Somewhat lost amid the high volume of news this year is the fact that 2020 marks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Cape Cod, where the colonists landed in November 1620. After a 66-day voyage across the Atlantic, they spent their first five weeks anchored off of what is now Provincetown, then sailed to the mainland and arriving in Plymouth in December. The first Thanksgiving occurred the following year, in 1621.

The significance of this year is definitely not lost on Redmond resident Rebecca Locklear, a 13th-generation Mayflower descendant and the head of the group Central Oregon Mayflower and Wampanoag Descendants. Locklear is a former Redmond School District teacher who taught various subjects — mainly English, history, music and drama — before pivoting several years ago to write books, as well as short plays and skits, for educators.

“After teaching at Sage Elementary in Redmond for six years, I was itching to go back overseas. My fellow teachers asked who would teach the Latin and Greek roots class when I was gone,” Locklear said.

Her solution was to share her lesson plans, which later ended up being her published curriculum, “Word Archeology – Digging Up Latin and Greek Roots (grades 4-12),” which remains one of her top-selling educational books.

“That experience got me thinking. When I came home from teaching in Switzerland in 2016, I decided to change my career path and write materials for teachers,” Locklear said. “I really wanted to share creative, hands-on ideas that had worked for me.”

Though she’s lived in Oregon for 37 years, Locklear was born on Cape Cod just a mile from First Encounter Beach, the spot where a Pilgrim scouting expedition had its first encounter with local American Indians.

Despite her deep ties to the European settlers, it wasn’t until July 2019 that Locklear, a former Redmond School District teacher, officially joined the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.

“I had no clue,” she said. “This is really funny. I was doing research on a Unit Study that’s really heavily weighted in Cape Cod and Oregon. It’s called ‘Exploring the U.S. Life-Saving Service 1878-1915,’ which was a precursor of the U.S. Coast Guard. I was doing some research at a library in Chatham, Cape Cod, and one of the librarians said to me, ‘Oh, you are one of those Eldredges? Well, you’re a Mayflower descendant.’”

After that multi-year project, “I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to see if I can pull this off and be an official Mayflower descendant.’ But it was because a librarian said something to me.”

“I waited five long months to find out if they would accept my application,” she said with a laugh. “It’s pretty difficult to find your birth, death and marriage certificates for everyone.” She’s related to four different descendants, but for the sake of joining the group, focused on one, Stephen Hopkins, one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, arguably an antecedent to American democracy, in which the Pilgrims made an agreement to self-govern.

Now, other members of her family, including her son and sister, have also become members of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. Locklear then became connected with 11 other descendants and families in Central Oregon, forming a social group with the objective of promoting Mayflower 400: 1620-2020.

“We shared genealogical histories, discussed relevant issues, and sampled foods similar to what Natives or Pilgrims would have eaten,” Locklear said. “The best part of this group has been making new friends — often literally cousins,” she said.

The group had planned to have a float in the Redmond Fourth of July Parade and other programming, all canceled due to COVID-19.

Another group that was not caught off-guard by the anniversary was the Eastham 400 Committee, formed to commemorate the quadricentennial of the landing. Because of her heritage and her background in education, the committee approached Locklear about writing “The Mayflower at Cape Cod,” a unit study for students in grades 6-12 published earlier this year.

The project came about in September 2019, when Locklear was on Cape Cod giving a presentation on another of her unit studies, “Exploring the U.S. Life-Saving Service 1878-1915,” about the forerunner to the U.S. Coast Guard. A member of the Eastham 400 Committee approached Locklear and asked if she’d write one on the Mayflower.

“He said there are no materials for grades 6-12 that include the latest historical information on the Pilgrims and Wampanoags,” Locklear said. “I agreed to write a unit and remained on Cape Cod to attended lectures on recent research, to interview a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and go on a nature hike with another tribal member, review the legacy of my former teacher and Native activist Frank Wamsutta James, and head up to Plymouth for more research.”

In the process, she discovered conflicting information from some major organizations, including the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plimoth Plantation and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.

“This was frustrating, particularly since I was given only six weeks to write the unit,” she said. “I ended up making decisions based on assistance from historians at the Cape Cod National Seashore.”

Locklear’s book is full of fascinating facts, and dispels collective notions that Pilgrims wore the big-buckled hats and shoes — that was the Puritans, who came along a decade later. The book is specifically concentrated on those early weeks on Cape Cod, and one of its seven lessons is devoted to Native Indians, whose roots on Cape Cod go back 8,000 years, according to “The Mayflower at Cape Cod,” and it discusses soberly some of the less flattering facts about the presence of whites: Pilgrims robbed a native cache of winter foods and even their graves, and a white-man-induced plague from 1616-19 wiped out an estimated 90 percent of the native population from Rhode Island to Maine, including the local Wampanoag population: “Thus, when the Pilgrims left the Cape Cod area to settle in Plymouth, the Wampanoags formed an alliance with them,” she writes. “Both parties would help each other if attacked by the Narragansetts.”

“In my research for any history unit studies I try to refrain from judging people in past cultures and times by today’s standards and perceived enlightened thinking, and instead look at the situation within the context of the times,” Locklear said.

“The Mayflower at Cape Cod” is sold at Herringbone Books in Redmond and Amazon, and is available digitally on Teachers Pay Teachers. For more on Locklear and her books, visit rebeccalocklear.com.