Troy D. Smith
November 26, 2021
Two days ago, on the day before Thanksgiving, I was
contacted by two different news venues to publicly opine about Thanksgiving in
my capacity as a professional historian. The first was a local (Cookeville)
radio station, the other was a local TV station in Chattanooga. The radio
reporter only wanted to ask me a couple of brief questions about food, which I
answered, but the TV reporter also wanted to talk about the story of
Thanksgiving. Specifically, I was asked to add any detail that I thought might
be interesting or important to know. So I did. That whole interview took about
15 minutes.
In that time, I told the parts of the Thanksgiving story that
most people don’t know and are rarely, if ever, broached in K-12. “Wow,” the
reporter said, “I never knew any of that -you never get taught that stuff in school.” I remember thinking
to myself, though, that I would be amazed if any of those things made it into the final piece.
I was not wrong. Not a word of it was. I do understand that
they were looking for a one-or-two-minute retelling of the feel-good myths to
show on the holiday, and were not planning on showing anything that would
challenge their audience’s assumptions or worldview… and certainly nothing
which might make their viewers mad because it was an uncomfortable truth. When
the fact becomes legend, as the newspaperman said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, print the legend.
Essentially, only the things I said about the menu on that
first Pilgrim harvest feast, and the things that support the basic story as everyone
was taught it in school (selectively taken from my larger conversation), were
used. Again, I understand that editing 15 minutes down to 2 minutes means that
90% would be cut. But looking at my quotes in the article (which you can see here), you would get the impression I said nothing about the Native American Indian
perspective on Thanksgiving.
So I decided I would share with you, here, the story I told
the reporter.
The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620. There were about a
hundred of them. They really weren’t very well-versed in taking care of
themselves in this new environment, and at the end of their first winter
slightly more than half of them had died. They got crops planted in the spring
-with significant help via pointers from an indigenous man named Tisquantum, which
the Pilgrims shortened to Squanto. The following autumn they harvested those crops,
and decided to have a thanksgiving feast to celebrate. This took place sometime
between late September and early November, probably sometime in October, of 1621.
They did NOT invite the Wampanoags to their feast. In fact,
Wampanoag leader Massasoit showed up with about 90 warriors… because the
Pilgrims, in their celebration, had been firing their guns into the sky (which does make this sound like a uniquely
American occasion) and the Wampanoags feared the newcomers had started an
attack on them. When Massasoit saw that it was only a party, he had his men
contribute five deer they had caught. But, to make it clear: there were no
indigenous women and children present, only warriors; they had not been
invited; it was kind of a tense situation, and was partially a Wampanoag show
of strength.
Have you ever wondered how Squanto was able to communicate
with the Pilgrims? It was because he spoke English. The Pilgrims were not his
first contact with Englishmen; in fact, for years previous, English ships had
plied up and down the coast, fishing and trading. And, whenever they saw a
Native person alone or in only a small group on shore, they would kidnap them
and carry them back across the Atlantic to sell them as slaves. This had
happened to Squanto several years earlier (he had been tricked into boarding a
ship) and he had spent years in Europe as a slave -first in Spain, then in London.
He made his way back to New England via ship -perhaps, some have speculated,
working as a sailor, or perhaps still a slave now owned by a naval officer. At any
rate, he made his way home 14 or so years after his abduction, only to find
that his people -the Patuxet, members of the Wampanoag Federation -were all
dead. They had perished of disease introduced by English sailors. Incidentally,
there were at least a couple of other Native American men in the area who had
spent years as slaves of the English, including a Wampanoag named Samoset.
When the Pilgrims arrived, many Wampanoags wanted to wipe
them out. They had come to associate the English with slavers. Squanto told
Massasoit tales of the grandeur of London, and helped convince him that the
English would make good trading partners -and would allow the Wampanoag
Federation to maintain their primacy over their rivals in the region, the
Narragansets (and, to a lesser degree, the Pequots). The balance of power had
been disrupted by the epidemic that had killed so many Wampanoags. Hence the
decision was made to allow the Pilgrims to occupy the lands of the deceased
Patuxets. From the Pilgrim perspective, the fact they arrived to find empty
land that was not only arable, but cleared as if it were simply waiting there
for them, was proof that God was blessing them and was with their endeavor.
Squanto was their principal contact. Many of you, like me, may have been taught
in school that Squanto showed them an old Native American trick of planting a
dead fish at the base of a cornstalk, for fertilizer. The fact is, he did show them that… but it was not a
Native American practice. It was common in Mediterranean Europe. So Squanto
must have learned it from Southern Europeans, either in Spain or perhaps from
Italian sailors, and then taught it to the English.
By the way, Massasoit and other Wampanoags started getting
suspicious of Squanto, and wondering if he were accurately translating between
them and the Pilgrims. Squanto’s actions seemed, in the eye of some Wampanoags,
to principally benefit himself; he may have been playing both ends against the
middle. One year after the thanksgiving feast, Squanto died of an “Indian fever”;
some historians suspect he may have been poisoned as a collaborator/traitor by
the Wampanoags.
None of that adds up to a happy feast between friendly
allies, cementing bonds of amity.
The reporter asked what would have happened if the
Wampanoags who wanted to kill the Pilgrims had won out; would we still be here?
What would have happened, I said, is that they would have been dead. We would
still have been here, because other English colonies were being established- John
Smith and company had been in Jamestown for 13 years before the Pilgrims ever
showed up. The only real difference would be that we wouldn’t be talking about
Pilgrims, other than the way we talk about Roanoke -as a failed colony. Most of
the Thanksgiving traditions we associate with Pilgrims actually started in the
late 1800s or after; Thanksgiving as an official holiday was instituted by
Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War, as a way to unify Americans.
I pointed out that, to the majority of my indigenous
friends, Thanksgiving is at best an unpopular holiday and at worst a day of
mourning. It is extremely important to realize, I said, that within fifteen
years of this feast the Pilgrims and the many Puritans who had joined them were
committing genocide against neighboring tribes the Pequots and Narragansets
(after the latter had allied with them against he Pequots), and within fifty
years they had virtually wiped out the very tribe who had helped them, the
Wampanoags. Pilgrims were nasty people to Native Americans, and were really bad
neighbors in general (see "Thomas Morton").
After pointing out that the Pilgrims would probably have
perished without Wampanoag help, I said that most people do not even know that
November is National Native American Heritage month… and, really, every day
should be a day for honoring Native Americans past and present.
This is the very short, 15-minute version of the Thanksgiving
story. There are many more details, most of which I did not include in this
abridged version. But there is a lot of unacknowledged truth just in this brief
explanation.
The problem is, though, that most people prefer to hear a
lie that makes them feel good than a truth that does not. And most people -especially the politicians who control public
schools and much of the media that is reliant on commercial sponsors -would
rather teach the warm and fuzzy
misrepresentations which people expect to hear than the hard truth.
Benedict Anderson wrote several years ago that nations are “imagined
communities” -they agree to forge a common identity based on imaginary
connections and an imaginary origin story (or mythology). This explains the
discomfort many feel when someone begins to unravel that mythology.
But historians are not supposed to be mythologizers. And,
more importantly, Native American Indians are real people, with real ancestors
and a real past, who do not deserve to have their reality denied or downplayed in
order to make everybody else feel good about themselves. Finally, blinding ourselves to history in favor of comfortable mythology keeps us from understanding, not just what happened, but what the consequences are in the present, which then prevents us from addressing many of the issues that still plague us.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.
--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
