Thanksgiving

 

The original "Thanksgiving" wasn't called that at the time. It was a harvest feast, though, in November in 1621. And there can be no doubt that thanks was given to God by the Pilgrims. They were very religious, after all. Religious enough, in fact, to suffer misery and death crossing the Atlantic ocean in a small, leaky ship, arriving sick as dogs on the rocky shores of Turtle Island, just to find a place to worship God in their own special way without being bothered about it. 

    Pilgrims and Wampanoags (along with a Patuxet globe-trotter named Tisquantum), ate together for three days that November. The Wampanoags brought mainly venison, but it was thanks to their tutelage that the European immigrants had a relatively bounteous harvest that year (following a harrowing winter of mass starvation) of other American delicacies, such as corn, eel, squash, turkey, and duck. 

    The Wampanoags were eager to make an alliance with these English immigrants. They were small in stature, weak with starvation and disease, and they wore very silly shoes, but these strangers had one thing going for them; they had some really clever weapons--muskets and blunderbusses--which made them potentially valuable allies. So, although the Wampanoags seemed to believe the Pilgrims came in peace (since they brought their women and children), they hoped to enlist them in their simmering war with the Narragansetts, who lived to the south.

    Many people will tell you Thanksgiving is a myth. According to David Silverman, the myth goes like this: "friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear." The interesting thing about this myth is that it's true. The Indians were friendly. And they did teach the Pilgrims how to subsist. They did feast with them. And subsequently they did, for the most part, disappear. 

    What makes the Thanksgiving story a myth is not that it includes falsehoods, but rather that it excludes so many bitter truths. The Pilgrims brought diseases. And they brought a rather dogmatic religion, to which they would come to insist on converting the Wampanoags and other Native people. And worst of all, they hailed from an over-populated island, from which more and more of their kind would come with their own germs and clever weapons and haughty notions of conversion, settlement, "pacification," and manifest destiny. 

    Some seventy years after the friendly feast, a descendant of the Pilgrims, Cotton Mather, would be carrying the dis-membered jawbone of Metacomet, leader of the narrowly defeated Wampanoags, through the streets of Plymouth as a war trophy. The thanksgiving peace lasted for several decades, but a bloody war followed. And many other terrible colonial conflicts would follow that one, over several centuries of European colonization. 

    Roger Williams, pictured above, was excommunicated from the Puritan church and went south to Narragansett territory to start a new and better colony, on better relations with the locals. He asked nicely before just dropping anchor and pitching camp. He insisted on buying the land, not stealing it. And unlike the Pilgrims, he insisted on true freedom of religion for all the people of what he called "Rhode Island." But in the end, Williams's liberal utopia didn't work out much better for the Narragansetts than Massachusetts did for their northern neighbors.

    The story of North American colonialism is partly one of state societies encountering non-state societies. State societies are not better. But when such encounters happen, it's almost always conflictual, and it rarely ends well for the non-state societies. There are a few exceptions. Genghis Kahn's Eurasian rampage is the most epic example of nomads getting the underdog's revenge against The State--in this case, many states, including China's "Middle Kingdom," dozens of Islamic Caliphates and some unlucky European monarchies. This exception notwithstanding, it usually goes the other way, as it did in North America. The Europeans were state people, and when all accounts are taken, there probably is no virtue in being such, but there is a certain collective military strength in it. 

    Colonialism in South and Central America was different. There were Aztec and Inca states--empires in fact--existing there at the time of European intrusion. So, all the conquistadors had to do was cut off the head of the king and take his place on the throne. Subjugation was possible without genocide, because the people were already existing under a state apparatus. That, in a nutshell, is why such a greater percentage of Native ancestry persists in post-colonial Central and South American populations.

    The Thanksgiving story leaves many things out. It leaves out the smallpox blankets given to Native mothers to swaddle their children in. It leaves out the severed hands of the Taino who refused to mine silver for Columbus. The Native children kidnapped and taken to deadly boarding schools. The broken treaties, the trails of tears, the slaughter of the buffaloes. It leaves out the greatness of the pre-columbian empire of Cahokia, and the mysteries of Aztlan and the Chacoan Pueblo, and the wisdom of the Iroquoian democracy. It leaves out the rise of white supremacy ideology along with the Atlantic slave trade. It leaves out the horrible retributions of the Comanche--North American soul-brothers of Genghis--who cut down women and children and pulled all-nighters slow-roasting settlers on the Texas prairie in a nearly successful attempt to resist the onrushing tide of the colonial State. (Only the invention of the repeating rifle allowed the Texas Rangers to compete with rapid-fire Comanche horse archers.) It leaves out untold mass murders, extinctions, revenges, treacheries, and oppressions. In the Thanksgiving myth, all of these things are consigned to oblivion, like so many families, tribes, nations, cultures, and worlds that have been lost to history. Like the Carthaginians, Gauls, and Britons under Roman heels; like Tlaxcallans under Aztec swords, Apaches under Comanche horses, Israelites under Babylonian fire. 

    There are lots of terrible things in history, many of them even now bleeding into the present. There is much to lament and correct. The only real problem with Thanksgiving, though, is that it sometimes tries to mean too much. To make a 400-year-old dinner party stand for the origin and essence of a nation is to makes a whole swath of human history, with all its disasters and injustices, into a small happy story--one in which colonized people can even appear haplessly complicit in their own dispossession. But if you were really trying to whitewash history, you could probably do better than the Thanksgiving myth. Native people haven't disappeared from America, neither have the moral, legal, and political problems with colonialism. Thanksgiving may threaten to erase history, but in a certain way, it also keeps these hard questions fresh and present. Every year when the story is told, there the Wampanoags are with their culture still whole, as if to say, "time to reckon with us again…" Paul Chaat Smith, curator of the Museum of the American Indian, put it this way (speaking as the cartoon Indian at the Thanksgiving table): "I'm glad to be here.. Better than the alternative."

    The actual "first Thanksgiving," though, doesn't really deserve the burden of distilling the truth of a nation. It doesn't deserve to be freighted with all of this painful history and all of these difficult questions. It comes to us only through a few brief passages in letters written by two Pilgrims (who were more creative spellers than creative writers). Each was a plain telling of events, layered with little meaning beyond a sense of relief and gratitude that they might yet live through the winter. It was a big feast by any standards. Fifty Pilgrims and 90 Americans. It's hard to imagine it wasn't a good time. It seems like it was a brief moment of happiness and hope in a hard world. One little time and place where bad things weren't actively happening. Two small communities on the precipice of oblivion themselves, making the best of things. Not because they were good guys or bad guys, but just because they were human. 

    The first Thanksgiving meant something. It meant good food, a hope for survival, and a burgeoning alliance--a friendship across a wide cultural divide. A friendship which should have lasted but didn't. These were good things worth celebrating and giving thanks for, and if we are lucky enough to have such things in our lives, we can give thanks too. That's reason enough for a national holiday. We can give thanks, and we can remember a feast of thanksgiving from 400 years ago, and we can do so without encapsulating anything, without erasing anything, without justifying or reconciling or absolving anything.