![]() The Great Dying is rarely taught in public schools, and Smith and Vaughn plan to distribute the documentary nationally with education materials, in addition to hosting public screenings and discussions.Fear and isolation seized the Pilgrims on the Mayflower when they lowered anchor off Cape Cod four centuries ago. The two filmmakers hope the documentary project can be used for educational outreach. I don’t want to say these are reparations, but we certainly need to tell the story of our ancestors in an accurate and complete way and with balance.” “I don’t hold you accountable for the actions of your ancestors,” Peters says to Smith in the film. We’re still growing.”Īt one point in the documentary, Smith talks about learning he is a Mayflower descendant, and shares a reflective moment with Peters, whose ancestry traces to Patuxet. “I see a lot of beautiful babies being born. “We’ve lasted through history and I don’t think COVID is going to stop us,” said Attaquin Weeden of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. “Imagine if 400 years ago the Wampanoag had some sort of vaccine for that Great Dying, in what a different place we’d be in today.” “I feel like I owe it to my next generation,” Peters said of her decision to get vaccinated. Amid the COVID pandemic, tribal leaders are trying to rebuild a measure of trust in the medical system at a moment when vaccines offer strong protection from severe illness, hospitalization, and death. The documentary is also a story of survival and resilience among Native American communities. ![]() “I think the ship would likely have been turned away, and they would have been instructed to go find somewhere else to colonize.” “I don’t think they would have been welcome,” said Peters. The film also asks viewers to consider how the course of European colonization might have been different had there been no plague when the pilgrims first arrived on the shores of Patuxet. “Medicine has not been a neutral thing for Native Americans.” “We know disease was weaponized in American history,” Northeastern history professor Chris Parsons says in the film, touching on laws enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that forced sterilizations on Indigenous populations. The documentary also draws parallels to the current pandemic, addresses vaccine hesitancy among some Indigenous populations, and looks at how choices are being made in some communities against a backdrop of government mistrust. “It was in their custom beliefs to spread the disease even quicker without even knowing it.” “And their customs, the customs of people is to gather and pray over ,” said Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. The film features leaders and members of local Indigenous groups as well as historians and educators discussing the impact of the disease, its devastating spread, and the loss of oral histories and culture. “Interactions between Indigenous people and those new arrivals appeared to have been the gateway for sickness,” Smith says in the film. The disease is thought to have started in the region that is now Maine when European fishermen began trading with the Abenaki people, who’d long lived on the land. The 30-minute film looks at what happened during that period, although much is still unknown. “There is evidence of a settlement, but the inhabitants are gone.” “The waters were teeming with fish, the woods full of game, but where are the people?” Smith asks in the documentary. Over the course of about 30 years leading up to the Pilgrims’ 1620 arrival on the shores of Patuxet, approximately 75 percent to 95 percent of the population had been wiped out, according to the film. In the late 1500s and early 1600s, a vibrant Indigenous community of an estimated 100,000 people lived along the coast of what is now New England, from Maine to Cape Cod. “In reading on, I concluded there was an even more important story to tell.” “In the process of retracing my steps, I found mention multiple times of this terrible sickness,” said Smith, who formerly worked at WBZ.
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