Teaching About Thanksgiving
Topic: General
Dr. Frank B. Brouillet
Superintendent of Public Instruction
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
Posted by Carolyne Gould, Editor
at 5:16 PM CST
