Wampanoag Confederacy

The confederacy that met the Mayflower, and whose destruction is the war New England was built on. The Wampanoag occupied southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island under a paramount sachem, and had been reduced by perhaps three-quarters between 1616 and 1619 by an epidemic carried by earlier European fishermen - which is why the Plymouth colonists in 1620 found cleared fields and stored corn at an abandoned village. Massasoit made a treaty with them that year, calculating that English allies would balance the Narragansett to the west, and it held for half a century. Tisquantum, who had been kidnapped to Spain and reached England before returning to find his village dead, interpreted between them. The arrangement broke under land pressure. Massasoit's son Metacom, called King Philip by the English, went to war in 1675, and the conflict killed a larger share of the population of New England, on both sides, than any later American war. Metacom was killed in 1676, his head displayed at Plymouth for two decades, and his wife and son sold into Caribbean slavery along with hundreds of others. The nation survived. The Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag are federally recognised today, and a project begun in the 1990s has revived the language from surviving documents. Their name means people of the first light. Plymouth was built on the site of Patuxet. The Wopanaak language reclamation project produced the first new native speakers in more than a century. Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod are within their historic territory. The 1621 harvest feast became the American Thanksgiving story.

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