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Fall 1998*MWF 9:05-10:00 AM*(3) Credits*No Prerequisite

T E A C H I N G

A B O U T

T H A N K S G I V I N G

Dr. Frank B. Brouillet

Superintendent of Public Instruction

State of Washington

Cheryl Chow

Assistant Superintendent

Division of Instructional Programs and Services

Warren H. Burton

Director

Office for Multicultural and Equity Education

Dr. Willard E. Bill

Supervisor of Indian Education

Originally written and developed by

Cathy Ross, Mary Robertson, Chuck Larsen, and Roger Fernandes

Indian Education, Highline School District

With an introduction by:

Chuck Larsen

Tacoma School District

Printed: September, 1986

Reprinted: May, 1987

AN INTRODUCTION FOR TEACHERS

This is a particularly difficult introduction to

write. I have been a public schools teacher for twelve

years, and I am also a historian and have written several

books on American and Native American history. I also just

happen to be Quebeque French, Metis, Ojibwa, and Iroquois.

Because my Indian ancestors were on both sides of the

struggle between the Puritans and the New England Indians

and I am well versed in my cultural heritage and history

both as an Anishnabeg (Algokin) and Hodenosione (Iroquois),

it was felt that I could bring a unique insight to the

project.

For an Indian, who is also a school teacher,

Thanksgiving was never an easy holiday for me to deal with

in class. I sometimes have felt like I learned too much

about "the Pilgrims and the Indians." Every year I have

been faced with the professional and moral dilemma of just

how to be honest and informative with my children at

Thanksgiving without passing on historical distortions, and

racial and cultural stereotypes.

The problem is that part of what you and I learned in

our own childhood about the "Pilgrims" and "Squanto" and

the "First Thanksgiving" is a mixture of both history and

myth. But the THEME of Thanksgiving has truth and integrity

far above and beyond what we and our forebearers have made

of it. Thanksgiving is a bigger concept than just the story

of the founding of the Plymouth Plantation.

So what do we teach to our children? We usually pass

on unquestioned what we all received in our own childhood

classrooms. I have come to know both the truths and the

myths about our "First Thanksgiving," and I feel we need to

try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historic

truth. This text is an attempt to do this.

At this point you are probably asking, "What is the

big deal about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims?" "What does

this guy mean by a mixture of truths and myth?" That is

just what this introduction is all about. I propose that

there may be a good deal that many of us do not know about

our Thanksgiving holiday and also about the "First

Thanksgiving" story. I also propose that what most of us

have learned about the Pilgrims and the Indians who were at

the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation is only part

of the truth. When you build a lesson on only half of the

information, then you are not teaching the whole truth.

That is why I used the word myth. So where do you start to

find out more about the holiday and our modern stories

about how it began?

A good place to start is with a very important book,

"The Invasion of America," by Francis Jennings. It is a

very authoritative text on the settlement of New England

and the evolution of Indian/White relations in the New

England colonies. I also recommend looking up any good text

on British history. Check out the British Civil War of

1621-1642, Oliver Cromwell, and the Puritan uprising of

1653 which ended parliamentary government in England until

1660. The history of the Puritan experience in New England

really should not be separated from the history of the

Puritan experience in England. You should also realize that

the "Pilgrims" were a sub sect, or splinter group, of the

Puritan movement. They came to America to achieve on this

continent what their Puritan bretheran continued to strive

for in England; and when the Puritans were forced from

England, they came to New England and soon absorbed the

original "Pilgrims."

As the editor, I have read all the texts listed in our

bibliography, and many more, in preparing this material for

you. I want you to read some of these books. So let me use

my editorial license to deliberately provoke you a little.

When comparing the events stirred on by the Puritans in

England with accounts of Puritan/Pilgrim activities in New

England in the same era, several provocative things suggest

themselves:

1. The Puritans were not just simple religious

conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of

England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were

political revolutionaries who not only intended to

overthrow the government of England, but who actually

did so in 1649.

2. The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not

simply refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's

hands" in the "empty wilderness" of North America, as a

generation of Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture

at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often

outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not

fit into the mainstream of their society. This is not to

imply that people who settle on frontiers have no

redeeming qualities such as bravery, etc., but that the

images of nobility that we associate with the Puritans

are at least in part the good "P.R." efforts of later

writers who have romanticized them.(1) It is also very

plausible that this unnaturally noble image of the

Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology of "Noble

Civilization" vs. "Savagery."(2) At any rate, mainstream

Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate

religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation

completely independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643

the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent

confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before

the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent

occurrence of Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to

establish here in the new world the "Kingdom of God"

foretold in the book of Revelation. They diverged from

their Puritan brethren who remained in England only in

that they held little real hope of ever being able to

successfully overthrow the King and Parliament and,

thereby, impose their "Rule of Saints" (strict Puritan

orthodoxy) on the rest of the British people. So they

came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but

in a hundred others as well, with every intention of

taking the land away from its native people to build

their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."(3)

3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from

religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in

England, but some of them were themselves religious

bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the

Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned

in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first

themselves and then everyone else of everything they did

not accept in their own interpretation of scripture.

Later New England Puritans used any means, including

deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to

achieve that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a

holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with

them was the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was

transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it

sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we

have of them. This is best illustrated in the written

text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in

1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it, Mather the Elder gave

special thanks to God for the devastating plague of

smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag

Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God

for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very

seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way

for a better growth", i.e., the Pilgrims.(5) In as much

as these Indians were the Pilgrim's benefactors, and

Squanto, in particular, was the instrument of their

salvation that first year, how are we to interpret this

apparent callousness towards their misfortune?

4. The Wampanoag Indians were not the "friendly savages"

some of us were told about when we were in the primary

grades. Nor were they invited out of the goodness of the

Pilgrims' hearts to share the fruits of the Pilgrims'

harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and

interracial brotherhood. The Wampanoag were members of a

widespread confederacy of Algonkian-speaking peoples

known as the League of the Delaware. For six hundred

years they had been defending themselves from my other

ancestors, the Iroquois, and for the last hundred years

they had also had encounters with European fishermen and

explorers but especially with European slavers, who had

been raiding their coastal villages.(6) They knew

something of the power of the white people, and they did

not fully trust them. But their religion taught that

they were to give charity to the helpless and

hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty

hands.(7) Also, Squanto, the Indian hero of the

Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British

explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a second

father to him several years before the Pilgrims arrived

at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these Pilgrims as

Weymouth's people.(8) To the Pilgrims the Indians were

heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the

Devil. Squanto, as the only educated and baptized

Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely an

instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide for

the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims. The

Indians were comparatively powerful and, therefore,

dangerous; and they were to be courted until the next

ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and the

balance of power shifted. The Wampanoag were actually

invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of

negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the

Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be

noted that the INDIANS, possibly out of a sense of

charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the

majority of the food for the feast.(9)

5. A generation later, after the balance of power had

indeed shifted, the Indian and White children of that

Thanksgiving were striving to kill each other in the

genocidal conflict known as King Philip's War. At the

end of that conflict most of the New England Indians

were either exterminated or refugees among the French in

Canada, or they were sold into slavery in the Carolinas

by the Puritans. So successful was this early trade in

Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in Boston

began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa

for black slaves to sell to the proprietary colonies of

the South, thus founding the American-based slave

trade.(10)

Obviously there is a lot more to the story of

Indian/Puritan relations in New England than in the

thanksgiving stories we heard as children. Our contemporary

mix of myth and history about the "First" Thanksgiving at

Plymouth developed in the 1890s and early 1900s. Our

country was desperately trying to pull together its many

diverse peoples into a common national identity. To many

writers and educators at the end of the last century and

the beginning of this one, this also meant having a common

national history. This was the era of the "melting pot"

theory of social progress, and public education was a major

tool for social unity. It was with this in mind that the

federal government declared the last Thursday in November

as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving in 1898.

In consequence, what started as an inspirational bit

of New England folklore, soon grew into the full-fledged

American Thanksgiving we now know. It emerged complete with

stereotyped Indians and stereotyped Whites, incomplete

history, and a mythical significance as our "First

Thanksgiving." But was it really our FIRST American

Thanksgiving?

Now that I have deliberately provoked you with some

new information and different opinions, please take the

time to read some of the texts in our bibliography. I want

to encourage you to read further and form your own

opinions. There really is a TRUE Thanksgiving story of

Plymouth Plantation. But I strongly suggest that there

always has been a Thanksgiving story of some kind or other

for as long as there have been human beings. There was also

a "First" Thanksgiving in America, but it was celebrated

thirty thousand years ago.(11) At some time during the New

Stone Age (beginning about ten thousand years ago)

Thanksgiving became associated with giving thanks to God

for the harvests of the land. Thanksgiving has always been

a time of people coming together, so thanks has also been

offered for that gift of fellowship between us all. Every

last Thursday in November we now partake in one of the

OLDEST and most UNIVERSAL of human celebrations, and THERE

ARE MANY THANKSGIVING STORIES TO TELL.

As for Thanksgiving week at Plymouth Plantation in

1621, the friendship was guarded and not always sincere,

and the peace was very soon abused. But for three days in

New England's history, peace and friendship were there.

So here is a story for your children. It is as kind

and gentle a balance of historic truth and positive

inspiration as its writers and this editor can make it out

to be. I hope it will adequately serve its purpose both for

you and your students, and I also hope this work will

encourage you to look both deeper and farther, for

Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving all around the world.

Chuck Larsen

Tacoma Public Schools

September, 1986

FOOTNOTES FOR TEACHER INTRODUCTION

(1) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's

Indian," references to Puritans, pp. 27, 80-85, 90, 104, &

130.

(2) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's

Indian," references to frontier concepts of savagery in

index. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of

America," the myth of savagery, pp. 6-12, 15-16, & 109-110.

(3) See Blitzer, Charles, "Age of Kings," Great Ages

of Man series, references to Puritanism, pp. 141, 144 &

145-46. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of

America," references to Puritan human motives, pp. 4-6, 43-

44 and 53.

(4) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp.

6-10. Also see Armstrong, Virginia I., "I Have Spoken,"

reference to Cannonchet and his village, p. 6. Also see

Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of America," Chapter 9

"Savage War," Chapter 13 "We must Burn Them," and Chapter

17 "Outrage Bloody and Barbarous."

(5) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp.

6-9. Also see Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's

Indian," the comments of Cotton Mather, pp. 37 & 82-83.

(6) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving,"

pp. 3-4. Also see Graff, Steward and Polly Ann, "Squanto,

Indian Adventurer." Also see "Handbook of North American

Indians," Vol. 15, the reference to Squanto on p. 82.

(7) See Benton-Banai, Edward, "The Mishomis Book," as

a reference on general "Anishinabe" (the Algonkin speaking

peoples) religious beliefs and practices. Also see Larsen,

Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," reference to religious

life on p. 1.

(8) See Graff, Stewart and Polly Ann, "Squanto, Indian

Adventurer." Also see Larsen, Charles M., "The Real

Thanksgiving." Also see Bradford, Sir William, "Of Plymouth

Plantation," and "Mourt's Relation."

(9) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving,"

the letter of Edward Winslow dated 1622, pp. 5-6.

(10) See "Handbook of North American Indians," Vol.

15, pp. 177-78. Also see "Chronicles of American Indian

Protest," p. 9, the reference to the enslavement of King

Philip's family. Also see Larsen, Charles, M., "The Real

Thanksgiving," pp. 8-11, "Destruction of the Massachusetts

Indians."

(11) Best current estimate of the first entry of

people into the Americas confirmed by archaeological

evidence that is datable.