Bradford's Indian Book: Being the True Roote & Rise of American Letters as Revealed by the Native Text Embedded in <i>Of Plimoth Plantation</i>

7. Tisquantum

7 Tisquantum a\# Death came suddenly and unexpectedly to Tisquantum in the autumn of 1622. Although his sojourn among the Plymoutheans had been brief, his legacy to them was apocryphal, long-lived, and far-reaching. Pniese, poet, and shape-shifter, it is hardly remarkable that such an extraordinary man generated deep gratitude as well as considerable controversy for Bradford and subsequent historians. Much of the debate surrounding this man, in Bradford’s day and in ours, centers not on Tisquantum’s many widely acknowledged contributions to the Colony, but on his failure with narrative. Bradford’s and Winslow ’s respective accounts suggest that Tisquantum’s consummate blunder was to overestimate his audience’s powers of metaphorical discernment. The shaman’s naïve listeners seemed to have taken his metaphors literally, and these verbal miscalculations cost him his life. It is sadly ironic that the American Indian Word became mired in exegetical obfuscations at the critical time it most needed to give light. By all accounts, Tisquantum’s relations with Plymouth proceeded relatively smoothly from the time of his arrival until the spring of 1622, when Hobomok “intimated . . . some jealocie of Squanto, by what he gathered from some private whisperings betweene him and other Indeans.” After this disclosure, Bradford writes: They begane to see yt Squanto sought his owne ends, and plaid his owne game, by putting ye Indeans in fear, and drawing gifts from them to enrich him selfe; making them beleeve he could stur up warr against whom he would, & make peece for whom he would. Yea, he made them beleeve they kept ye plague buried in ye ground,and could 106 r Bradford’s Indian Book send it amongs whom they would, which did much terrifie the Indeans , and made them depend more on him, and seeke more to him then to Massasoyte,which proucured him envie,and had like to have cost him his life. For after ye discovery of his practises, Massasoyt sought it both privatly and openly; which caused him to stick close to ye English, & never durst goe from them till he dyed. (136–37) Until recently, literary critics have given this passage scant attention, and historians, hypothesizing that the Patuxet Tisquantum did indeed oppose the Pokanokets, tend to take Bradford’s comments as holy writ.1 A significant number of historical theories concerning this incident rest on the belief expressed by Bradford and Winslow that Tisquantum resented the Massasoit and wanted to take over his position. A typical rationale for Tisquantum’s alleged power plays can be found in “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets” (1981) by Neal Salisbury, who argues that Tisquantum“sought a reconstituted Patuxet band under his own leadership.”2 If Bradford’s observations were based upon accurate information, Salisbury and his fellows are correct, but, while not totally discounting the various domination theories concerning Tisquantum, I call them into question. My reading of Bradford’s passage raises several very different issues involving Tisquantum, and none of them includes power brokering. The major uncertainty concerning the pniese derives from the unhappy result of Tisquantum’s use of figural language, or rather his failure at storytelling .Another perplexity hinges on conflicting cultural expectations held by Algonquians and Plymoutheans respectively.Because it is virtually impossible to separate constituent elements in an American Indian world, it will be necessary to designate these problems “religious issues,” even though that term is largely inadequate. In the passage above, we see that Tisquantum metaphorically connects English political strength to “plague buried in ye ground” in an effort to explain the destructive potential of English gunpowder, which the Plymoutheans kept buried for dry storage and used to effect immediate security, if not political ascendancy.In a Native worldview,power is based on words; however, Tisquantum has observed that in the European system, power does not seem to be verbal, but appears to be tied to gunpowder that is concealed in the earth, the primal text. By using figurative language, a stylistic device with which American Indians are normally quite comfortable, Tisquantum r 107 Tisquantum attempts to explain European military technology and political strength to the Algonquians in terms he thinks they can understand: pathologies and bad medicine. Certainly American Indians understood epidemics of wasting diseases and necromancy quite well, but it appears that the vehicle of Tisquantum’s metaphor was misinterpreted by the Algonquians just as the tenor was misunderstood by the Plymoutheans. These misconstructions contributed to Tisquantum...