“We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the White man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people,” Wamsutta’s speech read. “What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years?”
Wamsutta said historically the White man had given plenty of false promises, mostly focused on land. Ten years later, the Puritans came to Wamsutta’s people. A group intended to push people toward Christianity and a Protestant lifestyle was anything but as Wamsutta wrote.
“They treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called ‘savages,'” Wamsutta wrote. “Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other ‘witch.'”
Wamsutta continued to emphasize the inaccurate betrayal of native Americans.
“History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal,” Wamsutt wrote. “Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.”
