Just listened to In Our Time’s episode on The Pilgrims and one of the historians mentioned that “Squanto” as a name is the Wampanoag equivalent of “Satan”.
Was this his real name or was this name attributed to him long afterwards by other people?
Is this name the equivalent of “Satan” (aka something with a very strong negative connotation) ?
According to Charles Mann (1491), he gave his name as Tisquantum, which was abbreviated by the Europeans as Squanto. Mann reports that this was not likely his given name. Its translation was roughly meaning "the rage of our gods." As Mann puts it:
When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God. No one would lightly adopt such a name in contemporary Western society. Neither would anyone in seventeenth-century indigenous society. Tisquantum was trying to project something.
What was he trying to project? Mann recounts how Tisquantum was kidnapped and brought to Europe for five yeas, where he was kept as a curiosity by a shipbuilder. He learned English there, and was finally able to convince the Europeans to bring him back to Massachusetts. Upon returning home, he found that his original settlement, Patuxet, was completely exterminated by a disease:
What Tisquantum saw on his return home was unimaginable. From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utterly void,” Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum’s entire social world had vanished.
So when Tisquantum, a year later, went to help out the crew of Mayflower, he might have had legitimate reason to give himself a new sobriquet. He had, as we might say today, seen some shit.
There's a lot more to the story of Tisquantum, but I find Mann's account pretty gripping — and a definite improvement on the nonsense "friendly Indian" version that one learns in American gradeschool.
See Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americans Before Columbus (Vintage Books, 2006), chapter 1.