Would you please edit Tom Landess (“Communities and Strangers,” Views, December 2011) for historical accuracy?  Such a serious libel of anyone, even a dead man, distracts me from the argument.

Squanto could not have betrayed his original tribe even if he had wanted to; they were already extinct when he finally got back from England.  Treason is a serious accusation and should not be made frivolously.

Should Squanto have disowned his new tribe, who depended on him for their survival?  That treason has no visible benefit to him.  Can we, living four centuries later, understand his problems well enough to be sure his decision not to become a total orphan was clearly wrong?  He thought in categories we do not recognize, and we think in categories he could not have imagined.

He used his new tribe to claim his birthright.  I would have done the same.  He cannot be expected to have foreseen consequences caused by, among other factors, the technological differences between the locals and his new tribe.

—Rachel Rempel

Newberg, OR

Dr. Landess Replies:

I can’t believe anyone could take literally or seriously what I wrote about that Indian.  The tone alone should have spared me the history lesson.

Too many people today make a profession of getting their feelings hurt.  America has become Versailles, with fops running up and down the mirrored corridors, slapping other fops in their faces with gloves.  And all because we can no longer grasp the subtleties of language.

Father’s Wisdom

Jeff Minick’s essay (“Duty,” Vital Signs, December) on the unpopularity of duty, as word and concept, is excellent.  He is right to observe how it has been widely replaced by the term responsibility, which, especially in the plural, means “job description,” and in the singular often means nothing at all (as Mr. Minick pointed out with regard to Janet Reno).

In connection with this matter, I am reminded of my father, who, in various circumstances, would say to me (always gently, and with a smile), “Remember what the great Lord Nelson said.”  No explanation was necessary; I had learned as a child the famous words, pronounced before the Battle of Trafalgar: “England expects every man will do his duty.”  That word will is important: It points to the connection, in a fully developed person, between free will and the acceptance of laws other than one’s own.  Nelson is quoted as having said after the battle, “Thank God, I have done my duty.”

—Catharine Savage Brosman

Houston, TX