Telling Our Story: An Interview with Paula Peters

This interview highlights the work of Paula Peters, a Wampanoag historian and journalist, to center Wampanoag timelines and homelands in stories of Plymouth Colony. This work revises the current emphasis, among scholars, publishers, and public-facing institutions, on 1620 and on Plymouth Colony as origins points in regional and national histories. Several years before the 2020 commemorations of the Plymouth colonists' settlement at Patuxet, on Wampanoag homelands, Peters and other Wampanoag tribal members created a traveling exhibit through which they are telling Wampanoag histories. The exhibit begins not in 1620 but in 1614, when colonists captured Wampanoag men and took them to England, and it emphasizes Wampanoag peoples' diplomacy with Plymouth settlers and their persistence in the present. The interview discusses the long trajectory of Wampanoag peoples' public-facing scholarship, with the goal of making clear its significance for telling stories about early America.