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History. Nonfiction. HTML:Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth's governor, John Carver, declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousmaequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the "First Thanksgiving." The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. 400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags' ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving.… (more)
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Quotes: "Let us discard the notion of America as a New World, never mind a savage wilderness. No less than the English, the Wampanoags were already a people with a rich past before the arrival of the Mayflower."
"The lionization of the Pilgrims also grew out of Plymouth Town's attempt to drum up civic pride and tourism. Depicting the Pilgrims as the epitome of colonial America also served to minimize the country's long-standing history of racial oppression at a time when Jim Crow was working to return Blacks in the South to as close to the state of slavery as possible."
"So much of the prosperity for which other Americans are thankful came at Native people's expense. The whole concept of Thanksgiving is a sugarcoating of the past and present abuses of Native people by European colonists and their successors. The Thanksgiving myth conveniently allowed whites to abdicate responsibility for their murderous conquest and oppression of Native people. They attributed it to just the natural, divine order of things – but Indian was every bit as novel an identity as Christian.
The current American struggle with white nationalism is a product of centuries of shameful acts that have convinced a critical mass of white Christians that the country has always belonged to them and always should."
"Social studies teachers from every corner of the United States commonly set aside a week or two in November to stumble through the Pilgrim-Wampanoag story and then drop Indians from consideration. But for many Indians, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their cultures."
"In all likelihood, neither the Wampanoags nor most of the rest of Native North America had ever experienced disease on this scale. Their separation from the rest of the world had been a boon to their health because it spared them from a host of ailments that festered among the crowds, filth, and close human-animal contacts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Foreign diseases would wreak such devastation among Indians throughout the continent that their introduction should be ranked among the most significant disasters in modern times."
"The Wampanoags' alliance with Plymouth was not about conceding to colonialism. Their hope was to fend off the Narragansetts while they tried to recover from the epidemic of 1616-1619."
"One English sponsor told the colonists to devote more time to securing commodities for sale back in England."
"Tisquantum knew how the colonists' hierarchical society, quest for riches, religious arrogance, and stunning technologies propelled them across the oceans."
"The circulation of material wealth was the essential social lubricant in Indian country."
"By the time Ousamequin died in 1660, English missions, land encroachment, double standards of justice, and colonial interference in Native people's affairs had strained the historic alliance almost to its breaking point."
"English agriculture was increasingly focused on exporting beef and pork to feed the slaves of the burgeoning sugar plantations of the Caribbean."
"In 1659 Rhode Island went so far as to authorize the sale of Indians into overseas slavery when they were convicted of theft or property damage and failed to pay restitution, fines, and court costs, particularly when they had demonstrated "insolency" to English officers."
"Wampanoag men tended to lead short lives because of their perilous work as whalers, fishermen, and soldiers."