Although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want
Edward Winslow, from "Mourt's Relation"
Last week:
I hope this week’s newsletter finds you far from want!
With Thanksgiving upon us next week, I thought it was high time to cover Mourt’s Relation, the public relations slash ship’s log that served as the basis for this national holiday.
The document known as “Mourt’s Relation” was mis-titled. Rather, this was a relation of the first months in New England, April 1620 to November 1621 , published by George Mourt, the delivery person for his brother-in-law William Bradford (1590-1657) and Edward Winslow (1595-1655). It was rediscovered and republished in the mid-1800s as Mourt’s Relation, or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth. Here’s the passage that started the Thanksgiving story:
You shall understand, that in this little time, that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us; we often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them, the occasions and relations whereof you shall understand by our general and more full declaration of such things as are worth the noting, yea, it has pleased God so to possess the Indians with a fear of us, and love unto us, that not only the greatest king amongst them, called Massasoit, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us, or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us, so that seven of them at once have sent their messengers to us to that end. Yea, an Isle at sea, which we never saw, hath also, together with the former, yielded willingly to be under the protection, and subjects to our sovereign lord King James, so that there is now great peace amongst the Indians themselves, which was not formerly, neither would have been but for us; and we for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just. The men and women go naked, only a skin about their middles.
In the middle of the Civil War, with a hope that a gathering would bring unity, Abraham Lincoln declared a national Thanksgiving in November. Armed with this paragraph as documentary evidence, the “First Thanksgiving” story became a part of our national story, taught in schools and heralded by cooking magazines. When I was a kid, a big part of Thanksgiving was the pagent that commemorated this event, dressing up in brown paper sacks with construction paper feathers on a band to signify the Wampanoags, with black construction paper buckles for the Pilgrims. Thank god, that’s over. In the early 20th century, Thanksgiving was enshrined in the form we know it now: a big meal that brings all the warring factions in your household to the table to eat heritage recipes.
When the English ship Fortune showed up in December 1621 to resupply the English, Edward Winslow and William Bradford sent “Mourt’s Relation” documenting their first months back to England. Many scholars have noted the significant differences between this document and Bradford’s private journals. In private, Bradford felt under siege, surrounded by wilderness. In “Mourt’s Relation” he is surrounded by abundance and friendship. Though they lost 44 people in that first winter, these deaths are largely unmarked. Omitted too are sickness, infighting between Saints and Strangers, cold, scurvy, and starvation. So, we now read this day-by-day journal of the first months at Plymouth/Patuxet as good marketing. Check it out here. I love that they report the weather every day. April in Cape Cod is sure better than in England!
This passage I have quoted above appears in section 6, entitled,
“A LETTER SENT FROM New England to a friend in these parts, setting forth a brief and true Declaration of the worth of that Plantation; As also certain usefulDirections for such as intend a VOYAGE into those Parts.”
The last paragraph is full of advice for future settlers, including my favorite:
“bring juice of lemons”
As documented evidence of a first Thanksgiving, this is thin indeed. If we presume it was written in such a way as to encourage further investment and settlement, then we can also assume that the world that Winslow finds himself in was far more complex than here described.
But as the Smithsonian points out in their documentation of this moment, the naming of Massasoit was significant. As leader of the Wampanoag people, he made a strategic call that would alter the future of the continent. The confederation of Wampanoag peoples who lived in what they called the “Dawnlands” numbered 40,000 between 60 to 67 settlements. Then came the Great Dying, a plague that decimated the region between 1616-1619. This plague was likely brought by European explorers who had been touching down in the region for 100 years. Death and disease weakened the nation and made it vulnerable to takeover by their neighbors to the west, the Narragansett.
The town of Patuxet, where the Pilgrims set up Plimouth, had been the site of a village that had lost everything to disease. They found unburied bodies when they arrived, a sign that the death toll was so total that no one was left to bury the dead. The English helped themselves to the buried grain stores.
At first, the Wampanoags followed their usual plan of rebuffing English settlement. There was a short skirmish in early December, more warning than attack. Then the Wampanoags noticed that these English were different — they brought women and children. On an event known as “the first washing” (lol) the first European women in the Dawnlands disembarked from the Mayflower to do the laundry and wash their hair. This was thought to signify to the Native witnesses that these English were settlers, not soldiers. Massasoit’s crucial decision: he allowed them to stay.
In the Spring, after the Pilgrims had lost many dozens to disease and starvation, Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, arrived with seed, and spoke English. He had been enslaved by an earlier party of English explorers, sold in Malaga and then in England, where he learned English. When he had returned to his hometown in 1619, he found it abandoned. Perhaps to gain leverage, or perhaps to live at home, Tisquantum chose to be an interpreter and live amongst the English. Massasoit, not fully trusting Tisquantum, sent a warrior Samoset to join him.
Fastforward a few months, and we have seven buildings and a full harvest. When the English begin shooting fowl, the Wampanoags come to check on things, with 90 warriors. The English invite them to stay, and they have the first Thanksgiving feast.
A result of these three days of feasting was improved relationships between the Governor John Carver and Massasoit. It was clear that these two groups needed each other. They signed a treaty that would hold until the next generation.
I wish I could say that the story continued happily, with feasting and fellowship. It doesn’t. With expansion, free ranging livestock, double-crossing by individual actors on both sides, and 10,000 additional English settlers in 10 years, the alliance was no longer mutually beneficial. Bloodshed ensued. Google up these events, if you are not aware of them:
Mystic Massacre of 1637 and Pequot War (1636-1637)
Metacom’s war, or King Phillip’s war (1676), & the Battle of the Great Swamp (1675)
and in the background — over in Virginia: Powhatan Massacre of Jamestown (1622)
And there’s another reason that I am writing about this most famous dinner party. A colleague at the University of Leiden has recently published a book that rattled our campus. In it, he claims to “debunk” the work of American historians who have proven that some Native American tribal groups experienced genocide at the hands of Europeans colonists and then later, the United States Army. His stated aim is to restore European-American and Anglo-American pride in the United States’s key origin stories, and to combat the “destructive myths” that include the word genocide. You’ll notice I am not giving this book a title or naming its author, because I don’t want to spread further disinformation here. On Amazon, the “books frequently brought with this one” are exclusively of the white power variety.
When students complained about the book, university administrators chose to platform it, with the hopes that academic freedom of speech would show it to be poorly researched polemics. I was glad that there would be an airing, so to speak. Better than pretending it wasn’t happening, right? clearly this was magical thinking. The poster on campus and email announcements promoted it as an event to share a book that “debunks current distortion and myths about European colonialism in the New World” and invited the community “to respond to the publication, listen to academic debate between North America experts, and personally engage in discussion about the ideas presented in the book.” Yikes. It seemed like the department was giving this idea a platform to further spread its message, rather than to contain it.
With most of my colleagues from American studies, I wrote in protest to the event organizers, and offered my training, expertise, and network to help them make this event more culturally sensitive. My key requests were that the stage be shared with scholars of Native American history, and that the organizers be on the lookout for rightwing rhetoric. I suggested that we point out where his rhetoric centers whiteness and invalidates important scholarship around race — through labeling, cherry-picking, and the like — in order to demonstrate to our students how white supremacy, or stories that celebrate European sovereignty at the expense of other groups, can be couched in quasi-academic language. And since we often teach the same students, I suggested that we, Leiden’s faculty in American history and American studies, should attend, if only to figure out what to further explore in our classes the following semester.
The event has been rescheduled. The author is claiming censorship. Or a travesty for another day, perhaps? I hope it will be better handled in future iterations. In the meantime, my colleague is claiming that I am leading a “witch hunt” (Salem in the house!!) and that “a woke mob of jr. colleagues is putting pressure on [other presenters] to drop out.” And the chair of the department has quoted my emails, and those of my colleagues who raised their concerns, calling them “malicious,” “ill-informed” and somehow hurtful to her (?). What a mess!
I plan to find ways to bring Native American scholarship to my campus so that this generation of students has opportunity to hear from them either way. Last year, I had the opportunity to host a few field trips to a contemporary Native American art exhibition. Though I am proceeding with as much grace, patience, and kindness as I can muster, it feels like the old ugliness is here on the doorstep again. Again I have to make a broom. Call me junior (it has been a while since that happened!!), call me woke (true, true). Name calling and put-downs, the fragility and defensiveness. I hate to see it. Sweep the porch and teach your own.
So, when we celebrate thanksgiving this year, let’s add a note of thanks for the Indigenous scholars and historians who must contend with all this distortion and denialism as they do their work. I have had only the smallest taste this month and it rankles. The Wampanoag scholars who have worked with the Plymouth/Patuxet research site have called for our understanding of history to be precise and accurate, above all else.
I can understand the desire to retrieve the “great American narrative” from the blood and darkness recorded in its archive. But name calling, invalidation, and disinformation are not the same as history, and we are not going back. We are not going back to a time when history was buried, purposefully obscured, and even whitewashed so that we felt better about it. I believe it is braver and wiser is to look squarely at our history. I am proud to be of a generation of scholars who understand history as made up of discreet human decisions, both devastating and redemptive.
The anthropologists, archeologists, historians, and archivists who have done so much in the last 30 years to deepen our understanding of what happened in 1492, 1607, 1621, and beyond, have opened our eyes to how the Native nations used their global connections, technologies, and linguistic sophistication to shape the future. American foods, technologies, architecture, trade, agriculture and knowledge played a key role in the development of human life in the Americas, and around the world, before and after contact with Europeans. They deserve to have their story told too.
So I give thanks for facts. I pray for accuracy and a better understanding of the past.
From the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, Greetings to the Natural World, which begins:
The People
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people.
Now our minds are one.
And towards the end, it offers this gratitude for teachers:
The Enlightened Teachers
We gather our minds to greet and thank the enlightened Teachers who have come to help throughout the ages. When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind us of the way we were instructed to live as people. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to these caring teachers.
Now our minds are one.
I had that line in the first draft!
Amazing! So much to think about! Hang in there! Reminds me of the saying ‘ people are entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts!’ Thanks for sharing a few facts!