- 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 Nina and the Pinta
-- the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola
(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
Nina 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 need, and as many slaves as they ask."
-
- 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 Spaniard 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 this 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/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities
were practiced as the norm -- contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's
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, and so 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 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 t.v.).
They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed
the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, 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, in 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 communal 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 Mayday!
-
- 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 in the genocide of the
Indians, that this "holyday 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 Amerikan 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 the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as
Amerika -- 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 Amerika, and they will
be the new Indians.
-
- Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix",
the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA, www.greenparty.org,
and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition, www.nospray.org and the Brooklyn
Greens.
-
- In memorium. Lest we forget. The First Thanksgiving
-
- From the 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.
-
- "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 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 first hand. 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.
-
-
- Comment
- From Jim Mortellaro
- 11-27-4
-
- OK. But you're missing out on a really great turkey dinner!
-
- Oh, and before I forget, please, don't celebrate Christmas
because they murdered Him. Or New Years Eve because on that day, the guy
in the white beard and cane drops dead.
-
- And please, don't eat Easter Wabbits made from chocolate.
Everyone knows you have to murder poor, innocent bunny wabbits and dip
'em in chocolate.
-
- And last, how about them Mets?
-
- Jim
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