Mayflower’s complicated legacy invokes pride, prejudice
PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Four centuries after white Europeans stepped off the Mayflower onto America’s shores, some descendants of the colonists are wrestling with the complicated legacy of their ancestors.
There is immense pride among those who can trace their families back to the passengers who boarded the ship in 1620 in Plymouth, England, to f lee religious persecution and realize a better life. Yet for some, the devastating impact on Native Americans of the Pilgrims’ landing in New England weighs heavily during this period of unrest over systemic racism.
In interviews with the Associated Press, Americans and Britons who can trace their ancestry to either the Pilgrims or the Indigenous people who helped them survive talked openly about the need in 2020, the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival, to fairly tell the history.
“Considering my ancestors helped incite the racial hierarchies that caused the need for these movements now, I do feel ashamed that that had to be part of history,” said Olivia Musoke, 19, whose ancestor on her mother’s side arrived in America on the Mayflower.
The U.S. was embroiled in civil unrest this summer, with protesters demanding justice for George Floyd and other Black Americans
killed or injured by police.
Musoke, whose father is Black, said the pride she feels in coming from people who helped settle this country “gets diminished by the role they played in kind of manipulating and terrorizing people of color, which trickled down to the structures we have today.”
For some, it’s a difficult issue to reconcile.
“The Pilgrims came out of religious persecution in England. And I’m very proud of the fact that they
set off to create their own independent culture,” said Seth Howland Handy, 53, another descendant of a Mayflower passenger. “But they came to a place where there was existing culture. And, you know, the history is not friendly, and that is troublesome.”
Handy said it’s more important than ever to “recognize everyone’s role in our history and the great diversity of this country.”
Ginny Mucciacco, 90, a descendant of Mayflower
passenger Degory Priest, admires the Pilgrims’ work ethic.
“To have this tie to our early history is really, I won’t say it’s a privilege, an honor. But it’s just something to be proud of, because so many of them worked so hard for so many years to help establish this country. And it’s just very important to me,” said Mucciacco, of Dedham, Mass.
Mayflower descendants in England say they, too, are trying to reconcile pride and prejudice.
Vicky Cosstick, a Briton whose ancestors John Alden and Priscilla Mullins were passengers, said she is troubled by the suffering the Indigenous people endured — but she doesn’t feel guilt.
“I’m of course horrified and appalled to know what happened as a result of British colonialism in America and what happened to their Native American tribes and the Wampanoags,” Cosstick said.
“It’s not as if they went to America in order to steal land from an Indigenous population,” she added. “Much of it was clearly wrong, but there are many stories that need to be told. And I think the anniversary gives a chance for all of those stories to be told.”
When the Pilgrims arrived at what we now know as Plymouth, Mass., the Wampanoag tribe helped the exhausted settlers survive their first winter. But Native Americans endured racism, oppression and new diseases brought by the European settlers.
Native Americans have long pushed for the unvarnished stories of their ancestors to be heard.
“We were exposed to disease. We were exposed to slavery. I mean, what happened here was people who came not just for religion — that might have been their purpose of leaving their homeland — but they came here and wanted to wipe out the existence of a whole culture,” said Hazel Harding
Currence, 78, of the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Organizers of events planned this year to commemorate the anniversary pledged to amplify the voices of the Wampanoag, which have been marginalized in the past. Fifty years ago, Massachusetts officials disinvited a leader of the Wampanoag Nation to the commemoration after learning that his speech would bemoan the tribe’s suffering.
This year, many anniversary events were canceled or postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We should have never been treated the way that we were, our ancestors,” Currence said. “I think that if they were here now, if they were looking down on us, I think they’d be very proud at the movement that’s going forward now.”
Although the coronavirus has put a damper on events surrounding the anniversary, some of the Wampanoag say they’re hopeful that new awareness of systemic racism in the U.S. will help their voices and stories be heard.
“It’s opening up everyone else’s eyes to how unbalanced the world is and unequal,” said Currence’s son Troy Currence, a medicine man for the Herring Pond Wampanoag.
“The world is spinning out of control,” he said. “So I think more people are going to be aware and more sensitive and open to receiving a message like that.”