The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher
Columbus on their beach.
Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women - naked, tawny and full
of wonder - emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get
a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore carrying
swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.
Columbus later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he wrote:
"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things,
which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded
everything they owned. They were well-built with good bodies and handsome features.
They do not bear arms and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it
by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are
made of sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them
all and make them do whatever we want."
And so the conquest began and the thanotocracy - the regime of death - was
inaugurated on the continent the Indians called "Turtle Island".
You probably already know a good piece of the story: how Columbus's army took
Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take him to the source of
their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears. And how, with utter
contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard
the Niņa and the Pinta - the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispaņola
(today the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken prisoner, they
were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Niņa and the Pinta set sail
for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage many of the Indian prisoners died.
Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:
"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one, who
has not witnessed them, would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they
never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." Columbus concluded
his report by asking for a little help from the King and Queen and in return he would
bring them "as much gold as they needed and as many slaves as they asked for".
Columbus returned to the New World - "new" for Europeans, that is - with 17
ships and more, than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from
island to island in the Caribbean taking Indians as captives. But word spread ahead
of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and
killed all the sailors left behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the
island in gangs raping women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus later
wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can
be sold!" The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spanish conquerors,
even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years Columbus's men murdered more,
than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves in the mines or directly
murdered or from diseases brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million
Indian people were murdered between 1494 and 1508.
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean,
Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru and the English settlers
of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of
native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used in
Europe to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx
would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital". These were the violent
beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that
would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
All of these were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North
American English colonies the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the
islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement
in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were
hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned
the whole Indian village.
The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607 inside the territory
of an Indian confederacy led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle
on his people's land, but did not attack. And the English began starving. Some of them
ran away and joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout
colonial times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves - from
Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa - ran away to live in Indian communities,
intermarry and raise their children there.
In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return
the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those,
who ran away and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown then sent soldiers to
take revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the
houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe
and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting
out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the boat and stabbed
to death.
By 1621 the atrocities committed by the English had grown and word spread throughout
the Indian villages. The Indians fought back and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was
total war. Not able to enslave the Indians, the English aristocracy decided to exterminate
them.
And then the Pilgrims arrived. When the Pilgrims came to New England, they too were
coming not to vacant land, but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes
that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution
in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower,
where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize
their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me and I shall
give thee the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy
possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2:
"Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that
resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now
southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way, they wanted their
land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that
area.
In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block
Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests
of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops.
Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast destroying
crops again.
The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after
village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it:
"It was supposed that no less, than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And
Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the name
of Christianity.
Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few years.
It is important to note: the ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very often
refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And
some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from
England. It was the Puritan elite, who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for power.
And in the end the Indian population of 10 million that was in North America, when Columbus
came, was reduced to less, than one million.
The way the different Indian peoples lived - communally, consensually, making decisions
through tribal councils, each tribe having different sexual/marital relationships, where many
different sexualities were practiced as the norm - contrasted dramatically with the Puritans'
Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans men decided everything, whereas in the
Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose the men, who represented the
clans at village and tribal councils; it was the women, who were responsible for deciding
on whether or not to go to war. The Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination
was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
There were many other cultural differences: the Iroquois did not use harsh punishment
on children. They did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually
allowed the child to learn to care for themselves. And they did not believe in ownership
of land; they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd.
The European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted
to own and control everything, even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim
colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a
stubbornness and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place,
be broken and beaten down, that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility
and tractableness, other virtues may in their time be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people - a combination
of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease - was "the Wonderful Preparation of the Lord
Jesus Christ by His Providence for His People's Abode in the Western World". The Pilgrims
robbed Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons.
Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the Wampanoags and scalped
them. Scalping had been unknown among Native Americans in New England prior to its introduction
by the English, who began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted
scalps.
"What do you think of Western Civilization?", Mahatma Gandhi was asked in the 1940s,
to which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization? I think, it would be a good idea." And so
enters "Civilization", the civilization of Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that
couldn't have been more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered,
so they slaughtered them.
These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved" and whom we celebrate in the holiday
Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation.
Samoset of the Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages
and having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold
Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in their New
World. He taught them, how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables.
He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He
also negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the Wampanoags,
a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And even that treaty was
soon broken. All this is celebrated as the first Thanksgiving.
My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn't do that.
Their humanity made them assist other human beings in need. And for that beautiful, human,
loving connection they - and those of us, who are not Indian, as well - paid a terrible price:
the genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.
Let's look at one example of the Puritan values, which were not, I repeat, the values
of the English working class, values that we "give thanks for" on this holiday: the example
of the Maypole and Mayday!
In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English working class
staged a huge revolt. This was done through the guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers
from Italy and merchants from France, in order to undercut wages, lengthen hours and break the
guilds. This alliance between international finance, national capital and military aristocracy
was in the process of merging into the imperialist nation-state.
The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret rumor said
the commonality - the vision of a communal society that would counter the rich, the merchants,
the industrialists, the nobility and the landowners - would arise on May Day. The King and Lords
got frightened, householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn't hear about the
curfew (they missed Dan Rather on TV). They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize and
700 workers stormed the jails throwing bricks, hot water and stones. The prisoners were freed.
A French capitalist's house was trashed.
Then came the repression: cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned,
soldiers patrolled the streets and a proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet
together and that all men should "keep their wives in their houses". The prisoners were brought
through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of gallows were set up
throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme
cruelty.
Thus the dreaded thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in answer to
proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day riots were caused by expropriation
(people having been uprooted from their lands they had used for centuries in common) and by
exploitation (people had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women
organizers and healers, who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism, were burned at
the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged the people, who
by losing their commons also lost a place to put their Maypole.
Suddenly the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament ordered the
destruction of Maypoles (just as during the Vietnam war the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon
banned the making of all red cloth, as it was being sewn into the blue, yellow and red
flags of the National Liberation Front).
In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot Indians, the Puritans
in England abolished May Day altogether. They had defeated the Indians and they were attempting
to defeat the growing proletarian insurgency at home, as well.
Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation, became an
anti-authoritarian manual useful to those, who would turn the Puritan world upside down, such
as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters and Thomas Morton, the
man, who in 1626 went to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass and with his Indian friends put up the
first Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.
The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians and hanged gay people and
Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who
came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian, who founded the communally living,
gender-separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic dance and who drove the Puritans up
the wall.
The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and
continued through the ages. In the late 1800s the Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle
"with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with strips of cloth of various
colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit".
They didn't call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return of
the dead and the expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but
otherwise it might as well have been a May Day!
Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon,
he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound
Indians had a new religion: they stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced and danced for
five days jerking, twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers! Wovoka took
this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were.
Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced
the left foot following with the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The federal
agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just
as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian riots, just as the
Shakers were dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism.
On December 29, 1890 the government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2-pound explosive
shells at 50 a minute, always developing new weapons!) massacred more, than 300 men, women
and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia,
the state disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to
investigate. Amid Janet-Reno-like tears he wrote: "The Indians were responsible for the
engagement."
In 1970 the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each year, a
Thanksgiving ceremony given by the townspeople. There are many speeches for the crowds,
who attend. That year - the year of Nixon's secret invasion of Cambodia, the year 4 students
were massacred at Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war, the year they tried to
electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins - the Massachusetts Department of
Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of
the Pilgrims' arrival and the first Thanksgiving.
Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to speak,
he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony.
When they saw, what he had written, they would not allow him to read it.
First the genocide. Then the suppression of all discussion about it. What do Indian
people find to be thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be thankful for
the genocide of the Indians that this "holiday" commemorates? As we sit with our families
on Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets and
be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things, we have to be thankful
for, have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with American history
and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led,
before they were massacred by the colonists in the name of privatization of property and
the lust for gold and labor.
Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday
known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being
against progress. To those charges I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people
lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify
their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their
holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to is the utter destruction of the
apparatus of death known as America - not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery,
the state, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a
future, where I will have children with America and they will be the new Indians.
In Memoriam. Lest We Forget. The First Thanksgiving
From Community Endeavor News, November 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds,
fall 1996
The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims,
but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an
anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks, as he talks about the
holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force, as he discusses Thanksgiving.
Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two universities and was the former chairman
of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.
Dutch and English settlers unite to slaughter the Pequots - 1637
"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children, who were
celebrating their annual green corn dance - Thanksgiving Day to them - in their own house",
Newell said.
"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and
English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth, they were shot
down. The rest were burned alive in the building", he said.
Newell based his research on studies of the Holland Documents and the 13-volume
Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials
to their superiors and the king in England and the private papers of Sir William Johnson,
British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
"My research is authentic, because it is documentary", Newell said. "You can't get
anything more accurate, than that, because it is firsthand. It is not hearsay."
Newell said, the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the Indians at
what is now Groton, CT (home of a nuclear submarine base) rather, than a celebration with
them. He said, the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate
Thanksgiving Day was "fictitious", although Indians did share food with the first settlers.
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