Native Americans urge boycott of ‘tone-deaf’ Mass. museum
PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Native Americans in Massachusetts are calling for a boycott of a popular living history museum featuring Colonial reenactors portraying life in Plymouth, the famous English settlement founded by the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower.
Members of the state’s Wampanoag community and their supporters say Plimoth Patuxet Museums has not lived up to its promise of creating a “bicultural museum” that equally tells the story of the European and Indigenous peoples that lived there.
They say the “Historic Patuxet Homesite,” the portion of the mostly outdoor museum focused on traditional Indigenous life, is inadequately small, in need of repairs and staffed by workers who aren’t from local tribes.
“We’re saying don’t patronize them, don’t work over there,” said Camille Madison, a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, who was among those recently venting their frustrations on social media. “We don’t want to engage with them until they can find a way to respect Indigenous knowledge and experience.”
The concerns come just two years after the museum changed its name from Plimoth Plantation to Plimoth Patuxet as part of a yearlong celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing.
At the time, the museum declared the “new, more balanced” moniker reflected the importance of the Indigenous perspective to the 75-year-old institution’s educational mission.
“Patuxet” was an Indigenous community near “Plimoth,” as the Pilgrim colony was known before becoming modern day Plymouth. It was badly decimated by European diseases by the time the Mayflower arrived, but one of its survivors, Tisquantum, commonly known as Squanto, famously helped the English colonists survive their first winter.
“They’ve changed the name but haven’t changed the attitude,” said Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe who worked for nearly 20 years at the museum, most recently as marketing director. “They’ve done nothing to ingratiate themselves with tribes. Every step they take is tone-deaf.”
Museum spokesperson Rob Kluin, in a statement emailed to the Associated Press, said the museum has expanded the outdoor Wampanoag exhibit, raised more than $2 million toward a new Indigenous programs building and has “several initiatives in place” to recruit and retain staff from Native communities. He declined to elaborate.
Carol Pollard, whose late brother Anthony “Nanepashemet” Pollard played a key role in the development of the museum’s Indigenous programming as a leading Wampanoag historian, was among those dismayed at the state of the site.
Last week, large gaps were evident in the battered tree bark roof of the large wetu, or traditional Wampanoag dwelling, that is a focal point of the Indigenous exhibit. Neither of the two museum interpreters on site was wearing traditional tribal attire. Meanwhile, on the Pilgrim settlement part of the museum, thatched roofs on the Colonial homes had been recently repaired, and numerous reenactors milled about in detailed period outfits.
“I know my brother would be very disappointed,” said Pollard, who also worked as a gardener at the museum until last summer. “I guarantee you, people dressed in khakis and navy blue tops was not my brother’s vision.”