Native Northeast: Wampanoag Indian Program at Plimoth Plantation By Linda Coombs Ms. Coombs is Associate Director of the Wampanoag Indian Program at Plimoth Plantation. The Wampanoag Indian Program (WIP) was established in 1972 at Plimoth Plantation, which was incorporated in 1947 and opened to the public in 1958. WIP is comprised of an outdoor living history exhibit, “Hobbamock’s Homesite” and an Education Outreach component. Like our counterpart, the Pilgrim Village, which portrays the lives of the first English settlers to New England, the Homesite portrays the history and culture of the Wampanoag people during the same time period, the 1620s. Education Outreach offers several types of programs given both in the schools and at the Plantation, including an Overnight and Field Trip Enhancement. Current projects also include updating of the Plantation website and the development of an Online Learning Center. In the 1970s, our program was called the Native American Studies Program (NASP) and the exhibit portrayed a “coastal Algonquin summer camp” such as a single family (not a village) would have lived in. It had one cattail-mat covered dwelling and representative corn-mound gardens. However, since Patuxet (aka Plimoth) is squarely within Wampanoag territory, we decided to become more specific in our presentation. In the 1980s the program was renamed the Wampanoag Indian Program, and in the early 1990s, the exhibit site assumed its current title “Hobbamock’s Homesite.” Hobbamock was a highly trusted warrior and counselor to the Wampanoag leader Massasoit, who sent him to live at Plimoth to act as liaison and ambassador between the two peoples. At the Homesite, visitors have the unique opportunity to speak with Native people and to hear about Wampanoag and southern New England Native history and culture from a Native perspective. Often the actual Native history of this area is simply omitted or drastically distorted, and staff is able to replace erroneous information from an accurate, appropriate and culturally sensitive viewpoint.  The majority of the staff are Wampanoag tribal members, from various communities. There also are representatives from the Micmac, Lakota, Gros Ventres, Tuscarora and Apache nations.  WIP staff uses a third-person style of interpretation. They speak to visitors from a modern perspective about the past – and do not role-play.  The primary reason for this is that a large percentage of questions are about the Wampanoag or other Native people today, or about what happened between 1620 and the present, or about contemporary issues. Since the Homesite represents only the  family of Hobbamock, our exhibit is comprised of two dwellings, two representative corn-mound gardens, an area near the Eel River where dugout canoes are made, and other areas where hide-tanning racks, food or reed-drying racks are located, or where indigenous wild plants have been reintroduced. There is a bark-covered 35-foot long house with three fires that a man of status such as Hobbamock would have lived in. The second house is smaller, a 15-foot diameter home that is covered with mats sewn of cattail reeds. Both houses are lined with insulating bulrush mats. The gardens contain between 800 and 1,000 mounds, which might be 20 percent of what an average family would have planted some 400 years ago. Everything that visitors see in our exhibit has been made by the staff of WIP, from the buildings and canoes to all of the artifacts that furnish the site. In addition to learning the historical information for interpretation, staff members have the opportunity to learn the ancient skills and technologies of our ancestors. This is based on our 30-years of research. We have utilized books and documents, oral tradition, and what we call “field research” – trying different methods and techniques that seem reasonable and appropriate to making a tool or undertaking a traditional task when the available information on how to do it is limited. The result of these efforts is that WIP has accomplished a reclamation of material culture. In addition to the construction of dwellings and other buildings, and the cattail and bulrush mats, other artifacts visitors see include: clothing and jewelry, sashes and legging ties, twined-woven baskets and bags, pottery, and tools and implements made of bone, stone, wood and metal – such as burl bowls and spoons, arrows, carving tools, hide-working and sewing tools. Visitors also observe WIP staff in the processes of traditional gardening, cooking and dugout canoe making. We are often asked if our sites are the original ones. In both cases they are not, and are completely recreated. Hobbamock’s actual homesite in the seventeenth century was located near what is now downtown Plymouth on a hill just south of Town Brook. However, our exhibit site at the Plantation was occupied for centuries and centuries by Wampanoag families who came to the river for the summer to fish and plant corn, just as we now do. It is extremely gratifying to be able to do the same things in the same place as our ancestors. We know that they are with us.