidemic disease altered politics before large-scale English settlement took hold.

He shows how a national myth can take one true aspect of a person’s life and make it swallow everything else.

Nothing about this fuller version makes his accomplishments smaller.

If anything, it makes his survival more remarkable.

He learned to navigate English society under coercive circumstances.