After 400 years, Native stories at heart of Mayflower events

SOUTHAMPTON, England (AP) — Four hundred years after English colonists landed on Plymouth Rock and upended the lives of her ancestors, Paula Peters is on a quest to recover a small part of what her people have lost.

A year of trans-Atlantic commemorations marking the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage opens in Southampton, England, on Saturday with an exhibition centered on one casualty of colonization: the wampum belt of Metacom, a 17th-century leader of the Wampanoag Native American nation.

Woven with imagery depicting tribal history and legends, the beaded belt was “as important to the Wampanoag as the crown jewels would be to the king of England,” said Peters, a Wampanoag writer and educator.

In 1620, the Wampanoag, who had lived for millennia in what is now New England, helped the exhausted Mayflower settlers survive their first winter. But within a few decades, tensions had erupted into a brutal 1670s conflict known as King Philip’s War. Metacom was killed, and his belt sent to England’s King Charles II as spoils of war.

“From all we can tell it did arrive in the U.K., but it never arrived in the hands of the king,” Peters said from her home in Mashpee, Massachusetts. “We have been searching for that belt for generations of our people,”

The hunt took Peters to the British Museum, which has one of the world’s largest collections of wampum belts. She didn’t find it there, but she had an idea: The Wampanoag would make a new belt, then send it to England for display. It would help share their story, and might bring new leads in the search.

Wampum belts — made with beads fashioned from the white and purple shells of whelks and quahog — play a central role in the culture of the Wampanaog and other Native peoples in eastern North...