tuluum's Diaryland Diary
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Gobble Gobble :O (article)
Excerpt from The Hidden History of Massachusetts: A Guide for Black
Folks; � DR. TINGBA APIDTA A publication of: The Reclamation
Project, New Revised and expanded edition, 2003; ISBN 0-9714462-0-2.
For more info e-mail A. Muhammad at [email protected].
The Real First Thanksgiving
Much of America's understanding of the early relationship between the
Indian and the European is conveyed through the story of
Thanksgiving. Proclaimed a holiday in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, this
fairy tale of a feast was allowed to exist in the American
imagination pretty much untouched until 1970, the 350th anniversary
of the landing of the Pilgrims. That is when Frank B. James,
president of the Federated Eastern Indian League, prepared a speech
for a Plymouth banquet that exposed the Pilgrims for having
committed, among other crimes, the robbery of the graves of the
Wampanoags. He wrote:
We welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that
it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass,
the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.
But white Massachusetts officials told him he could not deliver such
a speech and offered to write him another. Instead, James declined to
speak, and on Thanksgiving Day hundreds of Indians from around the
country came to protest. It was the first National Day of Mourning, a
day to mark the losses Native Americans suffered as the early
settlers prospered. This true story of "Thanksgiving" is what whites
did not want Mr. James to tell.
What Really Happened in Plymouth in 1621?
According to a single-paragraph account in the writings of one
Pilgrim, a harvest feast did take place in Plymouth in 1621, probably
in mid-October, but the Indians who attended were not even invited.
Though it later became known as "Thanksgiving," the Pilgrims never
called it that. And amidst the imagery of a picnic of interracial
harmony is some of the most terrifying bloodshed in New World history.
The Pilgrim crop had failed miserably that year, but the agricultural
expertise of the Indians had produced twenty acres of corn, without
which the Pilgrims would have surely perished. The Indians often
brought food to the Pilgrims, who came from England ridiculously
unprepared to survive and hence relied almost exclusively on handouts
from the overly generous Indians-thus making the Pilgrims the western
hemisphere's first class of welfare recipients. The Pilgrims invited
the Indian sachem Massasoit to their feast, and it was Massasoit,
engaging in the tribal tradition of equal sharing, who then invited
ninety or more of his Indian brothers and sisters-to the annoyance of
the 50 or so ungrateful Europeans. No turkey, cranberry sauce or
pumpkin pie was served; they likely ate duck or geese and the venison
from the 5 deer brought by Massasoit. In fact, most, if not all, of
the food was most likely brought and prepared by the Indians, whose
10,000-year familiarity with the cuisine of the region had kept the
whites alive up to that point.
The Pilgrims wore no black hats or buckled shoes-these were the silly
inventions of artists hundreds of years since that time. These lower-
class Englishmen wore brightly colored clothing, with one of their
church leaders recording among his possessions "1 paire of greene
drawers." Contrary to the fabricated lore of storytellers generations
since, no Pilgrims prayed at the meal, and the supposed good cheer
and fellowship must have dissipated quickly once the Pilgrims
brandished their weaponry in a primitive display of intimidation.
What's more, the Pilgrims consumed a good deal of home brew. In fact,
each Pilgrim drank at least a half gallon of beer a day, which they
preferred even to water. This daily inebriation led their governor,
William Bradford, to comment on his people's "notorious sin," which
included their "drunkenness and uncleanliness" and rampant "sodomy"...
The Pilgrims of Plymouth, The Original Scalpers
Contrary to popular mythology the Pilgrims were no friends to the
local Indians. They were engaged in a ruthless war of extermination
against their hosts, even as they falsely posed as friends. Just days
before the alleged Thanksgiving love-fest, a company of Pilgrims led
by Myles Standish actively sought to chop off the head of a local
chief. They deliberately caused a rivalry between two friendly
Indians, pitting one against the other in an attempt to
obtain "better intelligence and make them both more diligent." An 11-
foot-high wall was erected around the entire settlement for the
purpose of keeping the Indians out.
Any Indian who came within the vicinity of the Pilgrim settlement was
subject to robbery, enslavement, or even murder. The Pilgrims further
advertised their evil intentions and white racial hostility, when
they mounted five cannons on a hill around their settlement,
constructed a platform for artillery, and then organized their
soldiers into four companies-all in preparation for the military
destruction of their friends the Indians.
Pilgrim Myles Standish eventually got his bloody prize. He went to
the Indians, pretended to be a trader, then beheaded an Indian man
named Wituwamat. He brought the head to Plymouth, where it was
displayed on a wooden spike for many years, according to Gary B.
Nash, "as a symbol of white power." Standish had the Indian man's
young brother hanged from the rafters for good measure. From that
time on, the whites were known to the Indians of Massachusetts by the
name "Wotowquenange," which in their tongue meant cutthroats and
stabbers.
Who Were the "Savages"?
The myth of the fierce, ruthless Indian savage lusting after the
blood of innocent Europeans must be vigorously dispelled at this
point. In actuality, the historical record shows that the very
opposite was true.
Once the European settlements stabilized, the whites turned on their
hosts in a brutal way. The once amicable relationship was breeched
again and again by the whites, who lusted over the riches of Indian
land. A combination of the Pilgrims' demonization of the Indians, the
concocted mythology of Eurocentric historians, and standard Hollywood
propaganda has served to paint the gentle Indian as a tomahawk-
swinging savage endlessly on the warpath, lusting for the blood of
the God-fearing whites.
But the Pilgrims' own testimony obliterates that fallacy. The Indians
engaged each other in military contests from time to time, but the
causes of "war," the methods, and the resulting damage differed
profoundly from the European variety:
� Indian "wars" were largely symbolic and were about honor, not
about territory or extermination.
� "Wars" were fought as domestic correction for a specific act and
were ended when correction was achieved. Such action might better be
described as internal policing. The conquest or destruction of whole
territories was a European concept.
� Indian "wars" were often engaged in by family groups, not by
whole tribal groups, and would involve only the family members.
� A lengthy negotiation was engaged in between the aggrieved
parties before escalation to physical confrontation would be
sanctioned. Surprise attacks were unknown to the Indians.
� It was regarded as evidence of bravery for a man to go
into "battle" carrying no weapon that would do any harm at a distance-
not even bows and arrows. The bravest act in war in some Indian
cultures was to touch their adversary and escape before he could do
physical harm.
� The targeting of non-combatants like women, children, and the
elderly was never contemplated. Indians expressed shock and
repugnance when the Europeans told, and then showed, them that they
considered women and children fair game in their style of warfare.
� A major Indian "war" might end with less than a dozen casualties
on both sides. Often, when the arrows had been expended the "war"
would be halted. The European practice of wiping out whole nations in
bloody massacres was incomprehensible to the Indian.
According to one scholar, "The most notable feature of Indian warfare
was its relative innocuity." European observers of Indian wars often
expressed surprise at how little harm they actually inflicted. "Their
wars are far less bloody and devouring than the cruel wars of
Europe," commented settler Roger Williams in 1643. Even Puritan
warmonger and professional soldier Capt. John Mason scoffed at Indian
warfare: "[Their] feeble manner...did hardly deserve the name of
fighting." Fellow warmonger John Underhill spoke of the
Narragansetts, after having spent a day "burning and spoiling" their
country: "no Indians would come near us, but run from us, as the deer
from the dogs." He concluded that the Indians might fight seven years
and not kill seven men. Their fighting style, he wrote, "is more for
pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies."
All this describes a people for whom war is a deeply regrettable last
resort. An agrarian people, the American Indians had devised a
civilization that provided dozens of options all designed to avoid
conflict--the very opposite of Europeans, for whom all-out war, a
ferocious bloodlust, and systematic genocide are their apparent life
force. Thomas Jefferson--who himself advocated the physical
extermination of the American Indian--said of Europe, "They
[Europeans] are nations of eternal war. All their energies are
expended in the destruction of labor, property and lives of their
people."
Puritan Holocaust
By the mid 1630s, a new group of 700 even holier Europeans calling
themselves Puritans had arrived on 11 ships and settled in Boston-
which only served to accelerate the brutality against the Indians.
In one incident around 1637, a force of whites trapped some seven
hundred Pequot Indians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, near
the mouth of the Mystic River. Englishman John Mason attacked the
Indian camp with "fire, sword, blunderbuss, and tomahawk." Only a
handful escaped and few prisoners were taken-to the apparent delight
of the Europeans:
To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood
quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory
seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God.
This event marked the first actual Thanksgiving. In just 10 years
12,000 whites had invaded New England, and as their numbers grew they
pressed for all-out extermination of the Indian. Euro-diseases had
reduced the population of the Massachusett nation from over 24,000 to
less than 750; meanwhile, the number of European settlers in
Massachusetts rose to more than 20,000 by 1646.
By 1675, the Massachusetts Englishmen were in a full-scale war with
the great Indian chief of the Wampanoags, Metacomet. Renamed "King
Philip" by the white man, Metacomet watched the steady erosion of the
lifestyle and culture of his people as European-imposed laws and
values engulfed them.
In 1671, the white man had ordered Metacomet to come to Plymouth to
enforce upon him a new treaty, which included the humiliating rule
that he could no longer sell his own land without prior approval from
whites. They also demanded that he turn in his community's firearms.
Marked for extermination by the merciless power of a distant king and
his ruthless subjects, Metacomet retaliated in 1675 with raids on
several isolated frontier towns. Eventually, the Indians attacked 52
of the 90 New England towns, destroying 13 of them. The Englishmen
ultimately regrouped, and after much bloodletting defeated the great
Indian nation, just half a century after their arrival on
Massachusetts soil. Historian Douglas Edward Leach describes the
bitter end:
The ruthless executions, the cruel sentences...were all aimed at the
same goal-unchallengeable white supremacy in southern New England.
That the program succeeded is convincingly demonstrated by the almost
complete docility of the local native ever since.
When Captain Benjamin Church tracked down and murdered Metacomet in
1676, his body was quartered and parts were "left for the wolves."
The great Indian chief's hands were cut off and sent to Boston and
his head went to Plymouth, where it was set upon a pole on the real
first "day of public Thanksgiving for the beginning of revenge upon
the enemy." Metacomet's nine-year-old son was destined for execution
because, the whites reasoned, the offspring of the devil must pay for
the sins of their father. The child was instead shipped to the
Caribbean to spend his life in slavery.
As the Holocaust continued, several official Thanksgiving Days were
proclaimed. Governor Joseph Dudley declared in 1704 a "General
Thanksgiving"-not in celebration of the brotherhood of man-but for
[God's] infinite Goodness to extend His Favors...In defeating and
disappointing...the Expeditions of the Enemy [Indians] against us,
And the good Success given us against them, by delivering so many of
them into our hands...
Just two years later one could reap a �50 reward in Massachusetts for
the scalp of an Indian-demonstrating that the practice of scalping
was a European tradition. According to one scholar, "Hunting redskins
became...a popular sport in New England, especially since prisoners
were worth good money..."
(end of excerpt)
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7:37 a.m. - Thursday, Nov. 27, 2003
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