I’m always looking for new things to be thankful for, and this year, I’m particularly thankful I’m not a refugee, Syrian or otherwise, mainly because of all the people in our fair state who are thankful they’re not obliged to take in strangers in distress. Thanks, but no thanks is their holiday greeting.
As you wait for that button to pop in the thorax of your roasting bird this Thanksgiving, remember that you have a damn Yankee to thank for your day off in the first place. None other than Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first official Thanksgiving in 1863. I know Republicans are fond of saying they’re in favor of less government intrusion, but it’s hard to top a federal decree mandating gratitude.
I’m all in favor of it, mind you. As a nation we tend to take our bounty for granted, and as individuals we have just about forgotten our manners altogether. We seem to need a nudge to express any sort of appreciation, unless we have won an Academy Award, in which case we cannot stop thanking folks even after an entire orchestra has limbered up to drown out our soliloquy.
Way before Honest Abe got out his proclamation pen points, the so-called “First Thanksgiving” took place up in Massachusetts, where friendly Indians supposedly joined unwinterized Pilgrims for a feast in the winter of 1621. It’s a lovely picture: noble savages and well-starched white folk in one big happy buffet line talking about how good the pemmican is and passing around second helpings of dried elderberries.
Thanks to the Center for World Indigenous Studies, we have an alternate evaluation of the tableau. Its historians observe that the Pilgrims were not just refugees fleeing religious persecution in Great Britain, but a sub-sect of the Puritans, religious revolutionaries out to overthrow the government. When they set out for America, the Puritans planned to set up a “holy kingdom” in the New World, the kind prophesied in the Book of Revelations.
Not a caliphate. Just a holy kingdom.
To accomplish this, though, they would have to evict the existing tenants. In the Plymouth Rock vicinity, that’d be your Wampanoag Indians, a hard-bitten crew who had been at odds with the Iroquois for 600 years or so. They had encountered Europeans before and mistrusted them, goodness knows why, although at least one Wampanoag, the famous Squanto, had indeed converted to Christianity before the Mayflower berthed.
Good timing for him for him, for the Pilgrims were a fundamentalist and somewhat bigoted bunch, engaged in what we might call a jihad against Satan. After they purified themselves, the Pilgrims were apt to purify anybody else that got in their way, and that included heathens like the Wampanoag.
Until a few more boats and artillery arrived, the outnumbered Pilgrims were in no position to launch a preemptive strike. Besides, the pale-faced newcomers weren’t assimilating their new digs very well. The Indians were wary, but because of their pagan beliefs, they had to treat the less fortunate among them with kindness and hospitality.
When Captain Miles Standish invited Squanto and some of the other Wampanoag leaders to bring their families to dine, he didn’t realize how many folks would show up, a Thanksgiving custom that persists to this day. Squanto alone brought 90 relatives, and before long, the Pilgrims made the Indians go Dutch. A Wampanoag chieftain, Massasoit, sent some of his people back to bring provisions. They returned with venison, wild turkeys, fish, beans, squash, corn soup, corn bread, and berries. (There is no historical mention of pumpkin pie or Bundt cake.)
The CIS historians note that it may have been the first American business lunch, since the Pilgrims used the occasion to swing a deal that would make the Plymouth Plantation their property. After three days of feasting and fanfaronade, the natives and the visitors negotiated a treaty of peace and friendship, including a deed to the land that eventually became the town of Plymouth.
That peace and friendship lasted about as long as it took reinforcements to arrive, bringing with them some other surprises for the native dwellers, like virulent pestilence. In his Thanksgiving sermon of 1623 in Plymouth, one Mather the Elder gave thanks to God for a smallpox epidemic that wiped out most of the Wampanoags who’d brought the feast two years before, “chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth.” Meaning more Pilgrims, of course.
Between microbes and musketry, the new settlers managed to clear New England of most of its heathen population, making the world safe for baked beans, cream pie and the Red Sox. Interestingly, the people in charge of pageantry invited a surviving member of the Wampanoags to speak during festivities in 1970 marking the 350th anniversary of the Plymouth Rock landing. What he said then is still pertinent:
“Today is a time of celebrating for you — a time of looking back to the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my people. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them 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 tribe, that we and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people.
“Although our way of life is almost gone, we, the Wampanoags, still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed. But today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.”
Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.