Giving a Voice to Squanto

Listen to this article

It’s that time of year again, the time when we gather with family and friends to eat food and watch football in tribute to the Pilgrims, those hardy souls who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean looking for the religious freedom denied for them back in Holland.

Of course, the fate of the people who were already in America, the people the Pilgrims called “savages,” is virtually ignored beyond the legend of Squanto, the noble native who helped them survive and eventually become self-sustaining.

Watching the National Geographic Channel’s two night movie event Saints & Strangers, premiering Nov 22-23 at 9, could help change all that thanks to a well-balanced script that looks at the settling of Plymouth from both sides of the story. At least that’s the fervent hope of actor Kalani Queypo who does an amazing job of bringing Squanto to life in the mini-series.

“It was such an honor to play a part like this,” Queypo said in an interview with Color Magazine. “The script is so full of details about what life was like for the Native Americans, both the life they lead before the Mayflower landed and their life after they first encountered the Pilgrims.  It’s their story, too.”

Queypo, whose heritage includes being part of the North American Blackfeet tribe, said the key to playing a part like Squanto was centered on the decision of the screenwriters to allow the Native Americans in Saints & Stranger speak in their native tongue. “It was extremely difficult to learn the lines in a language I don’t naturally speak, but it was worth it. It’s more authentic, naturally, but it also helped me find Squanto’s voice as a character.”

The other way that Queypo discovered how to play such a historically significant figure came about through the physicality of the performance. “Squanto didn’t belong to the same tribe that lives in Plymouth when the Pilgrims land; his people have been wiped out and he is literally the last of his tribe,” the actor explained. “I think that makes him constantly uncomfortable, always on edge and fearful of not being accepted among the other Native people. He’s that way, too, when he first goes among the Pilgrims, but as the dynamics change as he becomes more influential as a translator between the two groups. I really think he undergoes a physical transformation. He becomes more powerful in the way he stands, and in the way he walks among the others. He becomes more powerful in his heart and therefore in his stature.”

The National Geographic Channel mini-series Saints & Strangers premiers Nov 22-23 at 9 PM.