Why was Patuxet called the Dawnland?
The Pilgrims called the New England shoreline the Dawnland.
The Pilgrims called their own settlement in New England the Dawnland,
In the language of the Wampanoag, the New England shoreline was called the
Dawnland.
In the language of the Wampanoag, the Pilgrim settlement in New England was called
the Dawnland.

Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag confederation. In turn, the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite alliance with two other confederations: the Nauset, which comprised some thirty groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants of Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family, the biggest in eastern North America at the time. (Massachusett thus was the name both of a language and of one of the groups that spoke it.) In Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light.