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TechnoratiThanksgiving We Can Believe In
Seven years before Tisquantum (Squanto, to most of us) helped the Pilgrims recover from their disastrous first winter in America, he was kidnapped by an English cod fisher and fur trader who was diversifying into the human trade. Tisquantum and other stock were shipped to Spain under hatch, a murderous passage, and most of the survivors were sold into slavery. Tisquantum was among the lucky, rescued by friars before he could be auctioned, though perhaps held a few years to ensure his salvation by Christ. We do not know how Tisquantum made his way to London and finagled a job as guide and interpreter on a ship bound for New England. But in 1619, four years after his abduction, he returned to America only to find his town of Patuxet in ruins and nearly all its 2,000 Wampanoags dead of European pox. When the Pilgrims arrived the following winter, they founded Plymouth on Patuxet's remains--a cruel symbol, that.
We do not hear much of this history on Thanksgiving. We hear instead that in the spring of 1621 Tisquantum taught the Pilgrims to grown corn and catch eel. We hear that come autumn, gratitude suffused the harvest feast, that beautiful gathering of men who had seen Shakespeare in his lifetime and men ignorant of paper but living lives of plenty. These things are indeed true, but a fuller truth is that Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims as much from fear as from charity and that alongside the goodwill at the first Thanksgiving were mutual mistrust and just-restrained hostility. The mistrust, on the Wampanoags' side at least, was well founded, as their destruction by colonial America soon proved.
America is not alone among nations in making mythology of history. Myth comforts. History, which is to say truth, instructs, often painfully. And it is a painful truth that the guns, germs, and steel of our forebears precipitated the great bloodletting that rid Indian Country of Indians and damned the few survivors to POW camps (now called reservations) where they remain the poorest, most diseased, and worst schooled among us. The link between our myth-making and their destitution is direct. For to forget that our nation virtually destroyed theirs is to absolve ourselves of a duty to make amends. We have been absolving ourselves for half a millennium now.
The consequences are written all over America's most populous reservations, where half the men and women have no work, half their children drop out of school, and still greater majorities, adult and adolescent, rot slowly from addiction to drink and drug. The reservation birthright is an eightfold risk, compared to other Americans, of dying of tuberculosis, a twofold risk of dying in infancy, and a three- or fourfold risk of dying by one's own hand while still a child. On reservations like South Dakota's Pine Ridge, a boy born in 2008 can expect just 48 years of life, a girl 52. Tell them they should give thanks on this day.
Indians have, of course, tried to better their lot. But they are cursed by a dependence on the kindness of strangers far surpassing that of others who were once written out of the American dream. Blacks and Latinos, say, make up 12 and 15 percent of America and are clustered powerfully in cities and regions like the South and Southwest. But Indians make up just 1 percent of America and are thinly scattered across its lands. They haven't the numbers to demand power. Nor have they the natural resources to build wealth, power's proxy. (Only a tiny handful of America's 562 tribes, to dispel another myth, enjoy casino or mineral riches.)
And so Indians are reduced to asking our leaders to do what is right because, quaintly, it is right, not because it will win them votes or dollars. Morality has always been a weak political card, but our nation has come to a rare moment when there is at last a chance--call it a hope--that the card might play. For the man just elected president, now of necessity coldly calculating what his America can and cannot achieve, was shaped among the colonized peoples of Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya and by a family sensitive to the costs of colonialism. In his broad mandate for change there will be room for a few deeds of mere moral, rather than electoral, worth. These are thin reeds against the winds of Realpolitik, which will howl at Mr. Obama to ignore--that is, condemn--America's Indians just as his recent predecessors have done. But forgive Indians and their friends if for now they cling to those hope-giving reeds.
What, specifically, Indians hope for is no mystery. They hope our new president will end their Eternal Depression (compared to which our Great Depression was a curio) with a New Deal: a CCC, a WPA, an NYA, and all the rest of FDR's alphabet-soup work programs, only under Indian control. They hope our new president will return a few of their stolen lands; for a start, the federal tracts in the Black Hills, sacred to the Lakotas and seized by rankest theft, can be given back without disturbing a single acre owned by a white man. They hope our new president knows, or learns with grief, that tribal colleges and universities--born only a generation ago in trailer homes but already, in the greatest Indian victory since Little Bighorn, turning dropouts into graduates by the thousand--have never received even half the funds our niggardly Congress has authorized for them over the years. They hope our new president will raze the corrupt and soul-crushingly inefficient Bureau of Indian Affairs and erect in its place a truer friend of, by, and for Indians. And they hope our new president will free at last Leonard Peltier, the Mandela of Indian Country. Peltier has been imprisoned these 32 years for killing two FBI agents, an act he may or may not have done. What is certain is that he and his people returned the FBI's fire only after years of savage provocation, that his trial was one of the grossest railroadings in the history of American courts, and that our government's guilt far outstripped anything he stood accused of. The man has done time enough. So has Indian Country. Let us hope that may change.
15 Comments so far
Show AllA letter to the editor written last year to rebut a right-winger:
It was nice to read Dave Garthoff’s fairy tail version of the first Thanksgiving Day meal in your paper on Nov. 25. He started out by saying, “This year, let’s try to get the Thanksgiving story right”. Under Garthoff’s version of events, the pilgrims practiced a primitive form of socialism and almost starved to death. Only when the Pilgrims realized they could produce more food by turning to the free market system were they able to enjoy a fruitful bounty, thus producing the first Thanksgiving Day in America.
The truth is the Pilgrims barely would have made it through the year 1621 without the first form of public assistance in this country by the Native American Wampanoag tribe. The previous winter had almost eradicated the Pilgrim population. Their own crops were failing miserably. Chief Massasoit bailed out the Pilgrims by bringing most of the food consumed during the three day celebration. I guess you could call the tribal chief a precursor to FDR’s social program, the New Deal. Free enterprise? Hardly. If the Pilgrims were a corporation today they would be clamoring for government handouts in the form of corporate welfare.
Native Indian Squantos taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn and subsist in their new environment. A similar approach successfully put into place 300 years later by JFK we call the Peace Corps works on the same altruistic principles. Free-market system? Not even close
Garthoff’s letter would have you believe that we all can make it in a capitalistic society and those who can’t are just lazy. On this post-Thanksgiving day I thank God that our Democracy, built on compassion and charity, is the overriding principle that sets us apart, not the free-enterprise system.
www.PDAOhio.org
Excellent comment.
How many of you have refused to do any shopping today in protest to the commercialized binge that both Thanksgiving and Christmas have become? Just curious.
Poet
I don't shop unless it's for something I need. I don't have many wants outside of a good book and the free library keeps me supplied rather nicely.
Rickster
"How many of you have refused to do any shopping today in protest to the commercialized binge that both Thanksgiving and Christmas have become? Just curious."
That would be me Poet. :)
This year, again, count me out for Thanksgiving dinner. I will be in Plymouth with the Native Americans, commemorating Day of National Mourning. People often ask me: what is wrong with nice family gathering, what’s wrong with thanking God for all our blessings?
What is wrong is called genocide. We are being told, that this great nation is built on the foundation of freedom and liberty. This is lie, for we immediately should ask: freedom and liberty for whom? What is certain though, is the fact that this country was founded on the genocide of Native Americans. And this is not one of many – we are talking about biggest genocide in the history of human kind. Truth is so terrifying, injustice so great, that our inventive government decided to change pages of history. So kids in schools, adults in front of big TV screens were administered strong drug of propaganda and were told alternative, fantastic story of the past. Real events were dumped into the big “ memory hole”. Yes, American society is doped and dreaming.
"What we must do is LISTEN to what they have to tell us and do our best to give back from what we have taken. It is our responsibility to let them dictate the terms."
What is it that Native Americans largely want? Do they want to be woven into the larger American fabric by a New Deal type of thing, or given land or even entire states in which to live? Reparations?
"i did not know (and i'm pretty well read) until reading another thanksgiving article posted here today, that November is Native American History Month. wonder why not . . . clearly there would be lots of painful soul searching if we ever did
start to address native american history from anything other than the eurocentric perspective we learned in school"
I don't know if hand-wringing is really useful and would miss the point of what the candid American historians are trying do. The point is to illustrate just what is essentially wrong with America. When you do that, you move beyond shame and despair and find solutions. And while the story of how we all got to where we are is complex, the solutions (at least imo) are pretty simple.
How's this for a different slant on the issues raised by this article.
The Amish are today what they have been for the several centuries that they have lived on this continent, subsistence farmers. They don't fight wars, have electricity, drive cars, or even use mechanized farm equipment any more complicated than a draft animal pulling a hand plow fashioned from wood.
Most Amish youth by the time they reach puberty have the bgasic knowlwdge and skillsa to survive as subsistence farmers. They are then helped by their clan with land, a house and barn, and some survival furnishings.
After that they are on their own--except not really because if some disaster strikes, the clan and neighbors from all around come to offer solace, comfort and $upport (because the Amish don't deal in credit, insurance, or $ocial $ecurity many of them tend to accumulate a lot of cash wealth which they use to support one another in times of crisis.
There is not now nor has there ever been a "Bureau of Amish Affairs", their lands have never been confiscated, and their way of life continues in much the same manner as it has always been for centuries.
Native Americans have always had a hunter-gatherer culture and with sufficient open space managed to survive and thrive in the multiple millions from the Innuit of Alaska and Canada to the Incas of Peru. They built great civilizations and cultures and did so without spoiling and corrupting the land, water, and air from which they drew their livlihood.
So how come the Amish are left alone and Native Americans have been treated like Jews in the 3rd. Reich of Nazi Germany and extermihnated through systematic genocide that has been going on over several centuries?
Some of the reason was the lust and greed for "lebens raum" (which is German for "living room" and was an official policy of the Nazi's for justifying the confiscation of wealth and land by force of arms--now what middle easstern country does that sound like today?--Hmmm).
But primarily, Native Americans "get no respect" compared to Amish for the same reason as African Americans--the color of their complexion--it's a racial thing that is used to justify not only the extermihation of their peoples but also--much worse--of their culture.
Poet
How about this idea for a REAL Thanksgiving in addition to making the word gratitude less of a taboo than is the case? Instead of having to listen to Christmas music in November, it would be nice if the radio stations actually played some real Thanksgiving tunes from the natives and I'm not talking about the shitty Adam Sandler one. The beat and rhythm are great and the mind gets a better feeling.
Godfrey Hodgson wrote a fascinating book called, "A Great And Godly Adventure; The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving." Along with similar accounts about the Native American history that Steve Hendricks talks about, Hodgson also talks about the financial corruption and backstabbing in England that went on in financing of the first Pilgrim journeys.
It seems that we tend to look back in history and recreate Utopias, or look into the future and imagine Utopias, why is so difficult to live in one in the present? Or do we, and we just keep screwing it up.
The oft-quoted statistics might be true regarding reservation life, however, let's not forget that they have things we so-called "civilised white folk" don't have. True community.
Frequently, we're told that everyone drops out of school on reservations, but who really needs school? Especially when there are no jobs on the reservation. WHo needs a job anyway if you live in the traditional ways of your ancestors? I think the media, even here at common dreams needs to stop looking at this from a civilised privileged perspective and start reporting on what they do actually have and why that is good from an indigenous perspective.
And how come Native Hawaiians and Alaskans are always left out in these "First Peoples" articles that we see so often?
I assume Herbalist is not Native American since s/he refers to the residents of reservations as "them". It's time that non-natives stopped assuming they know what Native Americans have, want and need. As a non-native I wouldn't presume to tell Native Americans they don't need jobs or education. What we must do is LISTEN to what they have to tell us and do our best to give back from what we have taken. It is our responsibility to let them dictate the terms.
We wrung our bread
From stocks and stones
And fenced our gardens
With the red man's bones.
- Robert Lowell
i did not know (and i'm pretty well read) until reading another thanksgiving article posted here today, that November is Native American History Month. wonder why not . . . clearly there would be lots of painful soul searching if we ever did
start to address native american history from anything other than the eurocentric perspective we learned in school . . .
Good luck. I wish the Native American everything good and can only hope that they may recover something for their children to build upon. Genocide and slavery are not what a moral or above average country should do yet we must live with the shame and yes, there is much shame. We could learn a lot from the natives if we only had eyes with which to see, ears in which to hear and some kind of conscience with which to feel. Like I said, good luck.