Reconsidering
Thanksgiving
Middle-aged,
or older Americans remember their Thanksgiving celebrations in the
early grades of grade school when some of the students dressed up as
pilgrims, in pointed hats made of cardboard, and others dressed up as
Indians with a feather or two in their headband and otherwise scanty
clothes, enacted a peaceful and shared Thanksgiving dinner.. They
often express surprise when they hear that seven and eight year olds
in our schools today are subjected to the same pretend Thanksgiving
rituals.
These
celebrations were meant to convey a sense of our history, of the
positive relations between the pilgrims and the American Indians
living around Plymouth, MA. What happened in the years that followed
between the inhabitants of the Eastern shores of this continent and
the different tribes who had lived there for perhaps 12,000 or even
20,000 years was not discussed further. The meeting of the cardboard
pilgrims with two-feather Indians in second grade often is the only
mention of Indians in American history taught in our schools until
the Indians reappear as they attack innocent whites trekking across
the prairie in their covered wagons. No one asks what those wagons
were doing there in the first place.
The
colonists coming over from England regarded American Indians as
primitive savages for no other reason than that they did not speak or
read and write English, that they preferred to live in tents rather
than in houses, that their understanding of ownership and possessions
differed
from that of the English (and perhaps that they were not
Protestants). Ownership for the English meant that you had the right
to dispose of, for instance, a piece of land as you pleased. You
could farm a piece of land or let it lie fallow; you could sell it,
burn everything that grew on it or turn it into a formal garden –
what ever you chose. After all it was yours. For the Wampanoags land
could not be owned in that sense. Some family or band of families
occupied a particular piece of land for a time. They had possession
of it--that excluded use by others without permission--they farmed
it, fished its rivers, or ocean shores. But the land of course was
not theirs, it was not anybody's because it was everybody's.
When
colonists acquired ownership of a particular piece of land, often as
a consequence of deceptive practices, all the Indians were giving
away was possession, the ability to use a piece of land for a certain
period to farm, to fish, to hunt, to do whatever was needed to
sustain a group of people. This ownership lasted for a certain period
presumably agreed on. It was certainly not permanent. The English,
for their part, thought that they now were owners of this piece of
land forever and had total control over it; they did not just possess
it for a limited period. They could exclude all others—including
American Indians from passing over, let alone make use of the land.
Many bitter conflicts arose from these misunderstandings.
These
profound cultural differences inevitably lead to terrible
miscommunications however well-meaning the parties on both sides may
have been. But both parties regarding the others as ignorant and
incompetent – the Wampanoag did not possess a written language, the
colonists would have starved during the long first winter (when many
of them did die) if it had not been for the generous assistance of
chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag. Both sides appeared to have reasons
for looking down on the others; both sides were terribly mistaken.
After
chief Massasoit died, about 55 years after the colonists first set
foot on the New England shore, the son of Massasoit, Pumetacom, also
known as King Philip, started a war against the English colonists
which the American Indians lost. The colonists massacred several
hundred Pequot Indians at the conclusion of that war. They cut off
Pumetacom’s head and displayed it rotting away for twenty years
outside the walls of Plymouth.
Whereas
the first Thanksgiving celebration, so faithfully commemorated by our
grade school children, did not start a tradition, it was not
repeated; it was not significant, at the end of King Philip's war, in
August 1677, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a
holiday of Thanksgiving for the colonists’ success in massacring
the inhabitants of the area. From the American Indian perspective,
this was the first Thanksgiving—a celebration by White Americans of
their destruction of American Indian lives, peoples and cultures.
White
Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a family holiday and to give
thanks for thriving on this continent. For American Indians
Thanksgiving remains a lasting symbol of the widespread killing of
original inhabitants of these lands that opened two centuries of
having land stolen from them or taken by military expeditions that
killed the people who had
lived there long before we white people arrived.
For
the last 50 years American Indians have gathered in Plymouth MA on
Thanksgiving day as a Day of Mourning. White persons are allowed to
attend this ceremony. But they are not allowed to speak. They are
asked not to eat where there are American Indians who may be fasting
on that day.
When
white persons gather for Thanksgiving feasts in the coming year, we
should also remember the intense grief and suffering our presence in
America has brought to the people who have lived here for millenia.
Even better, well-meaning whites should inform themselves about the
history of American Indians on the American continent. We need to
find out how ordinary American Indians live today. We should find
the remaining Indian tribes where they live and try to arrange
meetings to sincerely apologize and to explore ways in which white
Americans can today try to repair at least a small part of the damage
we have done over several centuries.
