The English vs. the Wampanoag Nation
- Posted by Beth (Blue Star Chronicles) on November 23rd, 2006 filed in General, Guest Posts
On Thanksgiving we, the descendants of the English Pilgrims, give thanks for our many blessings. We celebrate in gratitude for our blessings mostly by stuffing our faces till we are sick. It’s a tradition that began by of a three day celebration in the fall of 1621 in which the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag celebrated together the first harvest of the Pilgrims.
This group of Pilgrims almost unbelievably survived a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in the early 1600s to colonize the Americas. The first winter in Plymouth about half of them died from starvation. As the second winter approached an alliance was forged between the Pilgrim and the Wampanoag enabling the English to survive the winter and learn to cultivate and utilize the bounty of the land in this new world.
Both the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag had their own motivations for forging this friendship. Each needed the other in order to survive. The Pilgrims were dying of starvation and the Wampanoag had lost 75% of it’s population over the previous 10 years to waring with other tribes and epidemics.
What happened after that period of cooperation between the Pilgrims and the American Indians is a matter of some debate.
During most of my lifetime, the Europeans have been demonized as interlopers who mistreated, abused and murdered the native populations. Then topped that off by stealing their land.
Complexities of early and later English-Indian relations may get some attention in Plymouth today, but each side has its primary story line. The Pilgrims’ is persecution, suffering, and endurance, followed by bounty and benevolence. The Indians’ is persecution, suffering and betrayal, followed by devastation. Neither version, nor even both of them taken together, encompasses the full truth.
Obviously, the Europeans were not all bad and the Indians were not all peaceful people who were victimized by the more sophisticated Europeans. But one wouldn’t know that by hearing what is generally taught about that period of time.
My Beloved Curmudgeon has often said that if the American Indian Nations had not been fighting each other and banded together, they would have run the Europeans off the continent. Proof of that is evident in the one time they did band together at Little Big Horn.
Crittenden has an excellent article that asks:
“Why are we having this conversation here, in English? Why aren’t we in England, speaking Wampanoag?”
I ask this question because there is no people in history that can lay claim to pure, exclusive victimhood or noble traits. Such a people do not exist. This is one of the reasons why the English were able to arrange their alliance with Massasoit. This is one of the reasons Hernando Cortes, with 400 Spaniards, could defeat the mighty Aztec army of 200,000 men. The Indians had a long history of preying on each other. When the Europeans showed up, instead of uniting to boot them off their shores, they tried to use them to their own advantage. Against their enemies. Other Indians.
At this point, we are all Americans, bound together through blood and history.
It is only within the last few centuries, primarily and ironically enough within the bloody, widely disparaged crucible of ideals that is America, that we have slowly and painfully tried to break with that past and become a higher people. We’ve tried to become a people that, growing out of ancient hatreds in Europe and violence here in America, have absorbed elements of all those histories and become something distinct from them. A people who acknowledge the misdeeds of the past and try to correct them. A people dedicated to universal justice and prosperity and always striving for them. A people moving forward.
Within that context, victimhood is a trap, every bit as vile and destructive as the trap of subjugating others that we now reject. They are traps that ensnare us in the terrible past. Whatever we might have come from, we are the survivors now, who hopefully have moved beyond that. And for that, today, we should be thankful.
Wow. Well said.
also at Blue Star Chronicles.
joated says:
You also might add: Where is the Erigh (spelling?) Indian nation? The Erigh’s violated a most important code of the Iroquois federation before the Europeans ever arrived. For their impudence the entire tribe was erased from the face of the earth by the other tribes of that federation as an example of what would happen if any tribe were to violate the federation laws. Only their name lives as Lake Erie.
On two occasions attempts were made by powerful and persuasive individuals to get the Native Americans to forget their feuds band together. If Pontiac or Tecumseh had succeeded in forging a united North American Indian Alliance (and each was only weeks away before rash actions by individuals and member groups caused their plans to blow up in their faces) the United States would not exist today.
beth says:
I watched a special on the History Channel in which Wampanoag descendants gave their version of the history of that era. I couldn’t help but think that it couldn’t be that lopsided.
The Europeans won the fight. That’s all. It’s the way things have always been since the beginning of time.
We certainly need to band together now. All of us Americans.