NE OF the first stories many people hear about Native Americans is the Pilgrims’ arrival in 1620. After a difficult year, the ne’w settlers and
Their Indian neighbors celebrated with a feast, thus starting the American tradition of giving.
In 1970 Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag tribe that had befriended the Pilgrims, was asked to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Europeans’ arrival in America. To James and many others, the giving holiday was a time of sorrow. The Wampanoag had welcomed these new people and helped them adjust, yet within 50 years of their meeting.
The Wampanoag were almost wiped out by guns and diseases brought by the new settlers.
It was a tale repeated often between Native American nations and European Americans in the United States. Europeans from England, Erance, the Netherlands, and other countries began arriving on the East Coast in large numbers during the i6oos. At the time, two language groups of Native Americans were the primary inhabitants of the Northeast, the region that would become the original 13 colonies. They were the Algonquian-speaking people and the Iroquois-speaking people.
World History
