This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower.
For many Native Americans, the commemoration of the Pilgrim’s arrival is a day of mourning
and not of joy because of centuries of conflict, dispossession, and disrespect.
But it wasn’t that way at the beginning, and for good reason.
You see, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag desperately needed each other.
The Pilgrims arrived on the shores of Cape Cod way later than planned.
They didn’t have enough food or shelter, and after the first long, bitter winter,
half of the one hundred immigrants got sick and died.
But the Wampanoags, who lived near where the Pilgrims landed, were also in desperate need.
Some 90 percent had been killed by an epidemic brought by earlier European visitors.
The Narragansett Indians, enemies to the Wampanoag, lived further inland and had escaped the epidemic.
The Wampanoag needed allies, and the English, though few in number, had guns.
So in February 1621, the Wampanoags and the English formed an alliance
to assist each other against their enemies.
The Wampanoags believed that such an alliance created kinship
and kin were expected to be generous with one another.
The Wampanoag were generous, allowing the Pilgrims to build homes on Native land,
providing them with corn, and teaching them how to plant and nourish it.
The chief sachem of the Wampanoags was Ousamequin, also known by his title Massasoit.
He became very sick and sent for Edward Winslow, who was the Pilgrim’s mediator.
Conforming to Wampanoag tradition, Winslow sat with the sachem to give comfort and assistance,
gently nourishing Ousamequin, who had been unable to take any food for days,
with a little jam and then some broth.
Day by day Ousamequin grew stronger.
When he was satisfied that Ousamequin was no longer in danger,
Winslow prepared to return home.
Ousamequin said to him,
“Now I see that the English are my friends and love me,
and whilst I live, I will never forget this kindness they have shown me.”
And so it was that as long as Ousamequin and Winslow lived, there was peace.
Unfortunately, as English population and power grew,
they no longer felt obligated to conform to Native expectations.
Ousamequin’s son Metacom, or Philip, tried to use law and diplomacy to push back
against English encroachments on Native land and sovereignty.
When those efforts failed, he prepared to go to war.
During a last-ditch effort, on the eve of a war that would kill thousands of Native people and English immigrants,
Metacom and other Wampanoag people met with English mediators
and reminded them of their generous treatment of the Pilgrims.
They said that when the English first came, Ousamequin was as a great man
and the English were as a little child.
He constrained other Indians from wronging the English and gave them corn
and showed them how to plant and was free to do them any good
and had given them a hundred times more land than the king now had for his own people.
When the English urged the Wampanoags to lay down their arms,
for the English were too strong for them,
they replied, “Then the English should do to them as they did when they were too strong for the English.”
What if they had done to them as the Wampanoag did when they were too strong for the English?
That question is worth considering today.
The Wampanoags words are a call to a higher law.
We should treat other people as we would be treated,
even when—especially when—power is unequal.
The vision of that kind of a world, seen ever so briefly in Plymouth, is something beautiful.