Back to Plimoth Plantation

This past summer, I took my son to Plimoth Plantation. That’s what it was called when I was growing up in New England in the 1980s; it’s recently been rebranded as the Plimoth Patuxet Museum. But it is neither exactly a museum nor quite so devoted to portraying the Patuxet village of the Wampanoag Nation as its website would suggest. Over the past decade, the Plimoth Patuxet Museum has become embroiled in scandal—a fact I only began to learn about halfway through our visit. The contours of this scandal are almost as bizarre as the experience of actually visiting the place, which forces its guests to play accomplice to one of American history’s most pernicious fictions. 

For the unfamiliar, the Plimoth Patuxet Museum is a reconstructed seventeenth-century settlement inhabited by trained historical reenactors portraying actual citizens of the colony at Plimoth. As a child, I revered Plimoth Plantation: the reenactors with their handmade clothes and funny accents, the spiced pudding for sale at the cafeteria, the casual opportunities to write with a quill pen or herd chickens back into their coop. To enter the recreated colony is to take part in a play, though your own role is unclear. 

 Literature given out at the site advises visitors how to engage with the museum. They remind you: “The people you will meet are living in the year 1627. They don’t know anything beyond that year. (You