Mayflower events do not tell the full story | Letters
“Native Americans are centre stage at last in events to mark 400 years since Mayflower”, says your headline (Report, 6 January). If only that were true. The creative arts events in Plymouth involving people from North American Indigenous nations that you mention are indeed a welcome departure from previous Mayflower commemorations. But, regrettably, their important correctives to the traditional colonial narrative are to be marginalised, and the pilgrims’ story is to remain centre stage. This is particularly notable in the sanitised education planning for the commemorations, which started with the opening of the Mayflower Museum in 2015.
Absent is any account of the connection between the New England and Caribbean colonies, crucial to understanding how British colonisation and slavery led to economic success and the creation of the Mayflower story. Also neglected is the establishment in the 17th century of traditions of land seizures, removal, and wars against Indigenous nations in North America that lasted 300 years.
Misrepresentation of history is clear in the Mayflower 400’s citizenship project for schools, centred around a particular controversial “federalist” interpretation and rebranded of the “Mayflower Compact” at the turn of 19th century. Like much else to do with these commemorations, this schools’ project on the “democratic decision process” is a stage-managed celebration of the traditional myth of the pilgrims.
Danny Reilly
Plymouth
I fail to see why the Mayflower voyage is to get so much year-long publicity when just down the coast in Virginia the Jamestown settlement had by then already been established for 13 years. By 1620 Jamestown was a regular transatlantic destination with a population of over 1,000 colonists occupying many separate holdings for 50 miles on both sides of the James River with a rapidly developing tobacco trade. The 400th anniversary of the first general assembly – the oldest continuous law-making body in the US that was originally held in the second wooden Jamestown church built in 1617 – was relatively quietly celebrated on 30 July last year, though President Trump did attend.
David Pace
(Author, The Man who Foiled a Jamestown Massacre), Dover, Kent
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