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Thanksgiving: Introduction for Teachers |
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Written by Xiuhcoatl
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Nov 24, 2005 at 03:27 PM |
THANKSGIVING: INTRODUCTION FOR TEACHERS
By Chuck Larsen
This is a particularly difficult introduction to write. I have been a
public schools teacher for twelve years, and I am also a historian and
have written several books on American and Native American history. I
also just happen to be Quebeque French, Metis, Ojibwa, and Iroquois.
Because my Indian ancestors were on both sides of the struggle between
the Puritans and the New England Indians and I am well versed in my
cultural heritage and history both as an Anishnabeg (Algokin) and
Hodenosione (Iroquois), it was felt that I could bring a unique insight
to the project.
For an Indian, who is also a school teacher, Thanksgiving was never an
easy holiday for me to deal with in class. I sometimes have felt like I
learned too much about "the Pilgrims and the Indians." Every year I
have been faced with the professional and moral dilemma of just how to
be honest and informative with my children at Thanksgiving without
passing on historical distortions, and racial and cultural stereotypes.
The problem is that part of what you and I learned in our own childhood
about the "Pilgrims" and "Squanto" and the "First Thanksgiving" is a
mixture of both history and myth. But the THEME of Thanksgiving has
truth and integrity far above and beyond what we and our forebearers
have made of it. Thanksgiving is a bigger concept than just the story
of the founding of the Plymouth Plantation.
So what do we teach to our children? We usually pass on unquestioned
what we all received in our own childhood classrooms. I have come to
know both the truths and the myths about our "First Thanksgiving," and
I feel we need to try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of
historic truth. This text is an attempt to do this.
At this point you are probably asking, "What is the big deal about
Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims?" "What does this guy mean by a mixture
of truths and myth?" That is just what this introduction is all about.
I propose that there may be a good deal that many of us do not know
about our Thanksgiving holiday and also about the "First Thanksgiving"
story. I also propose that what most of us have learned about the
Pilgrims and the Indians who were at the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth
Plantation is only part of the truth. When you build a lesson on only
half of the information, then you are not teaching the whole truth.
That is why I used the word myth. So where do you start to find out
more about the holiday and our modern stories about how it began?
A good place to start is with a very important book, "The Invasion of
America," by Francis Jennings. It is a very authoritative text on the
settlement of New England and the evolution of Indian/White relations
in the New England colonies. I also recommend looking up any good text
on British history. Check out the British Civil War of 1621-1642,
Oliver Cromwell, and the Puritan uprising of 1653 which ended
parliamentary government in England until 1660. The history of the
Puritan experience in New England really should not be separated from
the history of the Puritan experience in England. You should also
realize that the "Pilgrims" were a sub sect, or splinter group, of the
Puritan movement. They came to America to achieve on this continent
what their Puritan bretheran continued to strive for in England; and
when the Puritans were forced from England, they came to New England
and soon absorbed the original "Pilgrims."
As the editor, I have read all the texts listed in our bibliography,
and many more, in preparing this material for you. I want you to read
some of these books. So let me use my editorial license to deliberately
provoke you a little. When comparing the events stirred on by the
Puritans in England with accounts of Puritan/Pilgrim activities in New
England in the same era, several provocative things suggest themselves:
1. The Puritans were not just simple religious conservatives persecuted
by the King and the Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs.
They were political revolutionaries who not only intended to overthrow
the government of England, but who actually did so in 1649.
2. The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not simply
refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's hands" in the "empty
wilderness" of North America, as a generation of Hollywood movies
taught us. In any culture at any time, settlers on a frontier are most
often outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not fit into
the mainstream of their society. This is not to imply that people who
settle on frontiers have no redeeming qualities such as bravery, etc.,
but that the images of nobility that we associate with the Puritans are
at least in part the good "P.R." efforts of later writers who have
romanticized them.(1) It is also very plausible that this unnaturally
noble image of the Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology of
"Noble Civilization" vs. "Savagery."(2) At any rate, mainstream
Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate religious dropouts
who intended to found a new nation completely independent from
non-Puritan England. In 1643 the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves
an independent confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before
the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent occurrence of
Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to establish here in the new world the
"Kingdom of God" foretold in the book of Revelation. They diverged from
their Puritan brethren who remained in England only in that they held
little real hope of ever being able to successfully overthrow the King
and Parliament and, thereby, impose their "Rule of Saints" (strict
Puritan orthodoxy) on the rest of the British people. So they came to
America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but in a hundred others as
well, with every intention of taking the land away from its native
people to build their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."(3)
3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious
persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them
were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans
and the Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned in the
book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first themselves and then
everyone else of everything they did not accept in their own
interpretation of scripture. Later New England Puritans used any means,
including deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve
that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan,
and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. This rigid
fundamentalism was transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists,
and it sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we have of
them. This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving
sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it,
Mather the Elder gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague
of smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who
had been their benefactors. He praised God for destroying "chiefly
young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the
forests to make way for a better growth", i.e., the Pilgrims.(5) In as
much as these Indians were the Pilgrim's benefactors, and Squanto, in
particular, was the instrument of their salvation that first year, how
are we to interpret this apparent callousness towards their misfortune?
4. The Wampanoag Indians were not the "friendly savages" some of us
were told about when we were in the primary grades. Nor were they
invited out of the goodness of the Pilgrims' hearts to share the fruits
of the Pilgrims' harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and
interracial brotherhood. The Wampanoag were members of a widespread
confederacy of Algonkian-speaking peoples known as the League of the
Delaware. For six hundred years they had been defending themselves from
my other ancestors, the Iroquois, and for the last hundred years they
had also had encounters with European fishermen and explorers but
especially with European slavers, who had been raiding their coastal
villages.(6) They knew something of the power of the white people, and
they did not fully trust them. But their religion taught that they were
to give charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone who came to
them with empty hands.(7) Also, Squanto, the Indian hero of the
Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British explorer named
John Weymouth, who had become a second father to him several years
before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these
Pilgrims as Weymouth's people.(8) To the Pilgrims the Indians were
heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the Devil. Squanto,
as the only educated and baptized Christian among the Wampanoag, was
seen as merely an instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide
for the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims. The Indians were
comparatively powerful and, therefore, dangerous; and they were to be
courted until the next ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and
the balance of power shifted. The Wampanoag were actually invited to
that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that
would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It
should also be noted that the INDIANS, possibly out of a sense of
charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the majority of the food
for the feast.(9)
5. A generation later, after the balance of power had indeed shifted,
the Indian and White children of that Thanksgiving were striving to
kill each other in the genocidal conflict known as King Philip's War.
At the end of that conflict most of the New England Indians were either
exterminated or refugees among the French in Canada, or they were sold
into slavery in the Carolinas by the Puritans. So successful was this
early trade in Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in Boston
began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa for black
slaves to sell to the proprietary colonies of the South, thus founding
the American-based slave trade.(10)
Obviously there is a lot more to the story of Indian/Puritan relations
in New England than in the thanksgiving stories we heard as children.
Our contemporary mix of myth and history about the "First" Thanksgiving
at Plymouth developed in the 1890s and early 1900s. Our country was
desperately trying to pull together its many diverse peoples into a
common national identity. To many writers and educators at the end of
the last century and the beginning of this one, this also meant having
a common national history. This was the era of the "melting pot" theory
of social progress, and public education was a major tool for social
unity. It was with this in mind that the federal government declared
the last Thursday in November as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving in
1898.
In consequence, what started as an inspirational bit of New England
folklore, soon grew into the full-fledged American Thanksgiving we now
know. It emerged complete with stereotyped Indians and stereotyped
Whites, incomplete history, and a mythical significance as our "First
Thanksgiving." But was it really our FIRST American Thanksgiving?
Now that I have deliberately provoked you with some new information and
different opinions, please take the time to read some of the texts in
our bibliography. I want to encourage you to read further and form your
own opinions. There really is a TRUE Thanksgiving story of Plymouth
Plantation. But I strongly suggest that there always has been a
Thanksgiving story of some kind or other for as long as there have been
human beings. There was also a "First" Thanksgiving in America, but it
was celebrated thirty thousand years ago.(11) At some time during the
New Stone Age (beginning about ten thousand years ago) Thanksgiving
became associated with giving thanks to God for the harvests of the
land. Thanksgiving has always been a time of people coming together, so
thanks has also been offered for that gift of fellowship between us
all. Every last Thursday in November we now partake in one of the
OLDEST and most UNIVERSAL of human celebrations, and THERE ARE MANY
THANKSGIVING STORIES TO TELL.
As for Thanksgiving week at Plymouth Plantation in 1621, the friendship
was guarded and not always sincere, and the peace was very soon abused.
But for three days in New England's history, peace and friendship were
there.
So here is a story for your children. It is as kind and gentle a
balance of historic truth and positive inspiration as its writers and
this editor can make it out to be. I hope it will adequately serve its
purpose both for you and your students, and I also hope this work will
encourage you to look both deeper and farther, for Thanksgiving is
Thanksgiving all around the world.
Chuck Larsen Tacoma Public Schools September, 1986
FOOTNOTES FOR TEACHER INTRODUCTION
(1) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's Indian," references to Puritans, pp. 27, 80-85, 90, 104, & 130.
(2) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's Indian," references to
frontier concepts of savagery in index. Also see Jennings, Francis,
"The Invasion of America," the myth of savagery, pp. 6-12, 15-16, &
109-110.
(3) See Blitzer, Charles, "Age of Kings," Great Ages of Man series,
references to Puritanism, pp. 141, 144 & 145-46. Also see Jennings,
Francis, "The Invasion of America," references to Puritan human
motives, pp. 4-6, 43- 44 and 53.
(4) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp. 6-10. Also see
Armstrong, Virginia I., "I Have Spoken," reference to Cannonchet and
his village, p. 6. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of
America," Chapter 9 "Savage War," Chapter 13 "We must Burn Them," and
Chapter 17 "Outrage Bloody and Barbarous."
(5) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp. 6-9. Also see
Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's Indian," the comments of Cotton
Mather, pp. 37 & 82-83.
(6) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," pp. 3-4. Also see
Graff, Steward and Polly Ann, "Squanto, Indian Adventurer." Also see
"Handbook of North American Indians," Vol. 15, the reference to Squanto
on p. 82.
(7) See Benton-Banai, Edward, "The Mishomis Book," as a reference on
general "Anishinabe" (the Algonkin speaking peoples) religious beliefs
and practices. Also see Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving,"
reference to religious life on p. 1.
(8) See Graff, Stewart and Polly Ann, "Squanto, Indian Adventurer."
Also see Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving." Also see
Bradford, Sir William, "Of Plymouth Plantation," and "Mourt's Relation."
(9) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," the letter of Edward Winslow dated 1622, pp. 5-6.
(10) See "Handbook of North American Indians," Vol. 15, pp. 177-78.
Also see "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," p. 9, the reference
to the enslavement of King Philip's family. Also see Larsen, Charles,
M., "The Real Thanksgiving," pp. 8-11, "Destruction of the
Massachusetts Indians."
(11) Best current estimate of the first entry of people into the Americas confirmed by archaeological evidence that is datable. |
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