Uh, Thanks …
In Plymouth, Massachusetts, about 10 miles down the road from my house, the members of the Mayflower Society will march this Thanksgiving morning in period garb, in solemn procession, to the town cemetery. There, they will pay their respects to their ancestors, and go to dinner.
A few hours later, many also in period garb, American Indians will gather on the hill overlooking Plymouth Rock for what they call the National Day of Mourning. They will pay their respect to their ancestors, before turning it over to a day of rage, along the familiar lines of modern protest, a catchall for the anti-establishment causes du jour.
Thanksgiving in fact commemorates a brief, bright period in American history, in 1621, when the English and the Indians got along. There are a lot of nice ideals associated with Thanksgiving, most of which are later additions and irrelevant to this discussion. The friendship between Pilgrim and Wampanoag was an arrangement, at least at first, of wary mutual convenience. By 1675, it had degenerated into open warfare, but that was a remarkably long time, given the parties involved. The great Sachem Massasoit was dead. The long alliance he had maintained with the English against his rivals, the Pequots of Connecticut, had fallen apart amid suspicion over the death of his son and successor, Sachem Wamsutta, who sickened after a meeting with the English in my town. Suspicion, misunderstanding, unfortunate overreactions and outrage mounted. Finally the English and Sachem Metacomet, Wamsutta’s younger brother, also known as King Philip, went to war.
At least eight men from my town were killed in that war. Of the 27 sent from my town, population then about 400, eight of their productive adult men dead must have been a terrible toll. Everyone would have known these men, and would have had to help take care of their families. New England’s total of 600 dead colonials amounted to more than one in 10 of the force fielded, and more than one in 100 of the English population at that time. It was a fight for their survival, and out of it came a new distinctly American identity. The number of Indian dead is placed at 3,000. Thousands more were scattered, and others rounded up in a 17th-century concentration camp at Deer Island in Boston Harbor or sold into slavery. It was the end of the Wampanoag nation, and the start of an ugly history. Unclear what the Indians intended to do, had they prevailed.
Complexities of early and later English-Indian relations may get some attention in Plymouth today, but each side has its primary story line. The Pilgrims’ is persecution, suffering, and endurance, followed by bounty and benevolence. The Indians’ is persecution, suffering and betrayal, followed by devastation. Neither version, nor even both of them taken together, encompasses the full truth.
It is popular nowadays, and has been for the last 30 years or so, to look for the ugliness in the Pilgrims’ tale, starting with unearthing of an Indian corn cache and graves on Cape Cod, to what generations after their time became an undeniable genocide. The Pilgrims’ descendants may touch on some of that, in the spirit of acknowledgement and atonement. Not all are the kind of horse-faced, stuffy blueblood Yankees you might expect, by the way. I’ve met some with Italian names and others with Asian faces.
That’s a little surprising, but you quickly remember that this is America, and we are a little bit of everything. In any case, it’s not so odd as at the Day of Mourning event, when you see a speaker, dressed in Indian garb and vitriolically denouncing the European onslaught, who appears to be white himself.
That’s made me wonder what it is like to reject the inconvenient truths of one’s past, claiming identity and victimhood along a few exalted segments of one’s history and DNA, while repudiating other segments in collective punishment. When I’ve seen an angry young man in warpaint talking about the crimes against his people, and he looks like a pasty-faced punk from South Boston, I’ve thought, this has to be a torturous form of self-loathing.
It’s not all like that, and there are some people, many of them unquestionably Indians, who want to be together on this day, to remember and honor their dead symbolically, like any group of people does. They are justifiably angry at a turn of history that left them pariahs in their own land, the last vestiges of their people.
I’ve also thought, “Why are we having this conversation here, in English? Why aren’t we in England, speaking Wampanoag?”
I ask this question because there is no people in history that can lay claim to pure, exclusive victimhood or noble traits. Such a people does not exist. This is one of the reasons why the English were able to arrange their alliance with Massasoit. This is one of the reasons Hernando Cortes, with 400 Spaniards, could defeat the mighty Aztec army of 200,000 men. The Indians had a long history of preying on each other. When the Europeans showed up, instead of uniting to boot them off their shores, they tried to use them to their own advantage. Against their enemies. Other Indians.
The English and their American and Australian offshoots, despised in some quarters as racist conquerors, are themselves the product of multiple waves of marauders and conquerors — Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans — who took, killed, enslaved and absorbed, finally becoming part of something new.
Some people like to see the Indians as a peace-loving, yet warrior-chic people who lived in wise harmony with nature and each other. But they had been doing the same thing to each other ever since, archaeological finds such as Kennewick man now suggest, they crossed from Asia and overwhelmed the physically distinct Eurasian aboriginal inhabitants of North America about 7,000 B.C. Iroquois, Sioux, Navajo, Comanche, Aztecs, Incas, death cult societies of the pre-Columbian southwest, all warred on their neighbors and if they were strong enough, attempted to subjugate them. Often with unspeakable savagery, on a par with any Catho vs. Prot 30 Years War atrocities.
This is because we are human, and this is what humans do. As Jared Diamond has posited in his book, “Guns, Germs and Steel,” the significant difference from one group of humans to another, the reason why we’re speaking English here and not Wampanoag in England, has largely been one of resources and opportunity. For reasons too numerous to mention here, our boats were bigger than their canoes. Our guns were better than their bows and arrows. Our diseases were worse than theirs were.
It is only within the last few centuries, primarily and ironically enough within the bloody, widely disparaged crucible of ideals that is America, that we have slowly and painfully tried to break with that past and become a higher people. We’ve tried to become a people that, growing out of ancient hatreds in Europe and violence here in America, have absorbed elements of all those histories and become something distinct from them. A people who acknowledge the misdeeds of the past and try to correct them. A people dedicated to universal justice and prosperity and always striving for them. A people moving forward.
Within that context, victimhood is a trap, every bit as vile and destructive as the trap of subjugating others that we now reject. They are traps that ensnare us in the terrible past. Whatever we might have come from, we are the survivors now, who hopefully have moved beyond that. And for that, today, we should be thankful.
At the table:
Blue Crab offers some historical insight.
Hyscience delivers more Thanksgiving thoughts.
The Anchoress flies in on a prayer and some recipes.
Let’s raise a glass to PJ the dispatcher, he has to work.
Rightwingnation brings George Washington.
Powerline arrives with Abraham Lincoln
Confederate Yankee intones a psalm.
Argghhh!!! illustrates the holiday spirit.
Don Sensing brings dessert: Art Buchwald explaining Thanksgiving to the French.
In his quarters, the captain reflects.
And Volokh righteously smites an ignorant Pilgrim basher.
Topics: America
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 2:01 am on Thursday, November 23, 2006
4 Responses to “Uh, Thanks …”
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November 23rd, 2006 at 8:49 pm
Brillient post, Jules. Thanks for being a real reporter and staying clear of demigogery.
November 23rd, 2006 at 8:56 pm
It will fall on too many deaf ears, but it was well said.
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:14 pm
A Swill Thanksgiving to you and yours, Jules. After the day I’ve had (being called ‘racist’ for the first time in my life because of “fuzzy clerics”), it was lovely reading your words.
November 24th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
From a stuffy, horse-faced Mayflower Yankee, with 1/16 Indian blood (enough to count) - darn good post!
Like the colonists with the Indians, bloggers as good as you will take over the internet, and drive us out. Fine with me.
“We Indians” who use victimization to get freebies put themselves beneath human dignity - red, white, or any-colored dignity. Shameful, embarassing.
BTW, did you ever see the great New Yorker cartoon - erroneous, but great - in which two Pilgrims stand on Plymouth Rock. One says to the other: “My short term goal is religious freedom, but my long term goal is real estate.”