Out of the Woods

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.