This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David Silverman (review)

david silverman told me in 2017 of his intent to write this book. He wanted a Wampanoag person to cowrite it with him, and having been turned down by one person, he asked me. I responded that I wanted to think about it, having misgivings that this was an effort to benefit from the four hundredth anniversary celebration of the Mayflower landing.

I found it difficult to read through the four hundred plus pages, as I found an overwhelming number of issues in his interpretation of source material and conclusions drawn from it. A tone of condescension permeates the book, which treats the Wampanoag/Indigenous people as subjects—of study, research, writing, and so on.

Silverman has not seemed to come to terms with the fact that the "historical record" is comprised of opinions and judgments based in authors' cultural frameworks and worldviews, which create huge distortions when applied to Indigenous thinking, philosophies, people, and cultures.

Silverman relies too much on colonial sources, repeating entire passages virtually verbatim. His associated commentary can be inaccurate and deceptively so: it is rolled into the repeated material as if part of it. Readers may not have adequate background knowledge of the colonial period to identify such commentary and gauge its accuracy. For example, on page 188 Silverman comments on the character of Ousamequin, a highly respected leader in 1620. If readers are not familiar with the colonial sources, they may not realize that Silverman's "lingering question" does not exist in the source. Rather, it is Silverman's sensationalistic twist, layered into the described situation. If they are not familiar with Wampanoag traditional culture, they will not recognize the inaccuracy or the subliminal impact of Silverman's comments.

Silverman's commentary can be simplistic, diminishing or demeaning, inappropriate or in error. Certain sentences sound nonsensical or do nothing to enhance or expand upon the topic. For example, in "The Wampanoags' Old World," he states, "When the people were especially lucky, drift whales became stranded on the shore, ready for the taking." What does "especially lucky" actually mean? Silverman describes great abundance in the Wampanoag world, yet he communicates a sense of lack and struggle, furthering the stereotype of Native people needing to "scramble" to find food.

Silverman uses a wide variety of "loaded" words that evoke a rash of stereotypes ("forked tongue," "Indian uprising") and drops in topics such as slavery without context, which assumes the reader has the background to process the information appropriately. His descriptions pull topics far out of their cultural context. People, leadership, traditions, and events are grossly misrepresented. For example, he refers to Tisquantum, who was kidnapped and enslaved in Europe, as being a "bi-lingual globe trotter" (71). He assigns Western concepts, behaviors, and thought processes to seventeenth-century Wampanoag people, completely distorting their traditional cultures, leadership, and values. This misrepresentation was sometimes so extreme that I was not only insulted and incensed but also absolutely repulsed.

Silverman speculates, states opinions, and theorizes grandly, but those do not constitute history. They can complement the telling of history, or they can be damaging if readers cannot distinguish between what is real and what is fiction.

Surprisingly, the narrative changes in startling ways when Silverman enters the period of King Philip's War. The impacts of the war on Native people, the loss of life and land, the interruption of culture are clearly and graphically conveyed. Silverman's descriptions of colonial destruction over the next two centuries—enslavement, created indebtedness, indentured servitude, manipulative and coercive colonial laws—approach eloquence. One gains a very real sense of the infringements and losses Native people endured, as well as the accompanying emotional and psychological impacts.

This detail, depth of understanding, and empathy for what Native people went through is strikingly different from the earlier sections of the book, to the point that it feels like two books or two authors. How could the...