Honor Living Native Americans

November 26, 2015 12:25 PM

5 Socially Accountable Things You Can Do on Thanksgiving. Stop telling the Thanksgiving Myth.
posted by Anonymous (12 comments total)

The Wampanoag were weakened by disease before the Pilgrims even showed up.

Squanto was captured by Englishmen who tried to sell him into slavery in Spain. He was rescued by Spanish monks and ended up spending about a third of his life in Europe, trying to get back home. He did eventually get back, and when he did a few years later he befriend the Plymouth settlers and taught them a lot about how to survive in New England. Some historians believe he was poisoned by the Wampanoag for being too close to the Plymouth settlers.

The relationship between the Wapanog and the Pilgrims was a strategic partnership.

In short, the relationship between the white Plymouth settlers and the local indigenous people was complex. The article linked seems to elide and simplify much.
posted by Diablevert at 12:46 PM on November 26, 2015 [9 favorites]

The "despised Indians" link from the second link is a bit weird. Tries to say Lincoln was a Nazi? Or a Marxist? Both?
posted by howfar at 12:49 PM on November 26, 2015

In short, the relationship between the white Plymouth settlers and the local indigenous people was complex. The article linked seems to elide and simplify much.

It wasn't that complex. It was briefly somewhat friendly but quickly became murderous, with Miles Standish's tendency toward unprovoked violence causing Natives to flee the area, and a later war between Colonists and the Native population causing the loss of as many as 60 percent of the area's indigenous population, which had already been decimated by disease.
posted by maxsparber at 12:57 PM on November 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah, if you follow the Lincoln link from that second link we get:

In the movie, "Gangs of New York," we finally have a historically correct representation of the real Abraham Lincoln and his policies.

Wait. What?

But, yeah. US Thanksgiving is complicated. It's already so anxious for so many people, that I'm not surprised having to revisit revisionist history about people living now is a hard sell.
posted by clvrmnky at 12:59 PM on November 26, 2015

Tries to say Lincoln was a Nazi? Or a Marxist? Both?

Both. Guy looks to be old school libertarian. Some of them DESPISE Lincoln with a burning passion. Income taxes, and rescinding habeas corpus. Also common for them to say Nazis were a left wing group because they had 'socialist' in the name. Doing a search on the author shows he also has articles on Lew Rockwell.
posted by zabuni at 1:02 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Briefly somewhat friendly but quickly became murderous, with Miles Standish's tendency toward unprovoked violence causing Natives to flee the area, and a later war between Colonists and the Native population

King Philip's war began more than 50 years after the Plymouth colonists landed.
posted by Diablevert at 1:04 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Pequot War happened in the aftermath of events from 1632.
posted by maxsparber at 1:10 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

So, the answer to the "Thanksgiving Myth" is another historically inaccurate recounting that misstates chronology, flattens disparate groups of both Native Americans and English?

I'm all for recognizing the complicated relationship between the Europeans and indigenous nations, but something that's become a personal bugaboo is how often attempts to refute or reframe the traditional mythos — which has had a fairly undeniable effect of whitewashing the relationship between Europeans and indigenous nations, and I can imagine must be incredibly galling for a lot of Native Americans to see trotted out every year — is the corresponding romanticization and simplification of the early contact narratives into pure, innocent native naifs and cartoonishly evil Europeans.

The answer to dumb nationalism by white people isn't to invent a competing dumb myth, it's to actually look at what happened and why, and that involves things like recognizing that the Narraganset and Wampanoag were different people, and that the Pilgrims and Puritans were different people, and that things like the Cherokee relationship with the Union (which, hey, that link conveniently ignores that a large part of why the Cherokees threw in with the Confederacy is that they were slave owners and their elite were heavily invested in the plantation economy).

(Another myth about Native Americans I'd love to see killed is the idea that they didn't understand owning property.)
posted by klangklangston at 1:27 PM on November 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

"The Pequot War happened in the aftermath of events from 1632."

The Pequot War was with the Pequot, not the Wampanoag or the Narraganset. In fact, the Pequot attacked the Narraganset, of whom the Wampanoag had become tributaries. The Pequot, semi-aligned with the Mohawk, attacked the Wampanoag after they concluded their attacks on the Narraganset.

So, yeah, you're not treating different Native American nations the way we would treat French and English relations or even (as a better analogy) the complicated contemporary structure of Netherlands and Flemish governments, where a mix of electoral and hereditary politics led to shifting confederations of similar mutually-intelligible groups.

It's a shame that very few indigenous nations of the Americas left written records, but North America is about the size of Europe, and we all recognize that treating all Europeans as if they were the same in governance and goals would be a profoundly dumb reading of history. I try not to subject Native Americans to a stupidity I would object to if it were aimed at places with better written records.
posted by klangklangston at 1:37 PM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

Oh, nonsense. The settlers' friendly relationship was exclusively with a single tribe and a single chief, it was short-lived, and even then their relationship with other tribes included murdering them in their homes. I am not treating the Native population like the Flemish because the colonists didn't. They made one useful partnership when they were at their weakest and then galloped on into the mainstream American history of murdering and plundering the Native population, and, honestly, the point of this post was that the story of Thanksgiving is a whitewashing of an almost unblemished history of colonial genocide, which is a much truer representation of history than comparing this to international relations in Europe.
posted by maxsparber at 1:52 PM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

The PBS American Experience episode of The Pilgrims has an excellent account of the horrifying raid that Myles Standish conducted against some Massachusetts warriors. Standish was pretty much a thug who could have been a villain out of a George R. R. Martin novel.
posted by Dr. Zira at 3:23 PM on November 26, 2015

(Another myth about Native Americans I'd love to see killed is the idea that they didn't understand owning property.)

A few are taking this up, perhaps not without outside interests, but if claims are true that their personal inability to sell or use property as collateral leads to poverty, then it would be in their individual interests.
posted by Brian B. at 3:44 PM on November 26, 2015