"No, I don't want a Mayflower fridge magnet, thanks."

Farewell Nantucket! It was back to reality for us today and back to the beginning of America again as we explored the Plimoth Plantation.

Remember the Mayflower? That was 1620 and ended with 50-odd sickly English people on the Massachusetts coast. Whatever became of them? Well this place explains. In the woods above the modern city of Plymouth, an historical recreation of the settlers' community has been built. Like the replica Mayflower it is staffed by actors who are committed to selling you the notion that they ARE the Pilgrim Fathers and that it IS the year 1627.

Well, as an intellectual exercise this is all very entertaining. It's fun to talk to these people in their characters and to walk about (uninvited!) inside their dingy wooden houses or to watch them sewing or thatching roofs. It's certainly interesting to listen to their stories. But at the same time it is a deeply painful experience: the traditional smug pilgrim version of history is shattered by the rest of the installation.

Two hundred yards up the hill lies a recreation of a Wampanoag settlement: a series of wooden structures of different sizes, like Anderson shelters, stand around a forest clearing. They're made of a frame of arched sapling trunks, overlaid with sheets of cut bark and lined on the inside with woven hangings and animal skins. The village smells of wood smoke.

The employees here are not actors, nor do they believe that it is the year 1627. They are Native People and crucially they are able to explain what life was like before the Europeans arrived and what happened afterwards. It is not comfortable listening.

We entered one long house. At the far end sat a slight young woman in native clothes. She spoke calmly, slowly, interminably about the injustices done to the Wampanoag people, about the strengths and innocence of their culture and about how they were utterly destroyed by the English.

That word stung me, because I've never thought of those settlers as English. In my mind they are American because they left- if they had been English they would have stayed behind! I've been referring generally to them as 'European' so as to not let the Spanish, French or Dutch off the hook, but the devastation wrought on the Native Peoples of North America has always been -as far as I was concerned - an American crime.

Of course, this is self-delusion. The English colonists, with their economic concerns, were quite happy to put a price on human suffering to ensure profit, just as their American great-great-grandchildren would later do with slavery, just as the British would do in India, or Africa, or any other of a dozen places around the world. The terms English/British/American or European are interchangeable and meaningless. What is true is that these terrible crimes have always been perpetrated by people like us against people who were also like us.

The woman carried on speaking and we carried on listening, transfixed. The silence in that room was horrible. We nodded, Americans and English alike. We nodded sadly, we nodded sagely, in contrition and culpable.

We nodded because there was nothing we could say.