[Peace-discuss] A Thanksgiving tale.

[Morton K.Brussel]

History...How many of us know all this?

MKB

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING
by James W. Loewen

Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students,
"When was the country we now know as the United States first settled?"

That is a generous way of putting the question. Surely "we now know as"
implies that the original settlement happened before the United States.
I had hoped that students would suggest 30,000 BC, or some other
pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was "1620."

Part of the the problem is the word "settle." "Settlers" were white.
Indians did not settle. Nor are students the only people misled by
"settle." One recent Thanksgiving weekend, I listened as a guide at the
Statue of Liberty told about European immigrants "populating a wild
East Coast." As we shall see, however, if Indians had not already
settled New England, Europeans would have had a much tougher job of it.

Starting with the Pilgrims not only leaves out the Indians, but also
the Spanish. In the summer of 1526 five hundred Spaniards and one
hundred black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pedee River
in what is now South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby Indians
caused many deaths. Finally, in November the slaves rebelled, killed
some of their masters, and escaped to the the Indians. By now only 150
Spaniards survived, and they evacuated back to Haiti. The ex-slaves
remained behind. So the first non-Native settlers in "the country we
now know as the United States" were Africans.

The Spanish continued their settling in 1565, when they massacred a
settlement of French Protestants at St. Augustine, Florida, and
replaced it with their own fort. Some Spanish were pilgrims, seeking
regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish
Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know
that one third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to
Natchez to Floirda, has been Spanish longer than it has been
"American." Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible impact on the
West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic
elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco,
rodeo, lariat, and so on.

Beginnning with 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is
now Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first
permanent British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent
settlers to Jamestown, Virginia. No matter. The mythic origin of "the
country we now know as the United States" is at Plymouth Rock, and the
year is 1620. My students are not at fault. The myth is what their
testbooks and their culture have offered them. I examined how twelve
textbooks used in high school American history classes teach
Thanksgiving. Here is the version in one high school history book, THE
AMERICAN TRADITION:

After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth
Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in
December and were not prepared for the New England winter. However,
they were aided by freindly Indians, who gave them food and showed them
how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the colonists planted,
fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter. After
harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends celebrated
the first Thanksgiving.

My students also learned that the Pilgrims were persecuted in England
for their religion, so they moved to Holland. They sailed on the
Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower Compact. Times were rough,
until they met Squanto. He taught them how to put fish in each corn
hill, so they had a bountiful harvest.

But when I ask them about the plague, they stare back at me. "What
plague? The Black Plague?" No, that was three centuries earlier, I
sigh.

"THE WONDERFUL PLAGUE AMONG THE SAVAGES"

The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. Black (or
bubonic) Plague "was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever
befallen mankind." In three years it killed 30 percent of the
population of Europe. Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself
comprised only part of the horror. Thinking the day of judgment was
imminent, farmers failed to plant crops. Many people gave themselves
over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much
death as the disease itself.

For a variety of reasons --- their probable migration through cleansing
Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or livestock-borne
microbes --- Americans were in Howard Simpson's assessment "a
remarkable healthy race" before Columbus. Ironically, their very health
now proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance,
genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes Europeans
and Africans now brought them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims
landed, the process started in southern New England. A plague struck
that made the Black Death pale by comparison.
Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influenza
are also candidates. British fishermen had been fishing off
Massachusetts for decades before the Pilgrims landed. After filling
their hulls with cod, they would set forth on land to get firewood and
fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in
Europe. On one of these expeditions they probably transmitted the
illness to the people they met. Whatever it was, within three years
this plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the
inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian societies lay
devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scare left alive," wrote
British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in
all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many corpses,
survivors fled to the next tribe, carrying the infestation with them,
so that Indians died who had never seen a white person. Simpson tells
what the Pilgrims saw:

The summer after the Pilgrims landed, they sent two envoys on a
diplomatic mission to treat with Massasoit, a famous chief encamped
some 40 miles away at what is now Warren, Rhode Island. The envoys
discovered and described a scene of absolutie havoc. Villages lay in
ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with
the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none
was left to bury them.

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we
know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. Europeans caught
smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered,
including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George
Washington." Indians usually died. Therefore, almost as profound as
their effect on Indian demographics was the impact of the epidemics on
the two cultures, European and Indian. The English Separatists, already
seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play,
inferred that they had God on their side. John Winthrop, Governor of
Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous." To a friend
in England in 1634, he wrote:

But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for
300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the small
pox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared
our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all
not fifty, have put themselves under our protect....

Many Indians likewise inferred that their God had abandoned them.
Cushman, our British eyewitness, reported that "those that are left,
have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and
they seem as a people affrighted." After all, neither they nor the
Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian healers
offered no cure, their religion no explanation. That of the whites did.
Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians
surrendered to alcohol or bagan to listen to Christianity.

These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single
geopolitical event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the
planet. They meant that the British would face no real Indian challenge
for their first fifty years in America. Indeed, the plague helped cause
the legendary warm reception Plymouth enjoyed in its first formative
years from the Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally with the Pilgrims
because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the
Narragansetts to the west.

Moreover, the New England plagues exemplify a process which antedated
the Pilgrims and endures to this day. In 1942, more than 3,000,000
Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300
remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with
hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In
about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandans of North Dakota from nine
villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them
from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues; a fourth of the
Yanomamos of northern Brazil and souther Venezuela died in the year
prior to my writing this sentence.

Europeans were never able to "settle" China, India, Indonesia, Japan,
or most of Africa because too many people already lived there.
Advantages in military and social technology would have enabled
Europeans to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China
and Africa, but not to "settle" the New World. For that, the plague was
required. Thus, except for the European (and African) invasion itself,
the pestilence was surely the most important event in the history of
America.

What do we learn of all this in the twelve histories I studied? Three
offer some treatment of Indian disease as a factor in European
colonization. LIFE AND LIBERTY does quite a good job. AMERICA PAST AND
PRESENT supplies a fine analysis of the general impact of Indian
disease in American history, though it leaves out the plague at
Plymouth. THE AMERICAN WAY is the only text to draw the appropriate
geopolitical inference about the importance of the Plymouth outbreak,
but it never discuses Indian plagues anywhere else. Unfortunately, the
remaining nine books offer almost nothing. Two totally omit the
subject. Each of the other seven furnishes only a fragment of a
paragraph that does not even make it into the index, let alone into
students' minds.

Everyone knew all about the plague in colonial America. Even before the
Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in
his great goodness and bounty towards us," for sending "this wonderful
plague among the savages." Today it is no surprise that not one in a
hundred of my college students has ever heard of the plague. Unless
they read LIFE AND LIBERTY or PAST AND PRESENT, no student can come
away from these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact
on North America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled,
in short, and were then killed by disease or arms.

ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

Instead of the plague, our schoolbooks present the story of the
Pilgrims as a heroic myth. Referring to "the little party" in their
"small, storm-battered English vessel," their story line follows Perry
Miller's use of a Puritan sermon title, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS.
AMERICAN ADVENTURES even titles its chapter about British settlement in
North America "Opening the Wilderness." The imagery is right out of
Star Trek: "to go boldly where none dared go before."

The Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, where there already was a
British settlement, according to the texts, but "violent storms blew
their ship off course," according to some texts, or else an "error in
navigation" caused them to end up hundreds of miles to the north. In
fact, we are not sure where the Pilgrims planned to go. According to
George Willison, Pilgrim leaders never intended to settle in Virginia.
They had debated the relative merits of Guiana versus Massachusetts
precisely because they wanted to be far from Anglican control in
Virginia. They knew quite a bit about Massachusetts, from Cape Cod's
fine fishing to that "wonderful plague." They brought with them maps
drawn by Samuel Champlain when he toured the area in 1605 and a
guidebook by John Smith, who had named it "New England" when he visited
in 1614. One text, LAND OF PROMISE, follows Willison, pointing out that
Pilgrims numbered only about thirty-five of the 102 settlers aboard the
Mayflower. The rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the
new Virginia colony. "The New England landing came as a rude surpise
for the bedraggled and tired [non-Pilgrim] majority on board the
Mayflower," says Promise. "Rumors of mutiny spread quickly." Promise
then ties this unrest to the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a
uniquely fresh interpretation as to why the colonists adopted it.

Each text offers just one of three reasons---storm, pilot error, or
managerial hijacking--to explain how the Pilgrims ended up in
Massachusetts. Neither here nor in any other historical controversy
after 1620 can any of the twelve bear to admit that it does not know
the anser---that studying history is not just learning answers--that
history contains debates. Thus each book shuts student sout from the
intellectual excitement of the discipline.

Instead, textbooks parade ethnocentric assertions about the Pilgrims as
a flawless unprecedented band laying the foundations of our democracy.
John Garraty presents the Compact this way in AMERICAN HISTORY: "So far
as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a
group of people consiously created a government where none had existed
before." Such accounts deny students the opportunity to see the
Pilgrims as anything other than pious stereotypes.

"IT WAS WITH GOD'S HELP...FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?"

Settlement proceeded, not with God's help but with the Indians'. The
Pilgrims chose Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted
in corn, "and a brook of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor," in
the words of TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN NATION. It was a lovely site for a
town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in the
hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native
populations---Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New
England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why
so many town names---Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield--end in
"field".

Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims' second full day
in Massachusetts. A colonist's journal tells us: We marched to the
place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At
another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two
or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about ten
bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God's help that we
found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting
some Indians who might trouble us. ...The next morning, we found a
place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and
under that a fine bow...We also found bowls , trays, dishes, and things
like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry awa with
us, and covered the body up again.

A place "like a grave!"

More help came from a alive Indian, Squanto. Here my students are on
familiar turf, for they have all leanred the Squanto legend. LAND OF
PROMISE provides an archetypal account" Squanto had learned their
language, he explained, from English fishermen who ventured into the
New England waters each summer. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to
plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Would the small band of settlers have
survived without Squanto's help? We cannot say. But by the fall of
1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and
thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).

What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned
English. As a boy, along with four Penobscots, he was probably stolen
by a British captain in about 1605 and taken to England. There he
probably spent nine years, two in the employ of a Plymouth merchant who
later helped finance the Mayflower. At length, the merchant helped him
arrange passage back to Massachusetts. He was to enjoy home life for
less than a year, however. In 1614, a British slave raider seized him
and two dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery in Malaga,
Spain. Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, made his way
back to England, and in 1619 talked a ship captain into taking him
along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

It happens that Squanto's fabulous odyssey provides a "hook" into the
plague story, a hook that our texts choose to ignore. For now Squanto
walked to his home village, only to make the horrifying discovery that,
in Simpson's words, "he was the sole member of his village still alive.
All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before." No
wonder he throws in his lot with the Pilgrims, who rename his village
"Plymouth!" Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid
account in LAND OF PROMISE. "He had learned their language from English
fishermen." What do we make of books that give us the unimportant
details--Squanto's name, the occupation of his enslavers--while
omitting not only his enslavement, but also the crucial fact of the
plague? This is distortion on a grand scale.

William Bradford praised Squanto for many services, including his
"bring[ing] them to unknow places for their profit." "Their profit" was
the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. It too came
from the Indians, from the fur trade; Plymouth would never have paid
for itself without it. Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire
to "go boldly where none dared go before.|" They went to the Indians.

"TRUTH SHOULD BE HELD SACRED, AT WHATEVER COST"

Should we teach these truths about Thanksgiving? Or, like our
textbooks, should we look the other way? Again quoting LAND OF PROMISE.
"By the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several
days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first
Thanksgiving)." Throughout the nation, elementary school children still
enact Thanksgiving every fall as our national origin myth, complete
with Pilgrim hats made of construction paper and Indian braves with
feathers in their hair. An early Massachusetts colonist, Colonel Thomas
Aspinwall, advises us not to settle for this whitwash of feel - good -
history. "It is painful to advert to these things. But our forefathers,
though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to
Christian charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held
sacred, at whatever cost."

Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not
introduce the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had
observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern
celebrations date back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the
Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even called them
"Pilgrims" until the 1870s. Plymouth Rock achieved ichnographic status
only in the nineteenth century, when some enterprising residents of the
town moved it down to the water so its significance as the "holy soil"
the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible. The Rock has
become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a sacred text, and our textbooks
play the same function as the Anglican BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, teaching
us the rudiments of the civil religion of Thanksgiving.

Indians are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of
the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with
the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian
guests. Thanksgiving silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the
handouts that school children have carried home for decades, with
captions like, "They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash.
The Indians had never seen such a feast!" When his son brought home
this "information" from his New Hampshire elementary school, Native
American novelist Michael Dorris pointed out "the Pilgrims had
literally never seen `such a feast,' since all foods mentioned are
exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or
with the aid of] the local tribe."

I do not read Aspinwall as suggesting a "bash the Pilgrims"
interpretation, emphasizing only the bad parts. I have emphasized
untoward details only because our histories have suppressed everything
awkward for so long. The Pilgrims' courage in setting forth in the late
fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed.
In their first year, like the Indians, they suffered from diseases.
Half of them died. The Pilgrims did not cause the plague and were as
baffled as to its true origin as the stricken Indian villagers.
Pilgrim-Indian relations began reasonably postitively. Thus the
antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history, but honest and
inclusive history. "Knowing the truth about Thanksgiving, both its
proud and its shameful motivations and history, might well benefit
contemporary children," suggests Dorris. "But the glib retelling of an
ethnocentric and self-serving falsehood does no one any good." Because
Thanksgiving has roots in both Anglo and Native cultures, and because
of the interracial cooperation the first celebration enshrines,
Thanksgiving might yet develop into a holiday that promotes tolerance
and understanding. Its emphasis on Native foods provides a teachable
moment, for natives of the Americas first developed half of the world's
food crops. Texts could tell this--only three even mention Indian
foods---and could also relate other contributions form Indian
societies, from sports to political ideas. The original Thanksgiving
itself provides an interesting example: the Natives and newcomers spent
the better part of three days showing each other their various
recreations.

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous.
The genial ommissions and false details our texts use to retail the
Pilgrim legend promote Anglocentrism, which only handicaps us when
dealing with all those whose culture is not Anglo. Surely, in history,
"truth should be held sacred, at whatever
cost."

[Jim Loewen teaches sociology at the University of Vermont- Burlington,
and is the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me - Everything Your American
History Textbook Got Wrong.]
{EXCERPTED from MONTHLY REVIEW, (Vol.#44, November 1992), available
from Monthly Review Foundation, 122 West 27th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10117}

Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in
Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US
thanksgiving holiday.  Many Native Americans do not celebrate the
arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers.  Thanksgiving day
is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft
of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture.
Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the
struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of
remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism
and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.

34th NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING
Thursday, November 27, 2003, 12 Noon
Cole's Hill (the hill above Plymouth Rock)

Plymouth, Massachusetts

  Join us as we dedicate the 34th National Day of Mourning to our
brother, Native  political prisoner Leonard Peltier.  Add your voice to
the millions worldwide who demand his freedom.  Help us in our struggle
to create a true awareness of Native people and demonstrate Native
unity.  Help shatter the untrue glass image of the Pilgrims and the
unjust system based on racism, sexism, and homophobia.

For More Information Contact:

United American Indians of New England/LPSG
PO Box 890082, Weymouth, MA 02189
Phone and Fax: (781) 447-1926
E-mail: uainendom at earthlink.net
Website:  http://home.earthlink.net/~uainendom