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Native
Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving Revolutionary Worker #883,
November 24, 1996 |
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Every schoolchild in the U.S. has
been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local
Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in
New England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of
indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists--and
of the ruthless ways of capitalism. *
* * * * In mid-winter 1620 the English
ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102
Puritan exiles. The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had
already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there. When
they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three
years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the
coast, destroying most villages completely. The Puritans landed and built
their colony called "the Plymouth Plantation" near the deserted
ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They ate from abandoned cornfields
grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet named Squanto had survived--he had spent the
last years as a slave to the English and Spanish in Europe. Squanto spoke the
colonists' language and taught them how to plant corn and how to catch fish
until the first harvest. Squanto also helped the colonists negotiate a peace
treaty with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit. These were very lucky breaks for
the colonists. The first Virginia settlement had been wiped out before they
could establish themselves. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the
Puritans not only survived their first year but had an alliance with the
Wampanoags that would give them almost two decades of peace. John Winthrop, a founder of the
Massahusetts Bay colony considered this wave of illness and death to be a
divine miracle. He wrote to a friend in England, "But for the natives in
these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest
part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So
as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in
these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our
protection." The deadly impact of European
diseases and the good will of the Wampanoag allowed the Puritans to survive
their first year. In celebration of their good
fortune, the colony's governor, William Bradford, declared a three-day feast
of thanksgiving after that first harvest of 1621. How
the Puritans Stole the Land But the peace that produced the
Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that the Puritans would have 15 years to
establish a firm foothold on the coast. Until 1629 there were no more than
300 Puritans in New England, scattered in small and isolated settlements. But
their survival inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that soon established
growing Massachusetts towns north of Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10
years, boatloads of new settlers came. And as the number of Europeans
increased, they proved not nearly so generous as the Wampanoags. On arrival, the Puritans discussed
"who legally owns all this land." They had to decide this, not just
because of Anglo-Saxon traditions, but because their particular way of
farming was based on individual--not communal or tribal--ownership. This
debate over land ownership reveals that bourgeois "rule of law"
does not mean "protect the rights of the masses of people." Some Puritans argued that the land
belonged to the Indians. These forces were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts
Governor Winthrop declared the Indians had not "subdued" the land,
and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common Law,
be considered "public domain." This meant they belonged to the
king. In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the
Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the
representative of the crown (meaning the local governor). The Puritans embraced a line from
Psalms 2:8. "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine
inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession."
Since then, European settler states have similarly declared god their real
estate agent: from the Boers seizing South Africa to the Zionists seizing
Palestine. The European immigrants took land
and enslaved Indians to help them farm it. By 1637 there were about 2,000
British settlers. They pushed out from the coast and decided to remove the
inhabitants. The
Birth of In the Connecticut Valley, the
powerful Pequot tribe had not entered an alliance with the British (as had
the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Massachusetts peoples). At first
they were far from the centers of colonization. Then, in 1633, the British
stole the land where the city of Hartford now sits--land which the Pequot had
recently conquered from another tribe. That same year two British slave
raiders were killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who killed the
slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused. The Puritan preachers said, from
Romans 13:2, "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
damnation." The colonial governments gathered an armed force of 240
under the command of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett
warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: "Mason proposed to
avoid attacking Pequot warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned,
unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one
of the ways to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the
same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his
objective." The colonist army surrounded a
fortified Pequot village on the Mystic River. At sunrise, as the inhabitants
slept, the Puritan soldiers set the village on fire. William Bradford, Governor of
Plymouth, wrote: "Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword;
some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they
were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus
destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus
frying in the fire...horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the
victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God,
who had wrought so wonderfully for them." Mason himself wrote: "It may
be demanded...Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?
But...sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with
their parents.... We had sufficient light from the word of God for our
proceedings." Three hundred and fifty years
later the Puritan phrase "a shining city on the hill" became a
favorite quote of Ronald Reagan's speechwriters. Discovering
the This so-called "Pequot
war" was a one-sided murder and slaving expedition. Over 180 captives
were taken. After consulting the bible again, in Leviticus 24:44, the
colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and
enslave the captured women and their children. Only 500 Pequot remained alive
and free. In 1975 the official number of Pequot living in Connecticut was 21.
Some of the war captives were
given to the Narragansett and Massachusetts allies of the British. Even
before the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples of North America had widely
practiced taking war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves. The remaining captives were sold
to British plantation colonies in the West Indies to be worked to death in a
new form of slavery that served the emerging capitalist world market. And
with that, the merchants of Boston made a historic discovery: the profits
they made from the sale of human beings virtually paid for the cost of
seizing them. One account says that enslaving
Indians quickly became a "mania with speculators." These early
merchant capitalists of Massachusetts started to make genocide pay for
itself. The slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped
Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant capitalism. Thanksgiving
in the In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft
of Manhattan offered the first "scalp bounty"--his government paid
money for the scalp of each Indian brought to them. A couple years later,
Kieft ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were
killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets
of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his
own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the
notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a
similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and
500 Indian residents were put to the sword. A day of thanksgiving was
proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As we will see, the European
colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to celebrate mass murder more often than
they did for harvest and friendship. The
Conquest of New England By the 1670s there were about
30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in the United New England Colonies--6,000
to 8,000 able to bear arms. With the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and
Plymouth colonists turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved them in
1620 and probably joined them for the original Thanksgiving Day. In 1675 a Christian Wampanoag was
killed while spying for the Puritans. The Plymouth authorities arrested and
executed three Wampanoag without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip. As Mao Tsetung says: "Where
there is oppression there is resistance." The Wampanoag went to war. The Indians applied some military
lessons they had learned: they waged a guerrilla war which overran isolated
European settlements and were often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan
soldiers. The colonists again attacked and massacred the main Indian
populations. When this war ended, 600 European
men, one-eleventh of the adult men of the New England Colonies, had been
killed in battle. Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out.
But the colonists won. In their victory, the settlers
launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The
Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp,
and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers
were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could
capture. The "Praying Indians" who had converted to Christianity
and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into
the treetops during battles with "hostiles." They were enslaved or
killed. Other "peaceful" Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were
invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts--and were sold onto
slave ships. It is not known how many Indians
were sold into slavery, but in this campaign, 500 enslaved Indians
were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding
tribes, probably about half died from battle, massacre and starvation. After King Philip's War, there
were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist
wrote from Manhattan's New York colony: "There is now but few Indians
upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how
strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first
settled in these parts." In Massachusetts, the colonists
declared a "day of public thanksgiving" in 1676, saying,
"there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are
either slain, captivated or fled." Fifty-five years after the
original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had destroyed the generous Wampanoag
and all other neighboring tribes. The Wampanoag chief King Philip was
beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth, where the skull still
hung on display 24 years later. The descendants of these Native
peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant capitalists found markets for
slaves: the West Indies, the Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson
of Massasoit, the Pilgrim's original protector, was sold into slavery in
Bermuda. Runaways
and Rebels But even the destruction of Indian
tribal life and the enslavement of survivors brought no peace. Indians
continued to resist in every available way. Their oppressors lived in terror
of a revolt. And they searched for ways to end the resistance. The historian
MacLeod writes: "The first `reservations' were designed for the `wild'
Irish of Ulster in 1609. And the first Indian reservation agent in America,
Gookin of Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen service
in Ireland under Cromwell." The enslaved Indians refused to
work and ran away. The Massachusetts government tried to control runaways by
marking enslaved Indians: brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were
tattooed into their foreheads and cheeks. A Massachusetts law of 1695 gave
colonists permission to kill Indians at will, declaring it was "lawful
for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall find any Indians
traveling or skulking in any of the towns or roads (within specified limits),
to command them under their guard and examination, or to kill them as they
may or can." The northern colonists enacted
more and more laws for controlling the people. A law in Albany forbade any
African or Indian slave from driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set
up; Africans and Indians were forbidden to have evening get-togethers. On
Block Island, Indians were given 10 lashes for being out after nine o'clock.
In 1692 Massachusetts made it a serious crime for any white person to marry
an African, an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the
importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a slave revolt. Celebrate? Looking at this history raises a
question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans
with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no
reason to celebrate. A little known fact: Squanto, the
so-called "hero" of the original Thanksgiving Day, was executed by
the Indians for his treacheries. But the ruling powers of
the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it
is in their interest. That's why they created it. The first national
celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the
celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during
the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota). Washington and Lincoln were two
presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois
nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving
story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It
celebrates the "bounty of the American way of life," while covering
up the brutal nature of this society. This article is posted in English
and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online |
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