[Peace-discuss] A Thanksgiving tale.

[Al Kagan]

Mort,

Thanks much.  Even Zinn missed the plague.  I certainly didn't know 
most of this.

At 11:43 PM -0600 11/27/03, Morton K.Brussel wrote:
>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
>
>
>_______________________________________________
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu