November newsletter-THE SILVER LINING OF THANKSGIVING PAST

THE SILVER LINING OF THANKSGIVING PAST
BY: IAN WELSH SATURDAY NOVEMBER 24, 2007J 4:02 PM
The Puritans were religious radicals being driven into exile out of England. Since their story
is well known, I will not repeat it here. They settled and built a large colony which they called
the “Plymouth Plantation”, near the ruins of a former Native village of the Pawtuxet Nation. One
one Pawtaxet had survived, a man named Squanto, who had spend time as a slave to the English.
Since he understood the language and customs of the Puritans, he taught them to use the corn
growing wild from the abandoned fields of the village, taught them to fish, and about the foods,
herbs and fruits of this land. Squanto also negotiated a peace treaty between the Puritans and the
Wampanoag Nation, a very large Native nation which totally surrounded the new Plymouth
Plantation. Because of Squanto's efforts, the Puritans enjoyed almost 15 years of peaceful har-
mony with the surrounding Natives, and they prospered.
At the end of their first year, the Puritans held a great feast following the harvest of their new
farming efforts. The feast honored Squanto and their friends, the Wampanoags. The feast was
followed by 3 days of “Thanksgiving” celebrating their good fortune. This feast produced the
image of the first Thanksgiving that we all grew up with as children. However, things were
doomed to change.
Until approximately 1629, there were only about 300 Puritans living in widely scattered settle-
ments around New England. As word leaked back to England about their peaceful and prosper-
ous life, more Puritans arrived by the boatloads. As the numbers of Puritans grew, the question
of ownership of the land became a major issue. The Puritans came from the belief of individual
needs and prosperity, and had no concept of tribal living, or group sharing. It was clear that
these heathen savages had no claim on the land because it had never been subdued, cultivated
and farmed in the European manner, and there were no fences or other boundaries marked.
The land was clearly “public domain”, and there for the taking. This attitude met with great
resistance from the original Puritans who held their Native benefactors in high regard. These
first Puritan settlers were summarily excommunicated and expelled from the church.
Later on different types of Thanksgiving days occurred.
In 1641, the Dutch governor of Manhattan offered the first scalp bounty; a common prractice
in many European countries. This was broadened by the Puritans to include a bounty for Natives
fit to be sold for slavery. The Dutch and Puritans joined forces to exterminate all Natives from
New England, and village after village fell. Following an especially successful raid against the
Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches of Manhattan announced a day of
“Thanksgiving”. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the
streets of Manhattan like soccer balls.
The killing took on a frenzy, with days of thanksgiving being held after each successful massacre.
Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape. Their chief was beheaded, and his head placed
on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts – where it remained for 24 years. Each town held
thanksgiving days to celebrate their own victories over the Natives until it became clear that
there needed to be an order to these special occasions. It was George Washington who finally
brought a system and a schedule to thanksgiving when he declared one day to be celebrated
across the nation as Thanksgiving Day.
US and Canada are countries based on the destruction of the original habitants of the land.
Genocide, for all that we act as if it were suddenly invented in the 20th century by the Nazis,
or perhaps by the Turks, is nearly as ancient as recorded history. The Roman destruction of
Carthage, perhaps the most famous genocide of ancient history, was hardly the first. Nor in
modern weaponry necessary, as both Genghis Khan, who had entire cities slaughtered, and the
Hutus, with their slaughter of half a million to a million Tutsis, primarily with machetes, could
attest.
Yet, no question, the natives would have been wiser to have never helped Europeans learn how to
survive the new world, even if one can argue that in the end, the result probably would have been
the same.
The Puritans who were helped by the Indians resisted to the point of excommunication the
destruction of their benefactors. Such a penalty, at the time, was the equivalent of being ostra-
cized from their communities, other puritans were forbidden to have any civil communication
with them whatsoever, including eating with them.
Many people aren't as thankful as those pilgrims – helping someone often creates resentment.
And certainly one should never expect thankfulness to extend to those not directly helped, even if they indirectly benefit. But the effect of gratitude runs both ways.
We tend to look well upon those we've helped, especially if they respond with gratitude and make
good us of what we've given, be it knowledge or material goods. Helping people makes us feel
better about ourselves. Empathy, the ability to feel another's pain, is an naturally human as is
callousness, let alone the actual enjoyment of the pain of others, empathy's dark twin. Feeling
another's pain we either wish to relieve it, or we close ourselves off to the other person. To do so
requires making that person, or those people, into something other than ourselves. It's much
easier not to feel for those who aren't like you, who are lesser, who are, indeed, nothing but
uncivilized beasts or savages, little more than animals.
The Puritans who had personally been helped by, feasted with, and befriended by the Indians
couldn't do this. And the natives who had befriended the Puritans couldn't do it either. They had
been made aware that both sides were like them, were human. The Puritans felt grateful, the
Indians, benevolent.
But those who came afterwards, those who benefitted from the knowledge the Indians had given,
but never dealt with them as humans, they could feel superior. They could know, not that they
had needed the Indians help and that it had been given, and that in exchange they were able to
help the Indians by giving or trading them steel and iron goods and other advanced European
items, but that the Indians were nothing but animals, who didn't own the land and were savages
fit for death.
There was no room for empathy, or for a bond of thankfulness to occur. For the reciprocity of
favors and affection that leads to friendship.
And so those Indian tribes were virtually destroyed. And yet we still pretend we are thankful for
what they gave, when the record shows that the only people who were thankful were a few hun-
dred Puritans who were rewarded for their faithfulness by excommunication.
Every Thanksgiving I've thought of those who died, a sour smile on my face. But in Thanksgiv-
ings to come I'll think also of those who didn't break faith. A bitter silver lining, perhaps, but I
find in such things the true gold of the human spirit, untarnished even in failure.
Http://firedoglake.com/2007/11/24/the-silver-lining-of-thanksgiving-past/