The land of the “Quinnehtukut” is considered to be the original site or also known as “ground zero,” for Indigenous Genocide in 1637. Capt. John Mason and his militia launched a surprise attack on a Pequot village in Miissituk, also known as Mystic.  This war was considered unprecedented because most of the deaths came from women, children, and elders. The objective of the invasion was not for land, trading rights, or religious freedom. It was for the extermination of the indigenous. This invasion is popularly known as the Mystic massacre and is known as the “10 days that unexpectedly changed America” because it forced a shift away from diplomatic relations with indigenous people.

Despite the efforts made by the colonists to take out the Pequot people. By 1910, only 66 Pequot people were recorded alive on the U.S census. Their population would continue to decline for quite some time. However, starting in the 1970s, the Pequot population began to rise once again. This led to multiple legal actions and lawsuits over the land that had been illegally sold in 1856. In 1983, the “Mashantucket Pequot Indian Land Claim Act” was passed. This meant the Pequot tribe was allowed to buy their original land and start up their reservation. In 2002, the Eastern Pequot tribal nation was recognized, and this marked a significant step in the revival of the Pequot people.

The Pilgrims and Puritans settled in New England in the first half of the 17th century, arriving just shortly after the settlers of Jamestown, Virginia. They are the protagonists of a myth that has survived many centuries as a story of American Beginnings, which is characterized by religiousness, idealism, sacrifice, and a utopian vision based on theology.  Many scholars have

considered the New England Pilgrims and Puritans as the “first Americans,”  While they claimed for themselves the right to dissent from the orthodoxies of the Church of England,

They denied those who did not conform to their doctrines the same right of religious freedom. 

A Virginia cast Pocahontas, a Native woman, in the title role, “the Massachusetts myth centered on a patriarchal hierarchy, even though women composed a relatively large percentage of the Plymouth population.”

During the age of discovery, Europeans often imagined the Americas as a site for utopian communities, Leading to a lot of expectations abut the New world.  Writers like Thomas More in Utopia (1516), Tommaso Campanella in City of the Sun (1602), Johann Valentin Andreae in Christianopolis (1619), and Francis Bacon in New Atlantis (1624) imagined great societies in America. However, these utopian visions were not based on real encounters but on their imagination. European explorers did not find the utopias they hoped for, but instead found indigenous groups of people they viewed as uncivilized, As a result europeans shifted from seeking existing utopias to building their own, With settlers like the Pilgrims and Puritans looking to establish new religious groups in the “empty” lands of the Americas, replacing the hopes of discovery with the plans of creation for themselves.