Some see irony in COVID's impact on Mayflower commemoration

The year 2020 was supposed to be a big one for Pilgrims.

Dozens of events — from art exhibits and festivals to lectures and a maritime regatta featuring the Mayflower II, a full-scale replica refitted over the past three years at a cost of more than $11 million — were planned to mark the 400th anniversary of the religious separatists’ arrival at what we now know as Plymouth, Massachusetts.

But many of those activities have been postponed or canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. And historian Elizabeth Fenn finds a certain perverse poetry in that.

“The irony obviously runs quite deep,” says Fenn, a history professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied disease in Colonial America. “Novel infections did MOST of the dirty work of colonization.”

Disease introduced by traders and settlers — either by happenstance or intention — played a significant role in the “conquest” of Native people. And that inconvenient fact, well known to the Natives’ descendants, is contrary to the traditional narrative of the “New World.”

That narrative has been attacked in recent months, as statues of Pilgrim predecessors Christopher Columbus, Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oñate and other “colonizers” have been toppled and defaced. The counter-narrative sees people like the Pilgrims not as rugged pioneers and adventurers, but as part of a slow-motion genocide.

“The Mayflower came and the settlers came, and they’re considered FOUNDERS,” says historian and journalist Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. “But in fact, they were takers.”

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Plymouth wasn’t the first or the largest or most successful of the English settlements. But it has taken an outsized place in the American story.

“Regardless of anything...