Massacres, myths,
and the making of the great November holiday.
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The
Indians who joined the mistrustful Pilgrims, Wampanoag tradition
suggests, were honoring a mutual-defense pact. Illustration
by Rui Tenreiro
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Autumn is the season for Native America. There are the cool nights
and warm days of Indian summer and the genial query "What's Indian
about this weather?" More wearisome is the annual fight over the
legacy of Christopher Columbusa bold explorer dear to Italian-American
communities, but someone who brought to this continent forms of
slavery that would devastate indigenous populations for centuries.
Football season is in full swing, and the team in the nation's capital
revels each week in a racist performance passed off as "just good
fun." As baseball season closes, one prays that Atlanta (or even
semi-evolved Cleveland) will not advance to the World Series. Next
up is Halloween, typically featuring "Native American Brave" and
"Sexy Indian Princess" costumes. November brings Native American
Heritage Month and tracks a smooth countdown to Thanksgiving. In
the elementary-school curriculum, the holiday traditionally meant
a pageant, with students in construction-paper headdresses and Pilgrim
hats reënacting the original celebration. If today's teachers
aim for less pageantry and a slightly more complicated history,
many students still complete an American education unsure about
the place of Native people in the nation's pastor in its present.
Cap the season off with Thanksgiving, a turkey dinner, and a fable
of interracial harmony. Is it any wonder that by the time the holiday
arrives a lot of American Indian people are thankful that autumn
is nearly over?
Americans have been celebrating Thanksgiving for nearly four centuries,
commemorating that solemn dinner in November, 1621. We know the
story well, or think we do. Adorned in funny hats, large belt buckles,
and clunky black shoes, the Pilgrims of Plymouth gave thanks to
God for his blessings, demonstrated by the survival of their fragile
settlement. The local Indians, supporting characters who generously
pulled the Pilgrims through the first winter and taught them how
to plant corn, joined the feast with gifts of venison. A good time
was had by all, before things quietly took their natural course:
the American colonies expanded, the Indians gave up their lands
and faded from history, and the germ of collective governance found
in the Mayflower Compact blossomed into American democracy.
Almost none of this is true, as David Silverman points out in "This
Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and
the Troubled History of Thanksgiving" (Bloomsbury). The first Thanksgiving
was not a "thanksgiving," in Pilgrim terms, but a "rejoicing." An
actual giving of thanks required fasting and quiet contemplation;
a rejoicing featured feasting, drinking, militia drills, target
practice, and contests of strength and speed. It was a party, not
a prayer, and was full of people shooting at things. The Indians
were Wampanoags, led by Ousamequin (often called Massasoit, which
was a leadership title rather than a name). An experienced diplomat,
he was engaged in a challenging game of regional geopolitics, of
which the Pilgrims were only a part. While the celebrants might
well have feasted on wild turkey, the local diet also included fish,
eels, shellfish, and a Wampanoag dish called nasaump, which
the Pilgrims had adopted: boiled cornmeal mixed with vegetables
and meats. There were no potatoes (an indigenous South American
food not yet introduced into the global food system) and no pies
(because there was no butter, wheat flour, or sugar).
Nor did the Pilgrims extend a warm invitation to their Indian neighbors.
Rather, the Wampanoags showed up unbidden. And it was not simply
four or five of them at the table, as we often imagine. Ousamequin,
the Massasoit, arrived with perhaps ninety menmore than the
entire population of Plymouth. Wampanoag tradition suggests that
the group was in fact an army, honoring a mutual-defense pact negotiated
the previous spring. They came not to enjoy a multicultural feast
but to aid the Pilgrims: hearing repeated gunfire, they assumed
that the settlers were under attack. After a long moment of suspicion
(the Pilgrims misread almost everything that Indians did as potential
aggression), the two peoples recognized one another, in some uneasy
way, and spent the next three days together.
No centuries-long continuity emerged from that 1621 meet-up. New
Englanders certainly celebrated Thanksgivingsoften in both
fall and springbut they were of the fasting-and-prayer variety.
Notable examples took place in 1637 and 1676, following bloody victories
over Native people. To mark the second occasion, the Plymouth men
mounted the head of Ousamequin's son Pumetacom above their town
on a pike, where it remained for two decades, while his dismembered
and unburied body decomposed. The less brutal holiday that we celebrate
today took shape two centuries later, as an effort to entrench an
imagined American community. In 1841, the Reverend Alexander Young
explicitly linked three things: the 1621 "rejoicing," the tradition
of autumnal harvest festivals, and the name Thanksgiving. He did
so in a four-line throwaway gesture and a one-line footnote. Of
such half thoughts is history made.
A couple of decades later, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's
Lady's Book, proposed a day of unity and remembrance to counter
the trauma of the Civil War, and in 1863 Abraham Lincoln declared
the last Thursday of November to be that national holiday, following
Young's lead in calling it Thanksgiving. After the Civil War, Thanksgiving
developed rituals, foodways, and themes of familyand nationalreunion.
Only later would it consolidate its narrative around a harmonious
Pilgrim-Wampanoag feast, as Lisa Blee and Jean O'Brien point out
in "Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit" (North Carolina),
which tells the story of how the holiday myth spread. Fretting over
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration, American
mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole,
were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic,
and blessed with an American character centered on family, work,
individualism, freedom, and faith.
The new story aligned neatly with the defeat of American Indian
resistance in the West and the rising tide of celebratory regret
that the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo once called "imperialist
nostalgia." Glorifying the endurance of white Pilgrim founders diverted
attention from the brutality of Jim Crow and racial violence, and
downplayed the foundational role of African slavery. The fable also
allowed its audience to avert its eyes from the marginalization
of Asian and Latinx labor populations, the racialization of Southern
European and Eastern European immigrants, and the rise of eugenics.
At Thanksgiving, white New England cheerfully shoved the problematic
South and West off to the side, and claimed America for itself.
The challenge for scholars attempting to rewrite Thanksgiving is
the challenge of confronting an ideology that has long since metastasized
into popular history. Silverman begins his book with a plea for
the possibility of a "critical history." It will be "hard on the
living," he warns, because this approach questions the creation
stories that uphold traditional social orders, making the heroes
less heroic, and asking readers to consider the villains as full
and complicated human beings. Nonetheless, he says, we have an obligation
to try.
So how does one take on a myth? One might begin by deconstructing
the process through which it was made. Silverman sketches a brief
account of Hale, Lincoln, and the marketing of a fictionalized New
England. Blee and O'Brien reveal how proliferating copies of a Massasoit
statue, which we can recognize as not so distant kin to Confederate
monuments, do similar cultural work, linking the mythic memory of
the 1621 feast with the racial, ethnic, and national-identity politics
of 1921, when the original statue was commissioned. One might also
wield the historian's skills to tell a "truer," better story that
exposes the myth for the self-serving fraud that it is. Silverman,
in doing so, resists the temptation to offer a countermyth, an ideological
narrative better suited to the contemporary moment, and renders
the Wampanoags not simply as victims but as strugglers, fighting
it out as they confront mischance and aggression, disagreeing with
one another, making mistakes, displaying ambition and folly, failing
to see their peril until it is too late.
In the story that many generations of Americans grew up hearing,
there were no Wampanoags until the Pilgrims encountered them. If
Thanksgiving has had no continuous existence across the centuries,
however, the Wampanoag people have. Today, they make up two federally
recognized tribes, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag
Tribe of Gay Head, and they descend from a confederation of groups
that stretched across large areas of Massachusetts, including Cape
Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket.
In the years before the Pilgrims' landing, trails and roads connected
dozens of Wampanoag communities with gathering sites, hunting and
fishing areas, and agricultural plots. North America's defining
indigenous agriculturethe symbiotic Three Sisters of corn,
beans, and squashcame late to the region, adopted perhaps
two hundred years before Europeans appeared. That's when the Wampanoags,
who moved seasonally between coastal summer residences (not unlike
Cape Cod today) and protected winter homes inland, took up farming.
Cultivation and cropping created a need for shared-use land management
and an indigenous notion of property. That led in turn to the consolidation
of a system of sachems, leaders who navigated the internal needs
of their communities, established tributary and protectorate relationships
with nearby communities, and negotiated diplomatic relations with
outsiders. When the Pilgrims encountered Ousamequin, they were meeting
a paramount sachem, a Massasoit, who commanded the respect necessary
to establish strategy for other groups in the region.
The Pilgrims were not the only Europeans the Wampanoags had come
across. The first documented contact occurred in 1524, and marked
the start of a century of violent encounters, captivity, and enslavement.
By 1620, the Wampanoags had had enough, and were inclined to chase
off any ship that sought to land. They sent a French colonizing
mission packing and had driven the Pilgrims away from a previous
landing site, on the Cape. Ousamequin's people debated for months
about whether to ally with the newcomers or destroy them. When they
decided to begin diplomacy, they were guided by Tisquantum (you
may recall him as Squanto) and Epenow, New England natives who had
been captured, held in bondage in Britain, and trained as interpreters
by the English before eventually finding their way back across the
Atlantic.
Why would Ousamequin decide to welcome the newcomers and, in 1621,
make a mutual-defense pact with them? During the preceding years,
an epidemic had struck Massachusetts Bay Indians, killing between
seventy-five and ninety per cent of the Wampanoag and the Massachusett
people. A rich landscape of fields and gardens, tended hunting forests,
and fishing weirs was largely emptied of people. Belief systems
crashed. Even survival did not mean good health, and, with fields
unplanted and animals uncaught, starvation followed closely behind.
The Pilgrims' settlement took place in a graveyard.
Wampanoag people consolidated their survivors and their lands,
and reëstablished internal self-governance. But, to the west,
the Narragansettstraditional rivals largely untouched by the
epidemicnow outnumbered the Wampanoags, and that led to the
strengthening of Ousamequin's alliances with the surviving Massachusett
and another nearby group, the Nipmucks. As the paramount sachem,
he also had to contend with challenges to his leadership from a
number of other Wampanoag sachems. And so, after much debate, he
decided to tolerate the rather pathetic Pilgrimswho had seen
half their number die in their first winterand establish an
alliance with them. That history, understood through Wampanoag characters
and motives, explains the "rejoicing" that Americans later remembered
as a pumpkin-spiced tale of Thanksgiving conciliation.
This rejoicing arrives about a third of the way through Silverman's
four-hundred-plus-page book. What follows is a vivid account of
the ways the English repaid their new allies. The settlers pressed
hard to acquire Indian land through "sales" driven by debt, threat,
alliance politics, and violence. They denied the coequal civil and
criminal jurisdiction of the alliance, charging Indians under English
law and sentencing them to unpayable fines, imprisonment, even executions.
They played a constant game of divide and conquer, and they invariably
considered Indians their inferiors. Ousamequin's sons Pumetacomcalled
King Philip by the Englishand Wamsutta began forming a resistance,
despite the poor odds. By 1670, the immigrant population had ballooned
to sixty or seventy thousand in southern New Englandtwice
the number of Native people.
We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony. Perhaps
we should recall instead how English settlers cheated, abused, killed,
and eventually drove Wampanoags into a conflict, known as King Philip's
War, that exploded across the region in 1675 and 1676 and that was
one of the most devastating wars in the history of North American
settlement. Native soldiers attacked fifty-two towns in New England,
destroyed seventeen of them, and killed a substantial portion of
the settler population. The region also lost as much as forty per
cent of its Native population, who fought on both sides. Confronted
by Mohawks to the west, a mixed set of Indian and Colonial foes
to the south, and the English to the east, Pumetacom was surrounded
on three sides. In the north, the scholar Lisa Brooks argues, Abenaki
and other allies continued the struggle for years. In "Our Beloved
Kin: A New History of King Philip's War" (Yale), Brooks deepens
the story considerably, focussing on indigenous geographical and
linguistic knowledge, and tracing the life of Weetamoo, the widow
of Wamsutta and the saunkskwa, or female leader, of her tribe,
the Pocasset. Weetamoo was Pumetacom's ally, his relative, and a
major figure in the fight. In the end, not only Pumetacom's head
was stuck on a pike; hers was, too, displayed for Wampanoag prisoners
who were likely soon to be sold to the Caribbean.
The Thanksgiving story buries the major cause of King Philip's
Warthe relentless seizure of Indian land. It also covers up
the consequence. The war split Wampanoags, as well as every other
Native group, and ended with indigenous resistance broken, and the
colonists giving thanks. Like most Colonial wars, this one was a
giant slave expedition, marked by the seizure and sale of Indian
people. Wampanoags were judged criminals andin a foreshadowing
of the convict-labor provision of the Thirteenth Amendmentsold
into bondage. During the next two centuries, New England Indians
also suffered indentured servitude, convict labor, and debt peonage,
which often resulted in the enslavement of the debtor's children.
Thanksgiving's Pilgrim pageants suggest that good-hearted settlers
arrived from pious, civilized England. We could remember it differently:
that they came from a land that delighted in displaying heads on
poles and letting bodies rot in cages suspended above the roads.
They were a warrior tribe.
Despite continued demographic decline, loss of land, and severe
challenges to shared social identities, Wampanoags held on. With
so many men dead or enslaved, Native women married men outside their
groupoften African-Americansand then redefined the families
of mixed marriages as matrilineal in order to preserve collective
claims to land. They adopted the forms of the Christian church,
to some degree, in order to gain some breathing space. They took
advantage of the remoteness of their settlements to maintain self-governance.
And by the late twentieth century they began revitalizing what had
been a "sleeping" language, and gained federal recognition as a
tribal nation. Today, Wampanoag people debate whether Thanksgiving
should be a day of mourning or a chance to contemplate reconciliation.
It's mighty generous of them.
David Silverman, in his personal reflections, considers how two
secular patriotic hymns, "This Land Is Your Land" and "My Country
'Tis of Thee," shaped American childhood experiences. When schoolkids
sing "Land where my fathers died! Land of the Pilgrim's pride,"
he suggests, they name white, Protestant New England founders. It
makes no sense, these days, to ask ethnically diverse students to
celebrate those mythic dudes, with their odd hats and big buckles.
At the very least, Silverman asks, could we include Indians among
"my fathers," and pay better attention to the ways they died?
Could we acknowledge that Indians are not ghosts in the landscape
or foils in a delusional nationalist dream, but actual living people?
This sentiment bumps a little roughly against a second plea: to
recognize the falsely inclusive rhetoric in the phrase "This land
is your land, this land is my land." Those lines require the erasure
of Indian people, who don't get to be either "you" or "me." American
Indian people are at least partly excluded from the United States
political system, written into the Constitution (in the three-fifths
clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, where they appear
as "Indians not taxed") so as to exist outside it. Native
American tribes are distinct political entities, sovereign nations
in their own right.
"American Indian" is a political identity, not a racial one, constituted
by formal, still living treaties with the United States government
and a long series of legal decisions. Today, the Trump Administration
would like to deny this history, wrongly categorize Indians as a
racial group, and disavow ongoing treaty relationships. Native American
tribal governments are actively resisting this latest effort to
dismember the past, demanding better and truer Indian histories
and an accounting of the obligations that issue from them. At the
forefront of that effort you'll find the Mashpee Wampanoags, those
resilient folks whose ancestors came, uninvited, to the first "Thanksgiving"
almost four centuries ago in order to honor the obligations established
in a mutual-defense agreementa treatythey had made with
the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony. ?
Published in the print edition of the November 25, 2019, issue.
Philip Deloria is a professor of history at Harvard. His most
recent book is
"Becoming
Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract."
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