This chapter locates a throughline of Indigenous resistance to settler dominance that stretches from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to the 2016 NoDAPL movement on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. It is a throughline marked not by warfare and violence, but by diplomacy and strategic action founded in traditional Indigenous responses to the irresponsible use of power. Recognizing how Native peoples, across many cultures and regions, were philosophically aligned toward hospitality and peaceful conflict resolution, disrupts racist notions of savagery, and age-old assumptions of Indigenous peoples as strictly “warrior societies.” By highlighting a number of diplomatic practices and actions occurring between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter suggests the type of movement that took place at Standing Rock, founded in respect for the environment and peaceful resistance to uncivil government, was not a modern-day innovation, but a series of responses in keeping with the long-standing praxis of Indigenous communities.

This essay revisits the moment of encounter between the Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoags from a decolonizing perspective, situating this historical moment and the actions that followed in the indigenous space of Wȏpanȃak, or Dawnland, rather than the typologically rendered space made famous in accounts by William Bradford and other puritan authors. Drawing on recent insights of indigenous scholars such as Lisa Brooks, Margaret Bruchac, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others, this essay maps out how local Native leaders like Massasoit, Samoset, and Philip drew English settlers into their protocols of diplomacy and shared responsibility for the land. The Wampanoags sustained the colony with their surplus agriculture and traditional ecological knowledge, without which none of the early English settlements could have survived. The English, however, were incapable of conceptualizing a relationship of reciprocity with America’s indigenous population, leading eventually to war and acts of genocide. This history, duly recorded from the settler-colonial perspective, has a parallel history that was recorded through the medium of wampum and survives through oral tradition. But to hear this alternative version, we must first learn to disentangle ourselves from the “desert wilderness” of colonial reporting.