To create a better society, we have to engage in collaboration. No one person has a wide enough span of view to embrace everything needed to make the world better. Even the most enlightened and wisest leaders can do no more than to give a broad vision with some deep detailing.
If we engage in collaboration we can fashion a better world. If we choose to fight we will only create fighting and failure. The Pilgrims would not have survived had they not made peace with their neighboring Indians. It wasn't that the Indians or the Pilgrims were either superior to the other, but that when their ideas were shared both did better.
This is the lesson of America. This is the real lesson of Thanksgiving, and it is something we can be thankful for. The world is neither so brutal that only the strong survive, nor is it so easy that we have no reason to be excited by life.
Chris
Posted by cholte at November 23, 2006 11:06 AMAh,
The myth of Thanksgiving perpetuated again. The pilgrims survived the first year in the "New land" owing mainly to the fact that they robbed the graves of Native Americans. These first people had a tradition of burying food with their dead.
There wasn't the fabled collaboration of Native American and European. Peace lasted only for about a year. Then the decimation of Native peoples began. The warring, the forced migration began- a 300 year legacy that lives into today.
The myth of Thanksgiving started with the beginning of its celebration during the Civil War period (that peculiar time in our US history when quite a few Northerners as well as Southerners thought it was perfectly reasonable to enslave "subhumans" AKA people of African descent).
The need to perpetuate the myths of America, the founding fathers (many of whom were slaveowners and thought Indigenous people were not human) persists to this day. Amazing that the "Declaration of Independence" was lifted from the Confederation of the Iroquois Nations that existed many generations before Northern Europeans "discovered" the New World.
I'm always careful with the word "collaboration." That word best fits those who sell out their people to the oppressors (great example is those French who chose to "collaborate" with their Nazi occupiers). I use it advisedly when talking to folks who are not of the mainstream.
As Malcom X said, "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.
Best,
Mimi
descendent of those who came over the Bering Straits and those who survived the Middle Passage
I was listening to the descendents of the Wampanoag (forgive my spelling) and their interactions with Plymouth Colony. I didn't hear them mention grave-robbing, but then I only caught two-thirds of the story, the part in which they talked about the day of thanksgiving declared at the time and the mutual trade and assistance that they rendered the Pilgrims. I wouldn't be surprised about the grave robbing, the first pilgrims were not accomplished farmers and had left from urban life. They nearly starved to death -- just as the legend describes it.
This was the accomplishment of William Bradford and while it didn't happen the first year of the settlement as the myth depicts, it did happen. From 1621-1657 there was peace between the Plymouth Colonies and the local tribe and that was his doing. The Wampanoag are still around, the other tribes are long gone. The treaty with them did not extend to their neighbors.
There are myths and then there are counter-myths (both tend to be myths). The best stories lie in comparing the myths and legends to the reality and then reognizing that there are lessons to be learned from both competing narratives. Obviously, once the pilgrims were strong enough, they no longer felt the need to cooperate with hostile tribes in their area.
Obviously, the Wampanaug might have been better off exterminating them, but they seem to have taken pity on the Pilgrims, who unlike the Virginia settlers were genuinely religious refugees.
The story of the pilgrims is not really just a myth or a legend. It is a megillah, fable, or allegorical tale. It doesn't talk about reality so much as an idealized reality. It no more needs to be literally true than the story of Queen Esther or the Prodigal Son tale. People in our day need to understand the distinction. The Wampanaug probably did. The Pilgrims did not.
Chris
Chris
Posted by: Chris at November 26, 2006 05:17 AM