[music playing] Winter, 1620.
The coastal winds are howling, and the ocean currents raging.
At first glance, the land appears deserted, although native inhabitants have already lived here for generations.
They called it Patuxet.
We now know it is Plymouth.
Suddenly, through the misty gale, a battered wooden ship with just over 100 people glides into view.
The exhausted crew and passengers anxiously scan the shoreline.
The waters are teeming with fish.
The woods full of game, but where are the people?
There is evidence of a settlement, but the inhabitants are gone.
A great loss.
A great loss of population.
You know, estimates ranged anywhere from 75% to 95% of the population was wiped out.
There were unburied people, skeletons here in Patuxet.
All those people that were just dying by tens of thousands.
Great dying was really an astronomical loss for the Indigenous people in New England.
I mean, some places you have numbers as high as 90% of the population being killed by this illness.
The incredible death toll was caused by a mysterious plague, a pre-colonial sickness raging among Indigenous people unprepared for the horror they faced.
Quite simply, most of those who once lived on this coast, the vast majority had died.
On this site here, which was Patuxet, there were about 2,000 people who lived here before in 1616.
There were zero people who lived here in 1620 when the Mayflower showed up.
This doesn't mean every single person died.
Probably, there were survivors who moved to join other villages further inland, but you can get the idea that the communities were decimated by this plague.
For the Wampanoag and for the people that were Indigenous of this region 400 years ago, it didn't care.
Those people had absolutely no immunities.
They had no idea what was happening to them.
The pilgrims on board the Mayflower had their own problems, many of them close to death already from a combination of starvation, exposure, and the ill effects of weeks at sea.
But they would not be prepared for what they discovered when they stepped on shore.
They would find structures that had been-- houses that people had lived in that were left abandoned or fields that were clearly had been subtended at one point where overgrown.
This is a story of death on a massive scale, but it's also a tale of survival, then and now.
[inaudible], how are you?
Good, how are you?
Good.
All right, I'm going to have you have a seat.
We'll get a set of vital signs on you, we'll get moving.
All right, awesome.
400 years later, history is repeating itself for Paula Peters and her fellow members of the Wampanoag tribe.
Her ancestors lived at Patuxet, and their settlement was perhaps hardest hit by that 1600s plague.
And now, like the rest of us, they deal with COVID and the historical echoes are painful.
Here, we are 400 years later, and we're being confronted with this illness that there's no known source or cure for.
Treatments are just falling short.
People are dying.
It was very much reminiscent of what I'd read about in history that it happened to our people 400 years ago.
So what happened in those years right before 1620?
What was this plague, and where did it come from, and how would it change the world?
Centuries later, what lessons are remembered by Native Americans and how is it different this time for all of us?
[music playing] What would come to be known as New England was home to an extremely large Indigenous community, from coastal regions, inland, to the forests and mountains.
A population about to be devastated beyond belief.
What most people don't realize or pick up on is that it's the vibrant community that was here in the pure population numbers as well as how well we were integrated into the land itself.
We're talking perhaps 100,000 people who lived in that area when the plague hit, so it's a fairly well populated area for the Eastern coast of North America at that time.
One of those coastal population centers was here in what is now modern day Gloucester, Massachusetts.
In the early 1600s, the French Explorer Champlain found thriving Indigenous communities here, still untouched by the plague that was to come.
This would have been the website of a really vibrant village.
As I said, Champlain describes seeing smoke from fires the entire way down this coast, and he describes fields filled with people who are growing pumpkins, who are growing corn, who are growing Jerusalem artichokes or sun chokes, who are gathering fish.
What's the best guess on how long the Indigenous people might have been here?
Tens of thousands of years.
There's already archaeological artifacts here going back millennia.
This and was is a native homeland.
Champlain's maps are really interesting, because he-- in addition to depicting things like the landscape and the sounding depths of the various bays, he also depicts Indigenous peoples and their houses and their villages on the shores.
So you get the sense that when he visited, there are people here everywhere.
[music playing] This team of archeologists from the University of New Hampshire is combing a salt marsh and finding evidence of an Indigenous settlement from colonial times.
Oh, ho-ho.
That's awesome.
But they also believe this area of coastal New Hampshire was populated long before that.
Oh, I think people were present in this landscape definitely for thousands of years, yes.
In this whole Great Bay estuary there are sites, and this is part of this huge estuary, one of the largest estuaries in the Atlantic.
The Great Bay.
It's a really unique ecosystem, and there are sites that date from the Paleoindian period up until the contemporary-- till contact.
That contact came sometime in the 1500s when European fishermen and traders arrived off the coast to the North.
Interactions between Indigenous people and those new arrivals appear to have been the gateway or the sickness.
Started in what is now Maine, so among the Abenaki people and around the Saco River is where the first signs of it are picked up, and then all the way to Cape Cod.
We've been warming.
We're just going to drum and have a good time.
If people want to dance, they dance.
If they don't, they don't.
To the North in Vermont, the Abenaki people say this horrific illness took a terrible toll.
Lives were lost, but something else too.
When you lose almost an entire race of people due to an invisible disease, I mean, you lose the underlying pinning of your community.
I mean, it wiped out entire villages.
I mean, it just took away so much knowledge and so much culture.
[non-english chanting] Just like today, your biggest impact with any epidemic is usually your elders who are the most vulnerable.
And in the culture where there's no written history, it's all oral, those are your encyclopedias.
So it was a great number of cultural aspects that we lost, and to this day we still haven't regained, because you don't know what you don't know.
We don't know what we lost because it was lost at that time.
400 years later, it's hard to know exactly what this horrific sickness was, but there are theories.
It certainly came from European ships.
I think that much is certain.
The best guess I'd say right now is leptospirosis, which is carried by rats.
And it could very well have come from the French ships which traded very, very extensively from the coast of Maine with the Abenaki people down to this region among the Wampanoags here and on Cape Cod as well.
The sad truth is we may never know exactly what it was.
It doesn't seem to have been a particular physical illness.
So smallpox, when people survive, they're left with a disfigurement, and so you can often say, well, that was smallpox.
But a lot of these other illnesses that are striking Native Americans at the time, influenza, measles, these aren't things that leave physical marks, and so you can see that people have died but the sense of what caused it and therefore where it came from is kind of anyone's guess.
The European sailors had built up immunity unlike the Indigenous people.
And their own customs, the customs of the people were to gather and to pray over the people who were sick.
So it was in their custom beliefs to spread the disease even quicker and without even really knowing it.
The pilgrims did not bring this plague to these shores.
It came years earlier, but the Great Dying did give Plymouth Colony a foothold.
Obviously, that first winter that the Mayflower passengers were here, so many of them had died.
Just due to exposure and sickness and just weakness.
Not having enough to sustain themselves.
And at the same time, the Wampanoag who had just endured the previous decade of dealing with illnesses and sickness and the Great Dying.
The great Wampanoag Sachem Massasoit, Ousamequin, was well aware of where his people stood.
It was better to align himself with the colonists because we had been decimated.
60% of our population had been decimated, so we lacked the-- that wasn't an option to stage a military effort against them.
Pandemics and plagues have altered history throughout the ages, and it was no different at Patuxet.
The Wampanoag were now threatened by other tribes who were not as impacted by the sickness.
So the Wampanoag needed an ally.
That's where the Pilgrims came in.
Once the plague hit and once they had these massive population losses, it just wasn't-- it wasn't as easy to resist English colonialism as it would have been.
And I think that changed everything in terms of the trajectory of the history of this region.
I don't think they would have been welcomed.
I think that the ship would have been likely turned away and they would have been instructed to go find somewhere else to colonize.
To make matters worse, some of those who came to colonize thought the Great Dying was driven by a higher power.
A lot of the European claim to the territory was that God had cleared the land for them, and so there's a real vested interest.
In 1629, for example, John Winthrop writes an explanation.
I forget the exact title, but it's like, by what by what claim do we take these lands?
And he says that these were clear.
This is when he calls these miraculous plagues.
It's really upsetting from a modern perspective to read this idea that such a devastating illness came in and killed so many people and then you had the people coming later said, well, clearly it was providential that this happened.
And it's something that even William Bradford writes about that.
He writes about how God had forsaken these poor savages so that they could have their colony, their settlement there.
The new arrivals from England were not totally without sympathy.
Bradford also called the empty Indigenous homes and skeletal remains a very sad spectacle to behold.
And later on, when Massasoit was sick and close to death from a different illness, Pilgrim Edward Winslow was said to have saved his life by bringing him soup and treating him.
And the only image we have of a Pilgrim.
Pilgrim scholar Sue Allen says, there was a tenuous coexistence for a number of years.
It must have taken so much trust for the Indigenous people to trust these English incomers, especially after what they'd experienced in the past.
It's like a once bitten, twice shy, but they did.
They opened their hearts up and trusted, and on both sides you have this relationship.
So what are you expecting with those two?
Trust can also be hard to find in modern times.
An ultimate cure for COVID is proving elusive, but of course, there is a vaccine.
Still, vaccine hesitancy is a fact of life for some Indigenous people.
The same type of mistrust that the general population has in terms of a lot of misinformation about the science behind it but within a lot of Native American communities, there's also a mistrust of the government in general.
And since that's where the push is coming from for the vaccine, there's just the natural instinct to be leery about it.
We know that disease was weaponized in American history.
We know that there was medical experimentation on Native American peoples into the 20th century.
Medicine has not been a neutral thing for Native Americans.
Despite that vaccine hesitancy, tribal leaders are working to rebuild trust.
I felt really strongly about taking the vaccine about being vaccinated, because I felt like I owed it to my next generation.
1, 2, 3.
Imagine if 400 years ago, the Wampanoag had had a vaccine or some kind of cure for that Great Dying what a different place we'd be today.
[non-english chanting] Other Indigenous people also took a leap of faith.
Abenaki Chief John Stevens was one of the first Vermonters to get a COVID vaccine.
I chose to do that, because if you know about history in the Great Dying or the pandemics, you know, it wiped out most of the native population because we had no defenses against it.
So we went through that once and survived.
I wanted to give our people every chance that we could to survive this one.
So as a leader, I decided to take the chance and get the vaccine shot and hopefully if I was OK that would allow others to maybe be confident in the fact that they could get a shot.
For Chief Stevens, trusting the government wasn't easy.
He says his family was targeted during Vermont's infamous eugenics program, which began in the 1930s and involved forced sterilizations.
[non-english chanting] I knew we were native, I knew we were Abenaki just from family heritage, but my grandmother was listed, unfortunately, in the eugenics survey.
If people don't know what that is, there was a 1931 Sterilization Act, which sterilized people that they didn't want breeding.
She was listed in that survey.
So she changed her name a couple of times from Lilian Mae to Pauline to then she died as Delia to avoid sterilization from the survey.
Despite daunting historical and modern day challenges, Indigenous communities are now an example of resiliency.
[non-english chanting] And back in Mashpee, they're singing, drumming, and celebration as a much loved Wampanoag chief turns 99.
It's a fresh reminder of the importance of elders and the need to protect them and everyone.
The vaccine.
Personally, I wasn't too fond of it in the beginning, but once I seen that just more and more people were getting sick and a lot of it had to do with people not taking it too serious, either catching it and going back out into communities thinking that they're OK.
It basically gave me a comfort more so when I went around my family.
In the end, the Wampanoag, the Abenaki, and other coastal Indigenous people survived the Great Dying.
And now, 400 years later, they believe the story is more important than ever.
When you were a really little girl and you first heard about the Great Dying, did it scare you, or were you-- It didn't so much scare me as it made me angry that it wasn't part of the narrative.
At a-- even at a grammar school level.
It's so important.
I mean, it's something that scholars know about, but if that's not taught to schoolchildren, then it's not going to be well known.
Why do you think when I was growing up I was never taught about that?
Well, some of it was intentional.
History has been really, really whitewashed and softened up, and there's a lot of misconceptions.
[non-english chanting] When I was growing up, I didn't get very much of this whole story at all and certainly nothing about the Great Dying.
And it wasn't until I really started digging deeply into the sources that I started learning more about this and how much it impacted the way that people settled here and the relationships that they had with the Indigenous population.
This is it.
This is going to be a park, and it literally is in the shadow of Massasoit.
The exploration in Plymouth continues to modern times.
Pilgrim hall museum executive director Donna Curtin showed me what looks like any other backyard, but it's actually an historic old gold mine.
Right here in this end corner is where we found the vestiges of the village of Patuxet.
A team from the University of Massachusetts Boston has found many colonial era items here, but they also discovered something else.
Evidence of a much, much earlier Wampanoag settlement.
Those who were here first.
Here, what we found was part of their village during a time when they were cooking.
There was a hearth cooking fires and the artifacts of daily life.
Right here.
Coals Hill is already sacred ground.
Location of Pilgrim human remains from that first horrific winter.
Now, a permanent memorial will be constructed here, Remembrance Park, honoring three historic episodes.
The first is the Great Dying and the second is the pilgrims first winter experience and what they endured at that time, and then the last episode is the pandemic of 2020.
I know the White family was a small one, but many of these other families.
Pilgrim Hall Museum is home to the world's finest collection of Mayflower artifacts.
They already had Wampanoag materials here too, and now, there's a new set of tapestries, telling the Indigenous and colonial stories.
And as it turns out, part of my own story is also in this museum.
This is a very fragile, about 400-year-old cradle.
It's a cradle that once held my eighth great grandfather, Peregrine White, a baby born on the Mayflower while it was anchored in Cape Cod Bay.
The first English child born in Plymouth Colony.
It's strange to me in a way that these are my ancestors too.
Just to look at.
It's powerful.
The cradle is an icon, I think, of that persistence and survival that these early English families enjoyed.
And it is also something that puts a very compelling contrast with the story and history of the Indigenous people of the region.
The success of the colonial experience versus the tragedy that befell so many Indigenous populations, not just here in New England, but all the way throughout what is today the United States.
The discovery of my own roots ignited my curiosity about the Indigenous people already here when the Mayflower dropped anchor.
Paula Peters says her ancestry traces back to Patuxet.
And she believes the ancestors of both of us most likely interacted 400 years ago, and now, it's time to look ahead.
I don't hold you accountable for the actions of your ancestors.
I hold you accountable for the future.
So the things that we do going forward can be very impactful, and there can be a lot that is done.
I don't want to say that these are reparations, but we certainly do need to tell the story of our ancestors in a more accurate and complete way and with balance.
[music playing] Every one of us is impacted by the COVID pandemic, perhaps the story of a different long ago plague will still hold lessons as we face a modern day challenge.
The key word might be survival.
We've lasted through history, and I don't think COVID is going to stop us.
I see a lot of beautiful babies being born and stuff, and we're still growing, you know?
This isn't new.
This has happened.
These ruptures have happened so many times, and every day people just like us persisted through these changes.
So what can we learn from how they did it, you know?
I think we should always learn from the lessons of the past.
And I think that there's a place for modern medicine and the great strides that have happened.
If this would have happened in the 1800s, we might have gone through another Great Dying, but since there is scientific medicine as well as natural medicines, I think it has given us the choice to be able to survive this in a different way.
So I think it provides a great teachable moment for everyone in this country to kind of understand these passages in our history that were not seen as so important, I think, for a long time.
[non-english chanting] When I was in college, I worked for, then the museum was called Plymouth Plantation.
I had this mentor that I worked for there, and I remember she was trying to calm me down one day because I was really upset about some ignorant tourists and what they might have said to me and she said something to me that I have carried with me perhaps my whole life since then.
She said, you know, ignorance is like a stonewall, and if you ball up your fists and you pound against the wall, you'll just walk away with bloody fists.
But if you take the stones down one at a time, you'll start to see the light on the other side.
I never forgot it.
We are still here.
[non-english chanting] Major funding for the production of "Surviving New England's Great Dying" has been provided by The Butler Foundation.
[non-english chanting]
