From: Hank Roth <pnews@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.society.revolution
Date: 20 Jan 93 17:14 PST
Subject: Thanksgiving belongs to Indians
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1672200002:000:24306
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!pnews    Jan 20 17:14:00 1993


/* Written  4:37 pm  Jan 20, 1993 by pnews in igc:p.news */
/* ---------- "Thanksgiving belongs to Indians" ---------- */
<<< via P_news/p.news >>>
{From MONTHLY REVIEW, An independent Socialist Magazine (Vol. 
#44, November 1992), available from Monthly Review Foundation, 
122 West 27th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10117}
[Footnotes available from Monthly Review with subscription.] 
 
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING
by James W. Loewen
[Jim Loewen teaches sociology at the University of Vermont-
Burlington.]
 
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 verson 
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 celebrted 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. 
Writing in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, William Langer tells us that the 
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 
influencza 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 
Rober Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in all previous 
human experience. Unable to cope with so many corposes, 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 indeigenous 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 recrations. 
 
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 no 
Anglo. Surely, in history, "truth should be held sacred, at 
whatever cost."
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