Thread by @rboren

"Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained?"

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"Is it necessary to the North American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?"

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"Starting the story of America’s settlement with the Pilgrims leaves out not only American Indians but also the Spanish."

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"The first non-Native settlers in “the country we now know as the United States” were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt."

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"Some later Spanish settlers were our first pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s."

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"Few Americans know that 1/3 of the US, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been “American,” & that Hispanic Americans lived here before the 1st ancestor of the Daughters of the American Revolution ever left England."

'Residents of northern Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and rarely removed all of their clothing at one time, believing it immodest. The Pilgrims smelled bad to the Indians. Squanto “tried, without success, to teach them to bathe”'

"In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, a pandemic swept southern New England."

"Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 to 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. Native societies lay devastated."

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"The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side."

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CW: Racist Pilgrim assholes

'John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague “miraculous.” "So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place"

“God ended the controversy by sending the small pox amongst the Indians”

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"God, the Original Real Estate Agent!"

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"These epidemics probably constituted the most important geopolitical event of the early seventeenth century."

"Indeed, the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm reception Plymouth enjoyed from the Wampanoags."

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"By the time the Native populations of New England had replenished themselves to some degree, it was too late to expel the intruders."

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"The technology and culture of Indians on America’s east coast were genuine rivals to those of the English."

"One can only speculate what the outcome of the rivalry would have been if the impact of European diseases on the American population had not been so devastating."

"If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all."

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'Charles Darwin, writing in 1839, put it almost poetically: “Wherever the European had trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.”'

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"The Europeans’ advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas...but not to “settle” the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required."

"Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America."

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CW: Staggering genocide.

"By 1880, owing to warfare and deculturation as well as illness, Native numbers had dropped to 250,000, a decline of 98 percent."

"Our archetypes of the “virgin continent” and its corollary, the “primitive tribe,” subtly influenced estimates of Native population...Never mind that the land was, in reality, not a virgin wilderness but recently widowed."

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"The very death rates that some historians and geographers now find hard to believe, the Pilgrims knew to be true."

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"Like other Americans who have not studied the literature, the authors of these textbooks were still under the thrall of the “virgin land” and “primitive tribe” archetypes"

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"Presenting a controversy seems somehow radical. It invites students to come to their own conclusions. Textbook authors don’t let that happen. They see their job as presenting “facts” for children to “learn,” not encouraging them to think for themselves."

'in colonial times, everyone knew about the plague. Even before the Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to “Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us” for sending “this wonderful plague among the salvages [sic].”'

"Bear in mind that the Pilgrims numbered only about 35 of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower; the rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes"

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"the Mayflower may have had no specific destination. Readers might be fascinated if textbook authors presented two or more of the various possibilities, but, as usual, exposing students to historical controversy is taboo. Each textbook picks just 1 reason & presents it as fact."

'“Rumors of mutiny spread quickly.” Promise then ties this unrest to the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a fresh interpretation of why the colonists adopted the agreement and why it was so democratic'

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"Regardless of motive, the Mayflower Compact provided a democratic basis for the Plymouth colony. Since the framers of our Constitution in fact paid the compact little heed, however, it hardly deserves the attention textbook authors lavish on it."

"textbook authors clearly want to package the Pilgrims as a pious and moral band who laid the antecedents of our democratic traditions."

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'George Willison has dryly noted that Adams was “blinking several salient facts—above all, the circumstances that prompted the compact, which was plainly an instrument of minority rule.”'

"Such an account simply invites students to become ethnocentric."

"In their pious treatment of the Pilgrims, history textbooks introduce the archetype of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is different from—and better than—all other nations on the planet."

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'To highlight that happy picture, textbooks underplay Jamestown & the sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of Plymouth Rock as the archetypal birthplace of the United States. Virginia...“ill-served later historians in search of the mythic origins of American culture.”

"In 1623 the English indulged in the first use of chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with tribes near the Potomac River"

"The English offered a toast “symbolizing eternal friendship,” whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison."

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"the early Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops."

CW: grave desecration, cannibalism

"Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Native corpses to eat or renting themselves out to American Indian families as servants—hardly the heroic founders that a great nation requires."

"neither our culture nor our textbooks give Virginia the same archetypal status as Massachusetts. That is why almost all my students know the name of the Pilgrims’ ship, while almost no students remember the names of the three ships that brought the English to Jamestown."

"They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, & its useful harbor & “brook of fresh water.” It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town, for “New Plimoth” was none other than Squanto’s village of Patuxet.

"The invaders followed a pattern: throughout the hemisphere Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of Native populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago."

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"Throughout New England, colonists appropriated American Indian cornfields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock."

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"This explains why, to this day, the names of so many towns throughout the region—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield—end in field."

'“Errand into the wilderness” may have made a lively sermon title in 1650, a popular book title in 1950, and an archetypal textbook phrase in 2000, but it was never accurate.'

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"It wasn’t only houses that the Pilgrims robbed."

"At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans."

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"From the start, the Pilgrims thanked God, not the American Indians, for assistance that the latter had (inadvertently) provided—setting a pattern for later thanksgivings."

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"The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, & under that a fine bow. . . . We also found bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again."

"What do most books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned English. According to Ferdinando Gorges, around 1605 an English captain stole Squanto, who was then still a boy, along with four Penobscots and took them to England."

"All sources agree, however, that in 1614 an English slave raider seized Squanto and two-dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery in Málaga, Spain. What happened next makes Ulysses look like a homebody."

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"Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, and made his way back to England. After trying to get home via Newfoundland, in 1619 he talked Thomas Dermer into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod."

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'now Squanto set foot again on Massachusetts soil and walked to his home village of Patuxet, only to make the horrifying discovery that “he was the sole member of his village still alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before.”'

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'Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid account in Land of Promise: “He had learned their language from English fishermen.”'

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"As translator, ambassador, and technical advisor, Squanto was essential to the survival of Plymouth in its first two years. Like other Europeans in America, the Pilgrims had no idea what to eat or how to raise or find food until American Indians showed them."

'William Bradford called Squanto “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish, and to procure other commodities, and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit.”'

'“Their profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. As Robert Moore has pointed out, “Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit motive underlying much of our history.”'

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"Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to “go boldly where none dared go before.” They went to the Indians."

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"Squanto’s travels acquainted him with more of the world than any Pilgrim encountered. He had crossed the Atlantic perhaps six times, twice as an English captive, and had lived in Maine, Newfoundland, Spain, and England, as well as Massachusetts."

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"All this brings us to Thanksgiving. Throughout the nation every fall, elementary-school children reenact a little morality play, The First Thanksgiving, as our national origin myth, complete w/ Pilgrim hats made out of construction paper & Indian braves w/ feathers in their hair

"More than any other celebration, more even than such overtly patriotic holidays as Independence Day and Memorial Day, Thanksgiving celebrates our ethnocentrism."

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"We have seen, for example, how King James and the early Pilgrim leaders gave thanks for the plague, which proved to them that God was on their side."

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"The archetypes associated with Thanksgiving—God on our side, civilization wrested from wilderness, order from disorder, through hard work and good Pilgrim character traits—continue to radiate from our history textbooks."

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'Bessie Pierce pointed out the political uses to which Thanksgiving is put: “For these unexcelled blessings, the pupil is urged to follow in the footsteps of his forbears, to offer unquestioning obedience to the law of the land, and to carry on the work begun.”'

"Thanksgiving dinner is a ritual, with all the characteristics that Mircea Eliade assigns to the ritual observances of origin myths:

1. It constitutes the history of the acts of the founders, the Supernaturals.

2. It is considered to be true."

"3. It tells how an institution came into existence.

4. In performing the ritual associated with the myth, one “experiences knowledge of the origin” and claims one’s patriarchy.

5. Thus one “lives” the myth, as a religion."

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"Thanksgiving has thus moved from history into the field of religion, “civil religion,” as Robert Bellah has called it."

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"The civil ritual we practice marginalizes Native Americans. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best next to their almost naked Indian guests."

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'The silliness of all this reaches its zenith in the handouts that schoolchildren have carried home for decades, complete with captions such as, “They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!”'

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“the Pilgrims had literally never seen ‘such a feast,’ since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.”

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"This notion that “we” advanced peoples provided for the Natives, exactly the converse of the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our history to complicate race relations."

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"For example, we are told that white plantation owners furnished food and medical care for their slaves, yet every shred of food, shelter, and clothing on the plantations was raised, built, woven, or paid for by black labor."

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"During the Civil War, when the Union needed all the patriotism that such an observance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even get included in the tradition."

"The ideological meaning American history has ascribed to Thanksgiving compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans ethnocentric. After all, if our culture has God on its side, why should we consider other cultures seriously?"

"the idea of “God on our side” was used to legitimize the open expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-à-vis Mexicans, Native Americans, peoples of the Pacific, Jews, and even Catholics."

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"Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentrism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave students less able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures."

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"The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans." -- Frank James

"Most of our textbooks also omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England. Thus our popular history of the Pilgrims has not been a process of gaining perspective but of deliberate forgetting."

"Instead of these important facts, textbooks supply the feel-good minutiae of Squanto’s helpfulness, his name, the fish in the corn-hills, sometimes even the menu and the number of American Indians who attended the prototypical first Thanksgiving."

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"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history."

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"Correctly taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric."

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"Textbooks need to learn from Plymouth. Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous."

/thread

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