Correcting inaccurate portrayals of history by seeking the perspective of those who lived it

Any school child could tell you that the year 1620 marks a milestone in American history: the date the Mayflower landed in the so-called New World. Legend has it that the “Indians”—as the Native Americans were often called—welcomed the Pilgrims and invited them to celebrate the autumn harvest. This event, reenacted in grade-school pageants every year, is commemorated in our Thanksgiving holiday.

It’s a treasured and heartwarming story, but there’s a major problem: It’s inaccurate, whitewashed and one-sided. Traditional history relates events only from the view of the Mayflower Pilgrims, misrepresenting the facts and ignoring the perspective of the Native Americans who played such a central role.

The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum is committed to getting the history right. We’ve taken a major step toward fulfilling that promise with a new exhibit that tells the story of the Mayflower’s arrival from the viewpoint of the resident Wampanoag. Created in partnership with SmokeSygnals, a leading Native American creative agency, this exhibit is called, “Our Story: The Complicated Relationship of the Indigenous Wampanoag and the Mayflower Pilgrims.”

The interactive, high-tech exhibit depicts the history of the Wampanoags, who lived on Cape Cod for more than 12,000 years before the first Europeans arrived. Against that backdrop, it gives an accurate, balanced account of the Mayflower landing, with new context that changes our understanding of events. This exhibit, which has been several years in the making, exemplifies the museum’s mission to honor the history of our region—the contributions of Indigenous people, as well as the rise of the whaling industry, the Portuguese fishing and LGBTQ communities and the establishment of Provincetown as a center of tolerance, art and theater.

How Our Story began

The initiative to curate and build the new exhibit grew out of conversations with two members of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, also experts on Native American history: Steven Peters, creative director at SmokeSygnals, and his mother, Paula. The museum reached out to them to discuss the idea of a permanent exhibit at PMPM that corrected the oversights and errors of traditional history. Over the next few years, we brainstormed the best way to contribute to a long-overdue understanding of our past and developed a plan. That culminated in the exhibit we opened last summer.

Steven wanted to articulate his people’s history in a way the general public could digest. “The Wampanoag weren’t just sitting here waiting for the Europeans to arrive,” he explains. “They had a vibrant community of hundreds of thousands of people all over Massachusetts.”

Months before the Pilgrims’ set foot on Plymouth Rock, they penned the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown Harbor, often considered to be one of the first versions of our modern-day representative form of government. However, the Wampanoag already had a robust government in place, with rules, laws and effective leadership—including female leaders, a practice the Pilgrims found hard to accept.

Though traditional accounts start the Pilgrims’ story in 1620, we began our exhibit’s timeline in 1609 to capture some pivotal events that provide much-needed context. In 1614, English explorers visited Cape Cod and kidnapped 27 Native Americans who were taken to Spain and sold as slaves. One of them was Tisquantum—a young Wampanoag man more commonly referred to as “Squanto”—who learned English during his captivity. He returned to America five years later and later served as an interpreter for the Pilgrims.

Another little-known, but defining event was a plague that decimated the Native American population between 1616 and 1619. The epidemic most likely started when survivors of a shipwrecked French vessel brought ashore a highly contagious disease. Over the next few years, it killed an estimated 100,000 members of the indigenous population, who had no immunity to a disease they’d never before encountered.

The weakened Wampanoags were under pressure from rival tribes encroaching on their territories, so were in no position to resist the Europeans arriving on their shores. Instead, they decided to cooperate with them in hopes of forging an alliance.

The epidemic also played a part in the Pilgrims’ decision to move from their landing site in Provincetown to settle in the Patuxet area, now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. Ravaged by disease, the Wampanoag had abandoned many villages there, so the Pilgrims moved into the communities that were left standing empty.

This little-known history provides a more logical, believable explanation than the myths, shedding new light on the events of 1620. The exhibit also shatters the long-held belief that the Pilgrims were noble heroes and lived peaceably with their neighbors for decades following their arrival. In fact, during their five and half week stay in Provincetown, the Pilgrims stole food from the natives and desecrated their sacred burial grounds. Once in Plymouth, they mounted a constant assault on the Wampanoags values and way of life, forcing their beliefs, religion and government on the native population.

Though the story we’d previously presented in our museum was inaccurate, we chose not to hide the old displays away. As Steven explains, “Rather than ignore their existence and attempt to erase those errors, we are using the original displays as a way to reveal the misconceptions we grew up with and to educate the public on the stereotypes we’ve held onto for too long.”

Multimedia for the most impact

This is the museum’s first interactive exhibit, combining audiovisual presentations such as reenactments by Wampanoag actors with hands-on displays featuring touchscreen kiosks, videos and informational panels. The multimedia approach provides an immersive experience for viewers and encourages emotional engagement. Steven Peters dug into historic documents such as journals, letters and deeds to uncover details that fleshed out the true story.

A rotating display of Native American cultural belongings, including wampum and birch boxes embroidered with porcupine quills, offers snapshots of day-to-day life. Every detail is historically accurate and appropriate for the period in which the depicted events occurred. Gone are the days when every native American face in a picture is identical, as they were in the 1971 Whittaker Murals from our collection, and the garb reflects Western movies rather than real life.

Like museums across the country, we were affected by the pandemic. COVID-19 forced us to delay our 2020 opening, as we adhered to the safety guidelines as set by the state. We finally opened on August 1, with limited hours, reduced capacity and a rigorous sanitization process. We’ve also had to minimize the hands-on aspects of the exhibit for the time being. Some of the new measures we’ve implemented, such as timed ticketing, have proved so helpful to scheduling and monitoring traffic that they are becoming a permanent part of our operation.

The reaction to the exhibit has been overwhelmingly positive. Visitors are excited to learn a story that hasn’t been told widely. They walk away with a better understanding of our nation’s history and a greater sense of tolerance and acceptance.

That fulfills the goal we’ve pursued since our nonprofit was founded more than a century ago: to educate the public about Provincetown’s role in American history. Our commitment is symbolized by the Pilgrim Monument, erected from 1907 to 1910, a 252-foot tower that is the tallest all-granite structure in the United States. Our new exhibit stands just as tall, in its own way, and finally does justice to the true history of our region and its people.                       

Editor Note: You can use the Indigenous people’s land map to locate the lands where your museum is located and where you are zooming in from online at https://native-land.ca