[To follow
up Monday’s Patriot’s Day post, I’m going to steal my title from Glenn Greenwald’s great book and
briefly highlight five genuinely and impressively patriotic past Americans, one
per post-contact century. Please nominate your own choices to contribute to a
collectively patriotic weekend post!]
Today’s
genuinely patriotic American is Tisquantum, better
known by the Anglicized name “Squanto.”
It’s fair
to say that the whole tone of William
Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation—and also,
quite literally, of the Pilgrims’ first experiences in America, as Bradford
describes them at least—changes with the arrival of Squanto (paragraph 136 in
that edition). From that first mention it’s clear that this is a man with a
complex identity and perspective: he is described as “a native of this place”
but also one who has “been in England,” and with these two identities and the
multiple languages that come with them he connects the Pilgrims to the local
Wampanoag chief Massasoit, with whom they make their first peace treaty. And
Bradford finds Squanto’s individual experiences, as a kidnapped slave turned
explorer and translator, compelling enough to spend most of the rest of this
chapter quoting another Englishman’s narrative of them.
Partly
Bradford’s extended focus is due to his culturally myopic sense of Squanto as
literally a gift from God, “a special instrument sent of God for their good
beyond their expectation.” Yet if we set aside the paternalism and, again,
myopia necessary to define another person as an instrument for one’s own good,
Bradford’s descriptions, coupled with the history provided in the extended
narrative, can help us realize a striking and crucial fact: Squanto turned a
horrific and traumatic set of experiences, ones based directly on cultural
conflict and oppression, into a perspective and life that worked toward and
indeed modeled cultural conversation and connection. He did so, it seems clear,
for the good both of the Pilgrims and of the Wampanoags, and more exactly for
the good of the new, cross-cultural community that came into existence the
second those two peoples met. What’s more patriotic than that?
As will be
the case for all of this week’s focal figures, there’s plenty more, and more
complexity and even tragedy, in Squanto’s story and what it symbolizes than I
can get into here. The arc of the
17th century in Massachusetts was not, after all, toward
justice. Yet if I have one overarching argument here, it’s the same one
that’s at the heart of my
fourth book: we can’t seek our ideal America, nor our ideal Americans, by
eliding the darkest histories; instead we have to look to precisely those
histories and find the genuine and impressive patriots who lived and engaged
with and responded to them. Tisquantum is a great place to start.
Next
patriot tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Any nominations?
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