Episode Details

Most native people in colonial New England did not die in the wars. They became colonists.

The standard story runs: encounter, conflict, destruction. The colonists arrived, the natives helped them, then the colonists wanted land, there was a war, the natives lost, the natives were destroyed. The version varies by who tells it, but the basic arc is what most American schoolchildren learn. And it is wrong about the structural fact.

Yes, there was a war — King Philip's War, in 1675, devastating to both sides and the subject of the next two episodes. But the war killed in the thousands. The other channels — fur trade, intermarriage, indenture, religious conversion, military and maritime service — moved hundreds of thousands of native people, across generations, into a colonial society that absorbed them. Their grandchildren grew up English. Their great-grandchildren did not know.

This is the inheritance most American history textbooks skip. It runs from Tisquantum on the beach at Plymouth in 1621, through the Mayhew mission on Martha's Vineyard, through Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck graduating from Harvard in 1665, through James Printer setting type for the Algonquian Bible at the Cambridge press. It ends in the present — in Americans who can trace their family to colonial New England and who carry native bloodlines they did not know about, in numbers far larger than the recognized tribal communities suggest. Native New England did not disappear. It became part of the population that built the country.