LA Times Nov. 23
As a Pequot scholar wrote nearly 200 years ago: Get real about Thanksgiving
That three-day meal in the autumn of 1621 was less a predictor of future
goodwill among all Americans than a historic aberration
“THE FIRST THANKSGIVING,” by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe. William Apess,
a Pequot minister, argued in the 1830s for seeing colonization through
an Indigenous lens. (Barney Burstein Corbis/Visual China Group)
By Peter C. Mancall
I n November 1620 the Mayflower deposited about 100 Pilgrims at the
Wampanoag community of Patuxet, which the newcomers renamed New
Plymouth. A year later, the English and Wampanoags enjoyed a three-day
feast. For generations, Americans have celebrated that meal as the first
Thanksgiving.
As traditions go, Thanksgiving seems pretty secure, though the recent
redefinition of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day suggests that
even once-sacred holidays can change. Columbus trotted through American
culture until 1992, the 500th anniversary of his first voyage. That
year, Native and other scholars fueled a campaign to redefine the
holiday by emphasizing Columbus’ role in brutal conquest, enslavement
and ecological catastrophe. But this was not the first effort to
redefine America’s origins.
In the 1820s and 1830s, a Pequot minister named William Apess took aim
at what would become Thanksgiving — arguing that the nation needed to
rethink the colonization of New England, and view it through Indigenous
perspectives. What does it mean when a nation extracts a benign
interpretation of the past from a tangled and often violent legacy of
encounters and conflicts? Indigenous peoples’ experience of conquest and
colonization pivoted on dispossession. Shouldn’t that be part of the
story too?
Apess tackled these questions at a time when prominent politicians
linked the Pilgrims’ experience with two hallmarks of American
democracy: the right for any community to govern itself, and the right
for individuals to practice their faith without government interference.
In the era of Indian removal, these notions became embedded in the
federal government’s efforts to expand the nation westward into lands
held by Indigenous peoples whom the Constitution excluded from
exercising such rights.
In 1829, Apess’ “A Son of the Forest” became the earliest published
Indigenous autobiography in the United States. He reported he was born
in 1798, the grandson of “a white man” who had married the granddaughter
of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader known to the English as King Philip. “A
Son of the Forest” detailed Apess’ struggles with alcohol, and how he
quit drinking and became ordained as a Methodist minister.
Apess was a leader in the Massachusetts Indigenous peoples’ battle to
preserve their lands and to take greater control over their communities
in an uprising known as the Mashpee Revolt of 1833-34. The Mashpees (or
Marshpees) “wanted their rights as men and as freemen,” he wrote. Apess
and the Mashpees invoked the language of the Nullification Crisis of
1832, when the state of South Carolina failed in an effort to declare
federal tariffs unconstitutional. They tried to prevent white intruders
from taking wood from Mashpee lands, which landed Apess briefly in
prison. Many non-Natives feared the implications of Apess’ stand, but
their counsel, who was not Native, compared his clients to the patriots
who had thrown tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.
Soon after, Apess turned his attention to the history of early New England.
In the midst of a war in 1637 — less than 20 years after the famous
Plymouth feast — Pilgrims and their allies set a Pequot town on fire and
shot those who tried to escape. They killed 400 to 700 in a single
night, including children and elderly people. They captured Pequot
survivors and shipped them to the Caribbean as slaves. Forty years
later, Apess’ ancestor, Metacom, led multiple Indigenous communities to
battle for their homelands in a conflict known as King Philip’s War.
From 1675 to 1677, Indigenous and colonial soldiers laid waste to each
other’s communities, and colonists again bought and sold Indigenous
captives, creating a market in enslaved bodies. The colonists believed
Metacom and his allies posed the most serious crisis they had ever
faced. After Metacom died in Rhode Island on Aug. 12, 1676, English
soldiers decapitated him, and colonists mounted his head on a post in
Plymouth as a warning.
In powerful 1836 speeches and a book called “Eulogy on King Philip,”
Apess used his ancestor’s story to redefine the colonial era. Unlike
promoters of the myths surrounding Plymouth, Apess saw the 17th century
as an era of struggle and sacrifice. He described the Pilgrims as
trespassers who took land “without asking liberty from anyone.” Apess
castigated colonists for selling Metacom’s son into slavery, an act he
called shocking by “a people calling themselves Christians.” He
suggested that Metacom, rather than the English, was the true exemplar
of Revolutionary ideals and sacrifice.
Apess delivered his eulogy twice in Boston in January 1836, but he soon
after disappeared from the historical record. In 1863, in the midst of
the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a
national holiday. He asked all Americans to recognize the strength of
the country, and to seek divine protection for “all those who have
become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil
strife” engulfing the nation. But by then, the association of Plymouth
and the holiday had already taken hold. Thanksgiving festivities
continued to emphasize a sanitized version of events in early New
England — and to wallow in nationalist pride, rather than reckon with
the implications of European conquest.
For decades, scholars of early American history ignored Apess’ books,
though an edition of his complete writings in 1992 brought new attention
to his critique of early New England. By then, other Indigenous writers
and speakers also thought it necessary to challenge the romance of the
Pilgrims and Thanksgiving.
In 1970, an Aquinnah Wampanoag activist named Wamsutta Frank James
delivered a speech in Plymouth that put the Indigenous experience at the
center, not the periphery, of the history of the United States. Rather
than celebrating a tradition of religious freedom and democracy, he
spoke of centuries of prejudice and dispossession. His words had lasting
impact: Each year on the fourth Thursday of November, Indigenous and
supporters congregate on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to mark the holiday
James suggested renaming the National Day of Mourning.
There’s a rich and still too-little-known tradition of Indigenous
writings like Apess’, including Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s early 17th
century account of his travels and the many texts of Samson Occom, a
Mohegan who raised funds later used (against his wishes) to establish
Dartmouth College. Many of these authors offered penetrating critiques
of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas. Like Apess,
they bore witness and their words invite a similar reckoning.
Looked at from the vantage points of 1637, 1676 and so many other
moments in our country’s history, that three-day meal in the autumn of
1621 was less a predictor of future goodwill among all Americans than a
historic aberration. Thanksgiving may well survive for centuries. But as
the rethinking of Columbus Day and the public’s broader understanding of
slavery and American history through educational programs like “The 1619
Project” have shown, it is not too late to make progress. Rather than
see this holiday as an opportunity to gorge on a meal and dwell on naive
fantasies about a period of accord, it could become an opportunity to
retell the history of the United States, putting Indigenous experiences
at the center instead of the periphery.
Peter C. Mancall is the Mellon Professor of the Humanities at USC. He is
the author of “The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His
Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England.” This article was
produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square .
--
Rosalind Bresnahan, Ph.D.
Collective of Coordinating Editors
Latin American Perspectives
Home: 500 Edgerton Dr., San Bernardino, CA 92405
Phone: 909-881-1229
E-mail:rosalind568@xxxxxxxxx
The marriage of ignorance and force always generates
unfathomable evil, an evil that is unseen by perpetrators
who mistake their own stupidity and blindness for innocence.
Chris Hedges, The Great Forgetting, Truthdig, Jan. 10, 2016
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively
take part!
And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the
levers,
upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!
And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it —
that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
Mario Savio
Berkeley Free Speech Movement
December 2, 1964