In June 1675 a Rhode Island official named John Easton crossed the water to Montaup to hear the grievances of Pumetacom, the Wampanoag leader the English called King Philip. Forty armed men stood with the sachem. What he told Easton was a parable of the colony’s own beginnings. When the English came, his father had been the great man and the newcomers a little child. The great man had protected the child, fed it and kept others from harming it. Now the child had grown strong and repaid all of it with land seizures, rigged courts and contempt. Within weeks New England was at war. This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman treats that conversation as the hinge of the whole story, and calls it what it was: not the outburst of a cornered man, but a reasoned declaration of war.
Why This Land Is Their Land Begins Before the Ship
The Plymouth story Americans learn stops at the feast. Silverman’s point is that the people at that table had a past that ran back thousands of years and a future that ran through the gallows, the slave ship and the reservation. Ending the story in 1621 is a choice, and he spends four hundred pages undoing it.
The argument begins well before any ship arrives. An early chapter on the Wampanoag homeland reaches back to the giant Moshup, who in Aquinnah tradition chased a Thunderbird across the sound to Martha’s Vineyard, smashed whales against the cliffs until the clay ran colours, and left fog behind as pipe smoke. Alongside the stories sit the archaeology and the politics: maize arriving late to southern New England, sachems who could be removed if they ruled badly, and a long contest with the Narragansetts across the bay. By the time Plymouth is founded, the reader sees it the way the Wampanoags did, as one more small community on a crowded political map.
The myth, Silverman shows, is much younger than the colony. The holiday as Americans know it took shape in the nineteenth century, and its link to the Pilgrims rests on a single brief account published in 1841 by the Reverend Alexander Young, who added a note naming the meal the first Thanksgiving. Silverman calls it “perhaps the first and only influential footnote in history,” and it is one of several moments where his dry wit cuts through the density. This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman is at its best when it shows how a minor event became a national creed.
The Alliance as Politics, Not Friendship
What the founding myth calls friendship, the book recasts as diplomacy among unequal and wary partners. Ousamequin needed the newcomers against his rivals; the English needed food and allies. Silverman catches the strangeness of those early contacts beautifully. On a visit to Ousamequin’s village of Sowams in the summer of 1621, two Plymouth envoys share a sleeping platform with the sachem and his wife, are kept awake by fleas, lice and singing, and leave hungry. It is comic, but it also shows who set the terms in those years.
The balance did not hold. As English settlers multiplied, the book tracks how the partnership curdled into dependency and then humiliation. After the massacre of Pequot families at Mystic in 1637, Massachusetts marked the slaughter with a day of thanksgiving, an irony This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman sets down without raising its voice. By 1671 Pumetacom had been made to hand over his people’s guns, fined a hundred pounds, and ordered to deliver wolves’ heads to Plymouth every year as a token of submission. Read in sequence, these episodes make the speech to Easton sound less like a threat than an account rendered.
The war chapters are the most absorbing in This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman, and the most painful. Silverman argues that the conflict historians call King Philip’s War was widened by English policy, as colonists treated neutral communities as enemies and pushed them into the fight. He gives the Wampanoag women leaders their due: the sunksquaw Weetamoo, who led her own people into the war, and Awashonks of Sakonnet, who weighed her choices with cold care. On Martha’s Vineyard, the sachem Mittark refused to give up his community’s guns and proposed an armed Wampanoag guard instead, which kept the island at peace. When the fighting ended, Pumetacom’s head was displayed at Plymouth for years, his young son was sold into slavery overseas, and the colonies proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for their deliverance. Silverman lets that last fact close the chapter without comment. It needs none.
When the Historian Becomes an Advocate
The book’s force is also its main limitation. Silverman writes as an advocate, and says so. He addresses the reader directly, passes verdicts on colonial figures in plain moral terms, and reaches for loaded modern vocabulary where a quieter word would carry more weight. Readers who share his conclusions will hardly notice. Readers who need persuading may feel pressed rather than shown, and that is a pity, because the evidence alone usually makes the case.
The scepticism also runs in one direction more than the other. English accounts are cross-examined line by line, as they should be, while Ousamequin’s own coercion of rival communities tends to be read as shrewd strategy. A few present-tense passages about legal disputes and the coming 2020 anniversary have dated quickly, too. None of this undoes the achievement of This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman, but it is worth knowing before the first page.
A final chapter races from 1676 to the twenty-first century, through William Apess, the Pequot preacher who in 1836 called the Pilgrims’ landing day a day for mourning, through the 1928 gathering held under the banner “I Still Live”, and on to federal recognition, the revival of the Wampanoag language and the reburial of Ousamequin’s remains in 2017. The book’s subject matter includes epidemic death, massacre, enslavement, execution and the desecration of graves, and it is described without softening.
The Scholar Behind This Land Is Their Land
Silverman, born in 1971, teaches early American and Native history at George Washington University, where students in his seminar on Pilgrims and Indians heard early versions of these chapters. An earlier book, Faith and Boundaries, studied the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard across nearly three centuries, so this is ground he has walked for a long time.
He is candid that he is not Wampanoag and that this is not a Wampanoag telling. Wampanoag readers critiqued his drafts, he offered to print their dissents, and he urges readers to seek out their own accounts. Its acknowledgements also record, with some charm, that his parents cooked the family’s Thanksgiving dinner in 2017 so that he could spend the day in Plymouth doing research for This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman. The epilogue gives the last word to Wampanoag voices, including Ramona Peters of Mashpee, who would keep the holiday and teach children real gratitude while leaving the myth behind.
Where It Leaves You
Readers drawn to the gift economies Silverman describes, where generosity carried obligations, will find a gentler companion in The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Those who want the war itself in more depth should turn to Jill Lepore’s The Name of War. And for the old regional New England feast this book insists came first, Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving makes an unexpectedly fitting coda.
This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman is demanding, occasionally preachy and indispensable. It does not ask anyone to cancel the turkey. It asks that the people who brought the venison be remembered as more than guests, and the request is hard to refuse once the book is closed.