On a ship crossing back to New England in 1619, an English officer named Thomas Dermer tries to explain to his friend what has happened at home while he was away. He holds up his hand for the people who once lived there, then folds back all but two fingers for the people who remain. Nobody in Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac has to say the word catastrophe. A child listening will understand it from the hand.
That gesture is typical of the book’s method. Bruchac, writing in Squanto’s own voice, gets the hardest history into a picture book by finding small physical images for it, and then letting the paintings and the silence on the page do the rest.
A Man Speaking From One Autumn
The narration of Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac is fixed in a single season. Squanto speaks in the autumn of 1621, home again after seven years, and looks back across a life that reads like an adventure story until it turns into an elegy. He is lured onto an English ship, sold in Spain, freed by friars, carried to England, and finally sails home to find that the plague has taken his wife, his children and his parents. Here the book makes its most moving choice. He will not speak their names, he says, until he follows them along the Road of Stars, the Milky Way. The text simply leaves the space empty, and that restraint teaches young listeners more about mourning than a page of explanation would.
There is humour too, which keeps Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac from turning into a lament. Samoset, the Pemaquid sachem who walks into the English settlement first, carries two arrows, one tipped and one bare, to offer the strangers war or peace. They feed him well, and he later tells Squanto, laughing, that the food was good enough to stay the night. The glossary notes that his word for the Englishmen, Songlismoniak, comes from Wabanaki, a nice detail for a visitor from the north.
Squanto’s own temper is grave, patient and hopeful. He urges Massasoit to make friends with the English. He sees in the settlers people who might share the land. Readers who know how the century went will feel the weight of every hopeful sentence. Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac does not.
Squanto’s Journey in the Colour of Harvest
Greg Shed’s full-page paintings face every page of text, and they are soaked in the colours of late October. Even the Spanish scenes glow orange. The weave of the painting surface shows through, which gives the book a slightly antique, museum-wall feel.
The strongest images are about posture. A hooded friar points west across the sea while Squanto stands beside him with a hand pressed to his chest. On the English ship he is shown bowed and turned inward while an officer speaks over his shoulder. Massasoit, wrapped in a painted fur robe, listens in the snow with a ship at anchor behind him. Near the end comes a quiet scene of Squanto handing a ripe ear of corn to a small girl, the image the publisher chose for the back cover, and the book closes on a figure seen from behind with both arms raised to a rising sun.
The weakness is sameness. The palette rarely changes, the faces often hold the same composed expression, and over thirty-two pages the paintings start to feel like a gallery of portraits rather than a story in motion. The text pages are also dense for the youngest listeners; this is a book for children of six or seven and up, best read in two sittings.
What Squanto’s Journey Leaves Out
The final scene of Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac is a shared harvest feast, and its last words are a prayer of gratitude for all the peoples gathered there, ending on Squanto’s vow: “I will never leave this land.” It is the true Thanksgiving of the book, and a deeply felt one. It is also, for anyone who knows the record, hard to read without a wince, because he was dead within a little over a year.
Bruchac does correct several myths. The Pilgrims land on fields emptied by disease, not on wilderness. The kidnapping and the slave market are shown plainly. His sister Marge, whose research he credits in the note, clearly pushed for accuracy, down to a dry remark that Pilgrims did not wear hats with buckles. But the friendship arc is allowed to stand unchallenged, and a child could close Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac believing the story ended at that table.
Here it sits less comfortably beside more recent Native-authored retellings. Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story (2022), written by Danielle Greendeer of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe with Anthony Perry and Alexis Bunten, centres a Wampanoag family and community rather than one celebrated go-between. That is not a fault Bruchac could have avoided in 2000. It does mean Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac reads best as one man’s portrait, paired with a book that hands the story back to the Wampanoag themselves. Families should know before reading that it includes kidnapping, enslavement, epidemic grief and violence on a ship, all told without graphic detail.
The Storyteller and the Painter
Bruchac is best known for Dawn Land (1993) and its sequel Long River, novels about a young Abenaki man before European contact, and he was among the founders of the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. He also performs traditional music with his sister and sons as the Dawnland Singers. He belongs to the Nulhegan Abenaki Nation, a Vermont state-recognised tribe whose claims, and his own, are contested by the Odanak First Nation in Quebec.
Before and after Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac, Shed kept painting history and family; he returned to the theme of gratitude a few years later with The Secret of Saying Thanks, written by Douglas Wood, which makes a gentle companion for younger children.
What It Leaves Behind
Read alongside Keepunumuk, or ahead of a classroom unit on Plymouth, Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac earns its place: it is tactful about grief, honest about slavery, and handsome to look at, even if its optimism needs an adult beside it. Families who want an older holiday story with a lighter touch could follow it with An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott, while parents ready for an adult novel about Native history passed down through generations should try Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange. Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson tells how the holiday itself became national. The empty space where those family names should be is what stays.