In September 1970, Massachusetts invited Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag music teacher, to speak at a state banquet marking 350 years since the Pilgrims landed. Officials read his draft, judged it too inflammatory, and handed him a replacement written for him. He refused it and pulled out of the dinner. On Thanksgiving Day he stood on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, beside the statue of the sachem the English called Massasoit, and delivered the speech anyway. This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman opens with that afternoon, and with the National Day of Mourning that Native people have held on the same hill every Thanksgiving since.

It is the right door into the book, because what follows is the history James wanted told: Plymouth and the holiday with the Wampanoags at the centre, beginning long before the Mayflower and ending in the present day.

Where This Land Is Their Land Sits on the Thanksgiving Shelf

Bloomsbury published it in 2019, ahead of the 400th anniversary of the colony’s founding, into a field already full. The best-known popular account, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, starts aboard ship and treats the Wampanoags as the people the colonists met. Silverman turns the camera round. In This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman, the English arrive late into a country with its own long past, its own alliances and its own enemies, and the reader understands the politics they have walked into better than they did.

He also refuses to stop at the end of the war in 1676, where most Plymouth histories close. A long final chapter follows the Wampanoags through land loss, legal fights and survival into the age of federal recognition. That span is what sets the book apart. It is a history of Thanksgiving and, just as much, of what became of the people the holiday prints on its paper napkins.

What This Land Is Their Land Adds

The headline correction concerns the meal itself. This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman shows that the 1621 gathering was a harvest celebration with militia drills and beer, not a puritan thanksgiving, which meant fasting and prayer. Ousamequin came with about ninety men; Wampanoag tradition holds that they heard English gunfire and came to see what it meant. The visit lasted three days, the Wampanoags contributed five deer, and the English sources give it a few lines. The national holiday came only with Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation, after years of lobbying by the editor Sarah Josepha Hale, and the Pilgrim story was attached to it later still.

What works

• The alliance is explained, not assumed. An epidemic between 1616 and 1619, probably smallpox in Silverman’s reading, emptied Patuxet, the village on the site of Plymouth. The Narragansetts escaped it and forced Ousamequin into submission. The famous friendship becomes the gamble of a weakened ruler looking for guns.
• Tisquantum gets his own life back. Kidnapped in 1614, sold in Málaga, passed through London and Newfoundland, he came home to find his people dead. The helpful Squanto of school pageants was a man with an agenda of his own.
• The treaty is read clause by clause. Silverman argues that Ousamequin could never have accepted the clause on surrendering offenders as the English understood it, and he traces that misunderstanding all the way to 1675.
• The scenes have real tension. Edward Winslow scraping the coated tongue of the gravely ill sachem in 1623 and feeding him broth is unforgettable, and so is the bloody bargain Ousamequin offers in return.

Where It Gives Ground

• The cast is enormous. Sachems, sunksquaws, villages, renamings and alternate spellings pile up chapter after chapter. The glossary at the back is indispensable, and even with it, the middle chapters ask for real concentration.
• Conjecture fills the silences. The archive is almost entirely English, so This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman often reconstructs Wampanoag motives with “must have” and “perhaps”. He flags this honestly, but a few flights, such as an imagined 1616 meeting in London between Tisquantum and Pocahontas, are speculation staged as scene.
• The later centuries are compressed. After the slow, detailed 1620s, more than three hundred years of servitude, dispossession and revival arrive in a single chapter that reads at times like a list of cases.

Do You Need to Know the History First?

No. Silverman assumes nothing beyond the classroom version, and then takes it apart. A short note at the start explains his choices: Ousamequin rather than Massasoit, a Native word for fighters where “warriors” would mislead, and “Indian” because many Native New Englanders use it themselves. Readers who already know the war of 1675 will move faster through the later chapters, but This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman is written to be a first book on the subject.

Read These Next

If This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman leaves you wanting more Native history, or a different angle on the holiday, try these.

1. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, for another history that uncovers a national crime inside official records.
2. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, for the long aftermath of colonial violence carried through one family in fiction.
3. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, the English-centred narrative this book argues with in places. Read them as a pair.
4. An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott, for the regional New England farm holiday as it was kept before anyone tied it to the Pilgrims.
5. Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story by Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry and Alexis Bunten, a Wampanoag-authored picture book about the same autumn, for younger readers.

About David J. Silverman

Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University, where his work covers Native American, colonial and American racial history. Most of his books concern the Native peoples of southern New England and their dealings with colonists, and none of them has been reviewed here yet. This one, from a trade house rather than a university press, is aimed squarely at general readers.

• His Thundersticks (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016) shows how firearms transformed Native America.
• With the historian Julie A. Fisher he wrote Ninigret (Cornell University Press, 2014), the first biography of the Niantic and Narragansett sachem.
• The book is dedicated to his two daughters, one of whom shares her name with the Wampanoag community of Aquinnah.
• Its maps, drawn by Gary Antonetti, are worth bookmarking alongside the glossary.

The Verdict

This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman is not comfortable holiday reading, and it is not meant to be. It is a patient, forceful history that explains why the alliance of 1621 happened, why it broke, and why its descendants still live with the result. The density will slow some readers and the guesswork will bother others, but nothing else on the subject is as thorough or as humane. Silverman closes his introduction with a line from an Aquinnah elder: “we do ourselves no good by hiding from the truth.” Read it before the turkey, and the table will look different.