Staging the Compelling Question the painting provided in the featured sources, students write down what they know (or think they know) about the Pilgrims, the Wampanoags, and the positive and negative Pilgrim–Wampanoag interactions. Supporting Question 1 The first supporting question—“What was the first contact like between the Pilgrims and the the foundational understanding of the initial contact between one Native American group and the Pilgrims. The question asks students to understand this contact from the viewpoints of both Native Americans and colonists. To this end, the formative performance task calls on students to write a first-person account from the perspective of a Pilgrim settler or a Wampanoag man or woman about their first contact in 1620 and 1621. The featured sources are a sketch depicting the Plymouth settlement, a journal account of an early meeting between Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, and a set of illustrations of the Native leader Samoset meeting Pilgrim leaders. Supporting Question 2 The second supporting question—“How did the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags cooperate in the early years after first contact?”—asks students to consider how the Wampanoags and Pilgrims cooperated through trade and coexisted in relative peace. The formative performance task asks students to use the featured sources—Edward Winslow’s account of the first Thanksgiving, the 1621 treaty with Massasoit, and William Bradford’s description of sickness among Native Americans—to create a list of the different ways the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims cooperated. After completing this task, students should understand how the first contact eventually led to mutually beneficial cooperation. Supporting Question 3 The third supporting question—“Why did the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags move from cooperation to conflict?”—establishes the decline of the relationship between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims. Relations deteriorated in the 1630s, most dramatically with the Pequot War (1634–1638) and eventually with the King Philip’s War (1675), which remains the bloodiest in United States history relative to population size. The formative performance task asks students to use evidence to make a claim suggesting a way either side could have avoided conflict. The featured sources are a chart of colonial population in New England, an image bank of maps of settlements, excerpts from an account of Wampanoag leader Metacom’s complaints about the English, and a map depicting King Philip’s War.
Staging the Compelling Question Featured Source Source A: J. L. G. Ferris, painting of relations between the Pilgrims and Wampanoags, The First Thanksgiving 1621, 1919 Public domain. Available at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001699850/. Supporting Question 1 Featured Source Source A: Image bank: Maps and illustrations of “Pilgrim Village” Image 1: Map view of the location of the “Pilgrim Village,” Plimoth Plantation Museum, no date. Courtesy of the Plymouth Archive Project, http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/fortplan.html Image 2: Arial photograph of the location of the “Pilgrim Village,” Plimoth Plantation Museum, 1995. Courtesy of the Plymouth Archive Project, http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/fortplan.html.