November 29th, 2008

In Honor of Those Who Have Gone Before Us

» Posted in Bioregional Overviews at 1:11 am

Almost every culture in the world has held celebrations of thanks for a plentiful harvest. The American Thanksgiving holiday began as a feast of thanksgiving in the early days of the American colonies almost four hundred years ago.

On the fourth Thursday of every November, Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. Airports and roads are jammed. More than 40 million Americans travel from state to state to celebrate the holiday. On Thanksgiving Day, Americans give thanks for the blessings of the past year. They feast, celebrate, and play games.

My firend, Lisa, who is hosting a large thanksgiving dinner explains, “Everybody in the family: my two sisters, my two brothers and all of their families, we have the traditional turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and vegetables, all the cakes and pies after the turkey dinner. We usually eat kind of late. I think a lot of people here have their turkey dinner at around 3pm in the afternoon or so, earlier in the day. But we always have it a little later like 5pm or so, then dad watches the (American football) game.”

Makes me wonder what they are really celebrating?

It is our tradition not to celebrate this American holiday as part of the cultural norm.  Rather we participate in this day as a day of mourning and honor for those who have gone before us and those who gave of themselves, so that the puritans could prosper.

In our house, we light a smudge early in the morning and fast all day, as we prepare a feast of traditional foods such as turkey, salmon, moose sausage and wild rice, wild mushrooms, corn soup, corn bread, squash, succotash, fresh cranberry sauce, and a dessert with blueberries.  Blueberries are a staple at any feast for the Northeastern peoples.  Blueberries represent the ancestors at the feast; much like the Irish/Celts who would use apples, or the Mohawk people who use strawberries.

The smudge is kept going all day, much like a sacred fire and as the day wears on, there maybe some drumming and singing along with the conversation and the family effort to make the feast.  Everyone participates…even the littlest ones.

When everything is ready, we all come to the table and the spirit plates are made.  As the plates are passed, each person at the table places a little bit of each type of food that we have for the feast.  We do four plates, one for each of the four directions.

As the plates are being filled, my husband gives the teaching about the spirit plates.  “We make the spirit plates in honor of all our ancestors who have gone before us, so that they will not go hungry in the spirit world.”  The youngest ones of the family proudly stand ready to carry the plates out to the four directions.  The water glass is filled and passed around, as my husband also gives this teaching, each person takes a drink from the glass, leaving it half full.  “Water is our life force, without water we cannot live and we drink for the ancestor, so that they will live on in us.”

The little ones proudly take the plates outside to the four directions and place them upon the ground, so that the ancestors may eat with us.  They leave the glass of water too.

It is time for us to eat now and we all settle down for a good meal with much conversation and stories about ancestors and family who are gone from this world, however still remain each year to celebrate with us.

The cliche Thanksgiving portrayal of Native Americans and Pilgrims sharing a table together perpetuates that false idea, as well as another mistaken notion - that Native Americans celebrate the historical feast between Pilgrims and Indians. They do not.

For Indians, that feast is a symbol of the betrayal, of the killing and of the forced removal from their homelands that followed.

Many Native Americans struggle with the truth hidden in the American tradition of Thanksgiving - a reality that is nothing to be thankful for.

While most people with Native American heritage still celebrate Thanksgiving, it is a misconception that Native Americans and Europeans came together for a happy feast.

The myth of the coming together of the pilgrims and the Native American is a whole separate issue because originally there was very good contact; but it didn’t stay that way for very long. Fundamental cultural and land use issues divided the two people from the beginning. Europeans at the time thought they had entitlement to land that wasn’t necessarily theirs. The notion that Europeans had a God-given right to American land was a foreign concept, which was resisted violently by Native Americans.
The truth about Thanksgiving is that Europeans truly thought they were entitled to take land.  And they did so by genocide, poison or by deliberately spreading disease. There was a population loss of 90 percent after European arrival.

It is important to mention that while there are many conflictions with the holiday, many Native Americans still participate in it for a variety of reasons, including the fact that most now come from mixed-race backgrounds.

Because of their mixed heritage, some Native Americans celebrate the tradition with their families, because it is a modern American holiday, but others protest the holiday because much of the Native American history involved is nothing to truly be thankful for.

Yet, when the whole country is celebrating, it’s hard to be angry and not participate in taking part in family time.

It’s called Thanksgiving - giving thanks for what we are thankful for, and regardless of what history tells us, we all still have things to be thankful for.  In particular, our ancestors who have brought us life.

The pilgrims were rescued in 1620 from starvation and severe weather by a Wampanoag Indian man called “Tisquantum” or “Squanto,” who had learned English after traveling to England with explorer John Weymouth.

He brought them deer meat and beaver skins, taught them to cultivate corn and other vegetables and how to build Native American-style houses. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicine.
By fall, things were much better for the pilgrims and they decided to have a thanksgiving feast to celebrate their good fortune. Pilgrim leader Capt. Miles Standish invited Squanto and the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, and their families to the feast, but were overwhelmed by the sheer size of Indian families. It became clear to Massasoit that the pilgrims had not expected the 90-plus people who came to feast and he ordered more food to be brought. Thus it happened that the Indians supplied the majority of the food for the three-day celebration.
A peace and friendship agreement was made between Massasoit and Standish giving the pilgrims the clearing in the forest where the old village once stood to build their new town of Plymouth.
The European population grew and the Indians’ help was not needed, mistrust started to grow and the friendship weakened. The pilgrims displayed intolerance toward the Indian religion and within a few years the children of the people who ate together at the first Thanksgiving were killing one another in what came to be called King Phillip’s War.

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November 22nd, 2008

Giving Thanks

» Posted in Stories at 4:11 pm
The True Story of Thanksgiving, By Richard B. Williams, November 1, 2000.

One day in 1605, a young Patuxet Indian boy named Tisquantum and his dog were out hunting when they spotted a large English merchant ship off the coast of Plymouth, Mass. Tisquantum, who later became known as Squanto, had no idea that life as he knew it was about to change forever.

His role in helping the Pilgrims to survive the harsh New England winter and celebrate the “first”
Thanksgiving has been much storied as a legend of happy endings, with the English and the Indians coming together at the same table in racial harmony. Few people, however, know the story of Squanto’s sad life and the demise of his tribe as a result of its generosity. Each year, as the nation sits down to a meal that is celebrated by all cultures and races… the day we know as Thanksgiving… the story of Squanto and the fate of the Patuxet tribe is a footnote in history that deserves re-examination.

The day that Capt. George Weymouth anchored off the coast of Massachusetts, he and his sailors captured Squanto and four other tribesmen and took them back to England as slaves because Weymouth thought his financial backers “might like to see” some Indians. Squanto was taken to live with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, owner of the Plymouth Company. Gorges quickly saw Squanto’s value to his company’s exploits in the new world and taught his young charge to speak English so that his captains could negotiate trade deals with the Indians.

In 1614, Squanto was brought back to America to act as a guide and interpreter to assist in the mapping of the New England coast, but was kidnapped along with 27 other Indians and taken to Malaga, Spain, to be sold as slaves for about $25 a piece. When local priests learned of the fate of the Indians, they took them from the slave traders, Christianized them and eventually sent them back to America in 1618.

But his return home was short-lived. Squanto was recognized by one of Gorges’ captains, was captured a third time and sent back to England as Gorges’ slave. He was later sent back to New England with Thomas Dermer to finish mapping the coast, after which he was promised his freedom. In 1619, however, upon returning to his homeland, Squanto learned that his entire tribe had been wiped out by smallpox contracted from the Europeans two years before. He was the last surviving member of his tribe.

In November 1620, the Pilgrims made their now-famous voyage to the coast of Plymouth, which had previously been the center of Patuxet culture. The next year, on March 22, 1621, Squanto was sent to negotiate a peace treaty between the Wampanoag Confederation of tribes and the Pilgrims. We also know that Squanto’s skills as a fisherman and farmer were crucial to the survival of the Pilgrims that first year… contributions which changed history.

But in November 1622, Squanto himself would also succumb to smallpox during a trading expedition to the Massachusetts Indians. The Patuxet, like so many other tribes, had become extinct. The lesson of Squanto and the Pilgrims is not one of bitter remembrance, but rather a celebration of the generosity of Indian people. Under the guidance of Squanto, the Pilgrims followed a longstanding Indian tradition of offering thanks. Although we celebrate Thanksgiving as an “American” Holiday, its beginnings are Native to the core.

Feasts of gratitude and giving thanks have been a part of Indian culture for thousands of years. In Lakota culture, it’s called a Wopila; in Navajo, it’s Hozhoni; in Cherokee, it’s Selu i-tse-i; and in Ho Chunk it’s Wicawas warocu sto waroc. Each tribe, each Indian nation, has its own form of Thanksgiving. But for Indian culture, Thanksgiving doesn’t end when the dishes are put away. It is something we celebrate all year long… at the birth of a baby, a safe journey, a new home.

So when you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner this year, remember Squanto and the great sacrifices made by him and his tribe to a people they didn’t know. That is the legacy of the Indian people of New England… one that we can all enjoy.

Richard B. Williams is the executive director of the American Indian College Fund, a historian, educator and the founder of the Upward Bound Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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