Book: Squanto, by Andrew Lipman

Lipman, Andrew. 2024. Squanto: A Native Odyssey. Yale University Press.

In the traditional telling that was common in my youth, Squanto was the friendly "Indian" (no quotes back then) who helped the pilgrims survive their early years in North America. This book takes on the task of telling Squanto's tale as academic history, which is very much not what I got as a child. Though an academic book, the writing is clear and fun, with occasional wordplay and some clever turns of phrase. Probably that helped it win the Bancroft Prize.

I was surprised by the extent of Squanto's travels -- hence the "Odyssey" in the book's title. He spent time not only near his home in the area near what is now Plymouth, MA, but also in Spain, England, and what are now Newfoundland and Virginia. Not bad for the early 1600s! The material on Squanto's youth is mainly generic, which is to say it simply describes what we know about what life would have been like for a young man in his community in those times. But after that, there is a surprising amount of documentation specifically about him, including in particular writings by various members of the Plymouth colonies, as well as by or related to the people who held him in Europe. I also learned quite a lot about the early colonial period more generally, including the (generally involuntary) travels of other Native Americans to Europe, interactions both positive and negative among different indigenous communities along the Atlantic coast, and the interactions among the various early European settlements and between the settlements and their sponsors. The book also has a welcome epistemological side, as the author talks explicitly about the quality of the available information on various topics and about how he and other historians interpret and learn from it.

Recommended.

I found this book at the delightful Collected Works bookstore in Santa Fe, NM.

An addendum: An alert reader points out that while Lipman did indeed win the Bancroft Prize, it was for an earlier book.