Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of
people whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for
thousands of years. And it is true that I refer to him as an Indian,
because the label is useful shorthand; so would his descendants, and for
much the same reason. But "Indian" was not a category that Tisquantum
himself would have recognized, any more than the inhabitants of the same
area today would call themselves "Western Hemisphereans." Still less
would Tisquantum have claimed to belong to "Norumbega," the label by
which most Europeans then referred to New England. ("New England" was
coined only in 1616.) As Tisquantum's later history made clear, he
regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, a shoreline
settlement halfway between what is now Boston and the beginning of Cape
Cod.
Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern
Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag
confederation. In turn, the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite alliance
with two other confederations: the Nauset, which comprised some thirty
groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several dozen villages
clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants
of Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family, the biggest
in eastern North America at the time. (Massachusett was the name both of
a language and of one of the groups that spoke it.) In Massachusett, the
name for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun
rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First
Light.
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