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Plimoth Plantation: An Interpreter's Tale

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(page 4 of 5)

No other reference to Pearse's color could be found, and Southern left in September. There the matter would have ended if the national media, in its relentless quest to find a new angle on the annual Thanksgiving story, hadn't picked up The Black Pilgrim. "Guess who's not coming to dinner," the director of another Plymouth museum, Parting Ways Museum of African-American History, told AP. Around the country, Mayflower descendants phoned Grandma to pull the genealogy papers out of the bank vault and double-check. But what sounded like a Richard Pryor comedy routine turned out to be anything but funny to Marten. After defending his position on Pearse against what he claimed were attacks by Pearse's descendants, Marten was fired after 18 years with the Plantation. The Plantation commissioned a historical study that took nearly a year to complete, which concluded that Abraham Pearse was not black. This was, of course, ignored by the national press, who had forgotten the whole episode.

The same season that Southern, also known as Pearse, was working, the Plantation reopened an Indian campsite, hiring several Eastern native Americans as interpreters from May through October. The Indian ethnic group the Pilgrims actually encountered at Plymouth was the Wampanoag, who had been nearly wiped out in a series of epidemics in 1615. Although the Wampanoags have never been officially recognized by the Interior Department and have no reservation, small groups maintain an ethnic continuity on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard and in the Plymouth and Brockton areas.

About a dozen Indians of various tribes (mostly Wampanoag from Cape Cod and the Vineyard, and including one young man from Chile and one non-Indian) spend the off-season on educational programs at New England schools, linguistics research, and the very labor-intensive job of making all their clothes, implements, and houses by hand. Just getting to this point was a difficult undertaking. Despite the psychological kinship Wampanoags claim with their ancestors, the linguistic and cultural gap is greater than that between the Pilgrims and their descendants.

No native speakers of Wampanoag are alive today, and the language had to be reconstructed from dictionaries and primers written by missionaries who imposed a great deal of their own culture and grammar onto the material, and from related dialects still in use. During the first summer, the campsite interpreters who knew tribal languages threw in phrases of their dialects, used Wampanoag words for tools, and ended up with a linguistic mish-mash. "It was obviously unrealistic," recalled Wampanoag Tony Pollard, coordinator of interpretation for the Wampanoag Indian program. "Here we were supposed to be Indians who had recently made contact with Europeans, and now we speak English fluently and barely get by in Indian dialects."

With the help of anthropologists, advisors from other native American groups, and books, the Indian stafflearned how to make porcupine quill embroidery, prepare skins for clothing, build boats, and construct traditional wetu houses (Eastern Indians didn't live in teepees) from wood and rush mats. Often, finding the materials in urbanized Massachusetts proved harder than learning the crafts; bulrushes had to be gathered in Concord, and the best cattails came from an empty field next to a Valle's Steak House on Route 3.

But as the Indians' sensitivity to stereotyping grew, relations with the visitors became strained. It isn't difficult to carry on 17th-century European village life in front of tourists. Cooking, gardening, thatching roofs, and slopping hogs can be done on the spot and explained while the shutters click. But 17th-century Wampanoags spent their summer days hunting, fishing, and gathering food on the seashore, not hanging around a campsite answering questions. Visitors who would never dream of calling a long-haired impersonator of Myles Standish a hippie to his face felt free to call the Indians "Tonto," ask if they were "real," and comment on their racial characteristics. After four hundred years of intermarriage with blacks and whites, the Eastern Indian gene pool is well mixed, and Wampanoag people often don't conform to visitors' notions of what an Indian ought to look like.