Meet the Wampanoags in Plymouth, Massachusetts

Plymouth isn’t all about Pilgrims and the Mayflower. For a well-rounded and educational weekend of family travel, kids can visit a re-created Wampanoag village and take a walking tour led by a Native American.

Shadows of the Pilgrims, who landed and settled here in 1620, are everywhere you look in the small port city of Plymouth. Until recently, there was less attention paid to the people who were here to greet them. Now, a re-organization of Plimoth Patuxet Museums (formerly known as Plimouth Plantation) elevated the Patuxet Homesite, a replica Wampanoag village, to a more prominent position in the complex best known for the reproduced 17th-century English Village.

Historic Patuxet tells the forgotten parts of early Plymouth’s story, showing in an interactive setting the daily lives of the Native Americans that lived in the region long before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Interpreters in the small Wampanoag settlement are themselves Native Americans, here to preserve the culture of their ancestors, their traditions and way of life.

Visitors can go inside the wetu, a house of arched saplings covered in slabs of tree bark. The house is big enough to hold three cooking fires. Interpreters there describe family life and show daily tools and implements. Outdoors, men may be hollowing out a log to make a canoe while women go about seasonal tasks like gardening or cooking on an open fire.

Outside the museum village, a Native American guide leads lively walking tours exploring the sites of Plymouth from the perspective of the area’s first inhabitants. Native Plymouth Tours present historically accurate stories about the lives of the Pilgrims and Wampanoags based on years of the guide’s research and work at Plimoth Patuxet Museums.

The guide is good at engaging young visitors and making the stories relevant to their experiences. On a tour you’ll visit the home site of Wampanoag leader, Hobbamock, and other places of significance to Native Americans. You’ll also go to some of the Pilgrim sites to see them from a Native perspective.