3. created by america's television company, today we are brought to you by these television companies who provide this as a public service. the nantucket historical association hosted this event and provided the video. >> hello. >> that means good morning, friends. in my language. good morning, friends. good morning, friends. how are you doing today?

all right, good morning, richard. my name is darius coombs, i am mashpee wampanoag and also have nantucket ties to here. my people have been around this area, massachusetts, for over 12,000 years. as you heard from the last speaker. and we are still here today. okay? now, what i am going to do today is like, wampanoag is a culture of people. 1 out of over 1000 indigenous cultures going across north america. what makes wampanoag different, from the other 1000? it could be language. it could be diet. it could be the housing we lived in. one common bond we all have is how we think about life in general. we respect all forms of life. be it human life, plant life, animal life. we do not put ourselves above or below that. that is one thing we have all in common. i do a lot of teaching, right?

i ask people, what race do we come from? the human race. right? so we should all respect each other. and that is rule of thumb for my people. like i said, we have been here for 12,000 years. that is me up there, my lovely wife, who teaches language. also right next to me. what i am going to do is i'm going to bring you to a year, 1613, before any major interruption in our culture. okay? i am going to bring you to our new year's. you think about our new year's, a lot of people's new year's starts january 1st. our new year starts when everything comes to life. now think about it, when does everything come to life? >>springtime. >> that is when the birds start

chirping. that is when the oak leaf comes out. that just makes sense. everything is new again. on our new year, we thank mother earth, we thank the creator for having another earth, because because it is not guaranteed. we do a lot of dancing. we do a lot of feasting. we do a lot of socializing. but once that happens, we know we have to get to work. and these are the types of houses we live in during the summertime. the spring and summer. we live in a single family home during the summer. because we needed our space for planting. these reeds right here are cattails. it is a water plant. maybe on plymouth plantation, same as richard, we have been doing this for years. everything we do at the museum, we do ourselves. so we go out and gather cattails late august and september and we make these in the winter. they will last maybe three to five years. they are waterproof. they have a cup to it, so it

acts like a natural funnel. and these houses would hold one family. it is different from a european family back then. a european family is husband, wife, kids. our family has husband, wife, kids, aunts, grandparents. you're looking at three or four generations inside one house. that is one big thing that was different. so we would have englishmen come into our houses and say, this guy has five wives. maybe, but maybe not. but then again, not realizing what they are looking at, possibly. what they are looking at is sisters, grandmothers, aunts, so that is what my job is, to break it down what it means for wampanoag people and indigenous cultures. so those are the houses we lived in over the summer.

and what we do over the summer, now, this is our planting field. everybody loves corn, beans and squash. we call them the three sisters. who takes care of the field? the women. the women are considered to be the givers of life. they also give life to mother earth. so, you look at the planting fields. it has a mound. i don't know if you can see the mound. it is symbolic to a woman's stomach when she gives life. when do you plant corn? you have to wait for different signs of nature. once the herring stops to run, you wait until the next new moon. the reason you do it on the new moon, the new moon draws gravity up, so it helps the corn seed grow. so you plant corn, corn takes nitrogen out of the ground, and you plant the beans right next to it. the beans add nitrogen back into the ground. it will wrap around the stalk

of the corn. vegetables would represent half to two-thirds of the diet. nantucket, probably a lot more seafood. wampanoag culture makes up a large part of massachusetts. going as far west as worcester, parts of rhode island. all the islands, nantucket, martha's vineyard. let me mention some names to you. because back then we had about 70 wampanoag communities. nantucket sound familiar? sias constant? mattapoisett? pocasset? mashpee? knaufit? these are name places and town names, but they have always been wampanoag communities. okay? and at one time, we numbered

over 100,000. today is about 12,000. and we will get back into that a little bit later, right?so that is a planting field. and what is next -- we know that mom is taking care of the field. they are considered to be the givers of life. what do the kids do? what do the kids do during the spring and the summer? this is my daughter right here, one of my daughters. this is her in this picture when she was 11 years old, maybe 10. and that is her younger sister, storm, with her. and what she is doing is picking sumac. sumac, you pick those berries, you boil them, and that has three times as much vitamin c as orange juice does. kids were allowed to be kids. they helped out a little bit, but they had fun. they played games, they went swimming, they had running races. they joked around. a person could go through four or five different names in a lifespan.

right? as you would change as a person, your name was changed to fit how you are. you would not pick the names yourself. we still have medicine people in our community that give us names depending on how we are. let's talk about my daughter. what does the name mean? it means one who lifts up. it is not because she is physically strong and all that, but she wakes up in good mood almost every single day. when she wakes up in a good mood, she raises the house so everybody feels good. so you give the name depending on the person. but kids were given more responsibility as they matured. this is me and my lovely wife. we did a lot of fishing back then. still do today. still big part of the culture. saw a lot of men going ocean fishing, freshwater fishing. a lot of women would get shellfish, clams,mussels,

crabs. the biggest fish we would go for -- i am not sure if it was ever here, but large parts of wampanoag country, any idea what the biggest fish was? that would go in the river and ocean, back and forth? 20, 30-foot in length sometimes? somebody said it, i think. sturgeon. sturgeon. and sturgeon, they are a big fish, right? we go fishing for these fish at nighttime. they would range anywhere from a 9-41 men boat to a boat that was big enough to carry 40 men. we have three different recordings of europeans seeing the boatssailed in the nantucket island. not paddled, sailed. we paddled too. we pulled along the shore. when we went for the sturgeon,

we would have torches on the end of our boats. the light of the torch would attract the sturgeon and they would flip over on their bellies and we would spear them. a lot of the time, the fish got bigger than the boat. so you could not put the fish inside the boat. so you would drag it to the shore. salmon was another fish. flounder. cod. they are so thick. lobster, not a big deal. we used lobster for fishing bait. times have changed. we had so much lobster -- i'm not saying we did not eat lobster. it was common. go back 100 years ago, lobster was fed to the prisoners in jail. every single day. the prisoners had a big uprising and they said we are sick of this, we don't want no

more. there was a law made in massachusetts you could only feed lobster to prisoners twice a week. if you did it more than that, it was considered inhumane. in 1623, governor bradford had a ship come in and he was so embarrassed, he saidsaid, i'm very sorry, this is all the lobster we have for you guys. not a big deal. today, different meaning. we did a lot of fishing during the summer. this is different from the women who give life. that is where we did the majority of the fishing. after harvest time, we think about going inland. we want to go inland, a little bit away from the ocean. i know it is hard to do in nantucket. you get protection from the wind and from the ocean. inland would be half a mile, maybe a mile. these are the houses we lived in. we heard the names for long houses. they are bark-covered houses. normally, during the winter, these houses could be anywhere

from 100-foot long, to one of the biggest houses we found. when we found the footprint of this house, this footprint was found out in worcester. the footprint of this was 300- foot in length -- 320-foot in length and 60-foot width. i tell kids if you don't know what that means, think of a football field. that is how big the house was. the frames were made out of cedar. okay? the outside bark normally was elm. we don't have those trees around here anymore, so we use tulip poplar today. we used to use white ash. unfortunately you have the bug these days that is wiping out those trees. we will talk about that in a minute. the men did the hunting. like i said, the men were the takers of life.

and we hunt for the deer, for big game. there was a lot of deer around here at one time. on the mainland, we go for black bear, moose, elk, for big game. small animals, you guys like the taste of skunk? anybody? that is a good answer. never tried it. skunk is considered to be a wampanoag delicacy. how do you catch a skunk? very carefully, right? >> [ laughter ] >>you get two boys. one boy would be in front of the skunk distracting him. hey, skunky, right? you get the other boy, sneak up on him from behind, grab his tail and lift him up. in order for a skunk to spray, he has to be on all fours. put pressure on his hind legs, and he will release those stink glands. in the air, they cannot do that. you have a club, you bang them over the head, then you carefully cut them open and take his stink glands out. you take care because if you

puncture the stink glands, you will not be welcome in the community for a while. i have not tried it, but some elders say you take that gland of a skunk, you break it open and you rub it on your arthritis, it works. >> [ laughter ] >>i do not have arthritis yet. they do not sell that in drugstores yet. in the winter, the women do a lot of the weaving. we are known for our weaving. the wampanoag people. some ofour weavers are some of the best in the world. some of their work is in the smithsonian in washington, d.c. there is a woman, a relative of mine, wampanoag, and her work is in the smithsonian in d.c. now how did we use string? a lot of people say, you guys have string? yeah, we made string. how did we make string? we used different plants. we used milkweed.

we use dogweed. we take stalks, pull them out of the ground, open it up, take the inner fibers out. when the colonizers got here they noticed wampanoag women making string so fast that their eyes could not keep up with them. then we would dye them with different berries and roots for the coloring. we have small bags like you see here, and we also have large bushel bags to store vegetables over the winter. this right here is the interior of a house. that is actually all my daughters right there. three out of my four. i have four daughters and no boys. that is my oldest daughter. i want to break out for a second. i want to tell you where these pictures come from. we have worked with scholastic quite a bit over the years.

in 2016, they came and said, can we make a video? and put this video across every third grade classroom across the united states? sure. we set up a script. he did the colonial side, i did the wampanoag side, and we showed how wampanoag kids lived back then. in the 17th century and before. and it leads up to what they do today. it shows them riding their bikes, playing on the playground, wearing clothes like they do today. that is what kids relate to. they think we are gone. just because we wear different clothing today at times, we are still here. i do a lot of teaching. this video is literally in every third grade classroom in the united states. sometimes i walk into these third grade classes and they are playing the video. it is called "the wampanoag way." you can google it. i play the father in it. i am dressed up in 17th-century skin. and when i walked into one classroom, i see a boy watching

the video on the screen, he sees me walking in, he said, yo, you are storm's dad. yeah, i am. it was a real moment. inside these houses, we have bedding. we don't sleep on the ground. we have furs and mats on the beds. the houses got really big, round-shaped, really warm. our houses get to 70 degrees. rule of thumb when you're making the houses, i build them, every 10-feet or so you want to have a fire pit on the inside. that is just to keep you warm during the winter. it is a round shape. you can't really see on the walls, but we have bulrush mats on the walls. you had bark, interior frame, then you have your mats. you have the one-foot gap. because the way the house is shaped like a dome, the heat is

going to rise. go down underneath the mats, force the cold air to the middle, and that keeps the warm air going around in circles. when the europeans got here and went inside of our houses, they said the houses were so warm, they saw native children run outside naked in the winter. and jumping into the snow. so it did get quite warm. we lived like that for thousands of years. we went through that cycle. the following spring, we celebrate new year's again. we needed space for planting. no need for the winter. why not gather back together and be more communal. in a winter community during winter, it holds anywhere from 300 to say 3000 people. before disease hit. that was before any major interruption. all right? that was the cycle real quick. let's call that 1613, right?

one thing i want to say real quick is you hear the term lost survival for native people. how could you survive back that? well, we have been doing this for 12,000 years. you just don't rollover in bed one morning and say, geez, where am i going to get food today? there is a system already set up, generations long before, and people knew how to fish. so like i said, we call that 1513. let's move to 1614. there was trading going on. the first european traders that were here was back in 1524. the trades started blooming early 1600s. back in 1614 though, guys, when trading happened, the english, french, dutch, wanted a lot of

otter pelts, beaver pelts. that is what the made the hats in europe out of. but what happened in 1614, there was an english captain named thomas hunt. he came downthe coast. remember this date, 1614. he came down the coast and he went to an area called plymouth today. in what we call patuxet. there was a thriving wampanoag community, probably over 1000 people. that is how you described yourself back then. if you are traveling to patuxet and you said, hey, what are you, they would probably not say wampanoag. they would describe themselves as the community they are from. they would say i am a patuxet, what are you? but when thomas came to the

patuxet, he took 19 patuxet slaves. a lot of people think african- americans when they think of slavery. this happened to our people, too. this is six years before the pilgrims arrived. he took 19 patuxet, went down to the cape, took eight more. sold from there, the remainder was sold to england. one of those guys sold to england was squanto. have you heard of squanto? he lived in england with a merchant named john sweeney. he lived there for five years. he gained some kind of status. he learned a lot about english culture. he knew how to speak english fluently over those five years. but what happened to squanto, there was a wealthy man over there who was funding a lot of these trips, asking who is from this area that was called plimoth patuxet. they said squanto is. where is he? he is up in newfoundland. with captain nathan.

sogo get him. i want to do another adventure. so he sends thomas to pick up squanto. mind you, this is 1619. almost five years. he has not seen his home since 1614. he's picked up in newfoundland in 1619 by thomas. they come down the coast, stop at mohegan island off of maine, pick up a sagamore, a chief in his own language. he knew how to speak english, knew a lot of the english captains back then , okay? by name. he dealt with a lot of traders prior. as they were going down the coast in 1619, they saw something extremely devastating. the most devastating thing that ever happened to our people, disease. there was a major epidemic that happen between 1616 and 1618, 1619, when squanto was in england. this plague, the skin turned yellow, people got open sores on their bodies, and they died within two or three days once

they got it. it wiped out the native populationall along the coast. anywhere from 70% to 80% were wiped out within two or three years. that plague did not affect a lot of people on the islands. like nantucket, the vineyards. because it is hard for disease to go over water. that is why some people were protected from the plague. but what we know about the plague, okay, hepatitis,skin turning yellow, open sores. disease control came out 10 years ago and they believed it was leptospirosis. they believed the french trade

ships coming over, and they had rats on these trade ships. and the feces of the rats get into the water system. causes an infectious liver disease. that is what the theory is now. i always say this every time i talk. you can put whatever name you want on it, it does not matter to me. what i do know is it was the most devastating thing that ever happened to our people. period. so as he is coming down the coast with squanto, they come to patuxet. they find out patuxet was pretty much devastated. imagine that? squanto coming back home, finds out all his people are dead. is that going to change you as a person? i think so. they end up going to the vineyard. there was a leader in the vineyard, he was also taken over to england. he made it back, though. how he made it back was in 1614, they were asking him too, is there gold on the island you come from? he was a chief. he was not dumb. he started thinking, yeah, there is gold. if you bring me back home, i

will tell you where the gold is at. in 1614, they brought him back home. that is when he yelled out something in his native tongue which the english did not understand. they attacked the ship and he was able to swim to shore. he made it home. another ship coming in in 1619. so he is home for five years. he is thinking these people might be coming to get me again. there is another fight that breaks out. he gets injured quite badly. squanto, somehow is released. we don't know how but they got loose. they end up in a massive slave community. a lot of people think the great wampanoag leader. like i said, there were 70 wampanoag communities. what we know for sure is he was the leader of the strongest wampanoag community.

it is in bristol warren, rhode island today. squanto ends up there. let's fast track to 1620. the pilgrims are arriving. they final settle in what is plymouth today. december, 1620. they had a really bad year that winter. a lot of people died. from what i hear, february was the deadliest month. they were building their homes. they settled there because there was good water. it was cleared out already. it was a two days walk away, 40 miles west of plymouth. he heard about these people building homes. one thing we were used to, we were always used to people, europeans coming over here. the only thing we were not used to were people coming over and staying. that was different. what made these people different is they brought their women and children. that might have meant a friendlier type of people.

but they did not know. you know? sohe calls him over, come here. you speak english, right? sure. why don't you go to these people, find out why these people are building their homes. he was a leader, he was not dumb. he was probably thinking, this guy can speak english. he is also not one of my men. i do not know what is going to happen to him. come march 16, 1621, he walks into the pilgrim village. they considered him to be naked. he did not have this much clothing on. he had on just a beach cloth. he goes in and he goes, welcome, englishmen. in their own language. we are still shocked at seeing a native person speaking was to them. he told him about the land, about the area, and about the plague that just came through.

he actually stayed in a house that evening. he gave them help that evening. they carefully watched him overnight. he goes, you know what? i'm not from here. i'm going to bring you a leader who is. so he goes back and tells another to come along. later on in march, he comes along and brings 60 of his men. that is when they make the famous treaty between the two people, the peace treaty of diplomacy. you think about it, i mentioned the plague coming down the coast. that plague stopped them in their tracks right before people started their territory. any thoughts about that, why it stopped right there? we have two good thoughts. they did not like each other for generations before they were europeans here. down there, you have a large body of water called for

diseases it is hard to go over water. but then again, they were seeing that the wampanoag were depleting in numbers. one of the leaders was probably thinking, i will start to attack. the community was located on the border of the narragansetts. the chief came out and one needed each other because how you really felt here, it was not one universal answer. you have to go from community to community. if your brother was taken as a slave by traders prior, are you going to be happy? no. there were leaders who were not happy. but they had a lot of power. basically it is a peace treaty saying if you go to war, i will help you out, and if we go to war, you treaty lasted for 55 years with no major conflict or

war. later on in 1621, that is when squanto comes to live and stay with the colonists and he teaches them how to plant corn. that is what he is famous for. teaches them how to plant corn. that is what he is in the textbooks about. like i said, squanto was a changed person. he liked having power. he had a lot of power back then. he died in 1622. but in that two years, he caused a lot of drama. he liked having power. he died in 1622. in those two years, he caused a lot of drama. you better watch out, bradford wants to attack. and then he would run back and say the same thing. he sent his men to plymouth and wanted squanto's head delivered back to him. he is thinking,i should do

this. this could be one of the first breaks of the treaty. if one does something wrong to the other, you have to turn that person over. the ship coming in the water and governor bradford was distracted. the guys got frustrated and went back home. squanto died in 1622. that evening, when he was in one of the houses, squanto had a nosebleed that would not stop. it was called indian fever back then. some type of hemorrhaging going on. he asked the english if he would be accepted into their gods. he knew what he was doing. this guy does not get much praise in the textbooks.

if it was not for this guy, history would've been different today. he made the treaty with the english in 1621, he needed somebody else, he needed an ambassadorship out here. he lived with his family of over 10 people. he was the closest native the english considered to be a friend. they did not say much about his family. they say he had more than one wife, i wish i knew one of his wives' names. she plays a big role in diplomacy. they never give her a name. they do not say much about his family structure.

we are guessing he lived in a home like he was used to. he kept peace between the two people. he was one considered to counsel about war. a lot of times they are considered indestructible. how do you become this? you are chosen from childhood, and you have special qualities. special people choose you. you are given a stone knife. you go into the woods alone for a whole winter. he was highly respected amongst the people. he kept other people, you know, close. he was a key role player. let's skip up a little bit. if you have ever been on my homeland, this is the oldest

meet house in the united states. it was built in 1864. we have heard a lot about praying towns. learning about the king james bible. one of my relatives knew the bible so well, he was preaching it to non-native people. there was a chief who called him out. he says, whatare you doing? we have our own ways of doing things. why are you teaching something different? and literally punched him in the face. but he continued to preach. he actually made it over here, to nantucket. we will talk about what he did. it was the first praying town. you had lemahieu's, the cottonwood, you had john elliott.

do i have what i am looking for here? i want to talk about this. back when the town was being formed, john elliott was a missionary up there, right? he was teaching native people, and these two guys would have been the first graduating class ofharvard university back in 1665. one graduated. caleb did. joel did not. the reason he did not graduate, two weeks before graduation, he went over to martha's vineyard. on the way back, he stopped in nantucket and he got killed. it was probably his own people who did it.

christianity -- you had a lot of traditionalists still here. i always say about the praying indians,you do not know what they were going through unless you walk a mile in their moccasins. i never judge them. what harvard did back in 2011, they invited my family and gave us a posthumous degree in his name, which harvard rarely does. and this is it right here. when elliott was teaching the bible to native people, he felt like the native people were not picking up the religion quickly enough. being that the king james bible was written in english. so what he did,he hired native interpreters. there is a really good story, back in the 1990s, there was a woman from my community.

she was a vice chair, right? she was having dreams. she said people were coming into her dreams and speaking a different tongues. this happened night after night after night. and one of her dreams, the people spokeenglish to her. they said the wampanoag had the chance to get the language back, would they say yes? she went to m.i.t., graduated with a degree in linguistics and started to piece the language back together again. what helped a great deal was that bible. that king james bible. we have one of the first editions in our grasp today .my

wife is one of the teachers of the language. we teach pre-k up to third grade and every year we add a grade to it. three years ago, the wampanoag is taught as an accredited course, like english, french, and portuguese. if you lose your culture, you lose part of your identity. nobody likes war. the war broke out. what i can tell you, 1657, that is when two of the big leaders lost their lives. so you got the next generation coming up, which did not care for each other. people thought of ownership and the other people did not think

of ownership of the land. one culture would build fences around where they lived and the other culture would walk across what they would call their backyard. for a native person, they are thinking, what do you mean i can't be here no more? i don't get that. that was the reason, you know? in 1675, the bloodiest war per capita in new england. it lasted in massachusetts about a year or so. that guy was something to reckon with. he actually heard on nantucket, a native person talking bad about him. he took his canoe and paddled

out here to confront this person. he asked people on the island to join in on the war. it lasted about a year. it ended up with benjamin church , led by a native guy, august 12th, 1676. when they found him, they dismantled him, took his head off, took his arms limb by limb and threw it around. took his head back to plymouth and put it on a post. what are they going to do with his wife and kids? a lot of these people were sold as slaves. a lot of these people were sold down to bermuda. one of the islands down there. andthose people still have

their cultural identity. they know who they are. we as wampanoag go down and visit them. july 4th weekend, if you are around. it is kind of cool. moving forward to what happened here. there is a large population of 400 or so people in nantucket. in 1764, they wiped outtwo- thirds of the population. what happened to these people afterwards? a lot of people might have taken off to martha's vineyard. people were spread out.

a lot of people say, if it was not recorded, it's not true. if it is not written down, it is not true. so that happened. you guys heard of president jackson? yes. 1830, he wanted to remove all native people, west of the mississippi. oklahoma was one of the states. those agents came around here, too. they wanted us out west in oklahoma. and there was one non-native voice that stood up. his name was john adams. he said, if you bring these people out west, they are going to die. the reason they will die is they rely onseafood for their diet, and they believed him. that is why we were left alone.

the last two they say, it indians in nantucket, who knows? that was the perspective of some people's lenses. they died within several weeks. what else do we got here? this is kind of cool, right here. we might be doing this next year. seriously. we just got a 40-footwhite pine log. we are going to make a 20-man boat. this picture is from 2002 in martha's vineyard. back in the 90s, right, i have

been at the museum for a while. we all wanted to stay on this big 30 foot boat. we looked at each other and said let's raise for each other. we took the to 12 foot boats. he took one and i took another and went across the river. we had to see who made it back first. it looked like speedboats. he beat me by have a boat length. this trip took a lot of planning, right? it's to three years of

planning. we finally made the trip. it involved --, waupun all of course. we left august 18th of 2002. we had -- we landed over it was a straight shot. we had to get to half of my. i will also tell you there was nobody living who could say how long this was going to take you. any guesses in the crowd?

an hour and a half. absolutely correct. when we made this trip we kind of be to the ferry. those people had to take a shuttle to the ferry, take the ferry over to new haven, then take another shuttle to the beach. and we had to be there by half hour. we will have a big celebration and dancing and singing when you guys arrive. we were excited. i remember paddling in, that day we left it was really cloudy. we were coming and all the fog broke and i am paddling in and am like, where is everybody? we were wearing watches so we

did not know how long it was taking us. we studied people on the beach in bathing suits. eight sunbathers from nebraska. [ laughter ] the first thing out of their mounts was like, you have to do this every day? i go this has not been done in a couple of hundred years. we got this 40 foot boat we were going to be making. when they is having nantucket. mind being --. what that meant for our people was okay, now they only give you 25 acres but now we are going to tax you on it. yeah. that means a different term in

my language. we lost a lot of our land like that. cape cod became cape cod. not until the 90s. it was the fastest developing town in massachusetts in the 90s. today we literarily got recognized by the u.s. government as a people. what we do today we have programs. we do our powwow which is july 4th weekend.

we did it for my brother who passed away back in 97. he got killed in rhode island. i want to show you something. haven't visited here about 8-10 years. we went out to up the road. my grandparents were raised your. my grandfather moved here from mashpee. my grandmother born 1895 and passed away in 1964. she had a stillborn son 1919.

i visited the grounds yesterday, right. i googled indians of nantucket. i came across a picture that i had in my living room. this was my grandmother. there wasn't a name underneath it. that is ruth west, my grandmother. she passed away in 1964. this is one woman at first i can find her in the records so i am going to keep digging and see what i find. thank you guys. any questions? that is my story you guys.

up next on history a bookshelf to mark the 400th anniversary of the program's arrival in plymouth, massachusetts nathaniel on his book mayflower a story of courage, community and were. he details the complex relationship between the english settlers and the indians describing the first things giving celebration and the early years of new england. we recorded this in plymouth, massachusetts in 2006 the year the book was published. >> my name is peggy baker. i am the director of the museum and i would like to welcome you all here tonight for what is a grand occasion for all of us. because we are in essence gathered to celebrate the first well the written comprehensive narrative about plymouthol