Carnival, a festival in honor of the goddess of joy, imagination, and creativity, and a dance of sex hormones. Photo Credit: “So yuh going to Carnival” Magazine and Emmanuel Joseph

The African, and Spiritual, Origins of Carnival

By Grisso*

It has become the received teaching in all the countries of the New World where Carnival has become an institution — notably in Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, and Port of Spain — to ascribe its origins to white planters and costumed balls, rather than to its palpably African roots [1]. I want in this article to ground the Carnival firmly in Mother Africa, where it rightfully belongs.

The first point I would make in this regard is simply to note that everywhere in the New World where there is Carnival, you find the creative presence of an African genius. In Rio, you have African and Portuguese, in New Orleans you have African and French, and in Port of Spain you have African and again, French. It is also present throughout Hispanophone America, where African energy is again present, expressed now through an Hispanic voice. The one constant in all of these variations of carnival is an African presence.

But really, we shouldn’t end there. In the Bahamas, Carnival is known by another name … Junkanoo. There, the British never participated to any significant extent, and therefore there was no attempt at European expropriation; so that historically there has never been any doubt as to the African root of this festival. Junkanoo is known also in Bermuda, where again it is an undisputed African engine that propels this form of cultural expression … Jamaica also, where it is now a faded if not entirely lost cultural expression, now being resuscitated by the import of Trinidad-style carnival. Even in North America, few people are aware that Junkanoo was celebrated in North Carolina and other parts of the American South at one time. There, for a time, it even crossed cultures and was adopted by Anglos, only subsequently to die out.[2] One can speculate as to why Junkanoo died out in North Carolina and other parts of the American South; my speculation would be that it died of racial disdain — it is from the word Junkanoo that we get the derogatory terms “kooner” and “coon”, as in “acting like a …”, a folk etymology which reveals the disdain in which this African form of cultural expression was held. Even African-descended folk, I’m sure, many of them, especially “church-folk”, would have been persuaded to look down upon the Junkanoo. So that even where there is a large African population in the New World, namely the United States other than New Orleans, where it would appear to be an unknown, or at least alien, cultural expression, we find that it once existed. I therefore assert that everywhere in the New World where Africa is found, we also find carnival, or carnival by some other name such as junkanoo, or “crop-over” (its Barbadian form), except of course where it died a victim of racial disdain and/or racial self-hatred.

In making this assertion, a clear corollary is that the African carnival has nothing at bottom to do with Lent, Christmas, or the Christian calendar. For those who don’t know, the carnivals of Port of Spain, Rio de Janeiro, and New Orleans, also a host of others throughout the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe, are celebrated on the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, and so are linked with the Christian church calendar. (Truth be told, the Christian calendar is littered with pagan retentions, most notably Christmas and Easter. Christianity was always alien to Europe and has never really been tried by the Europeans, but it certainly was used by them as an arm of conquest. But I digress.) Likewise, the Junkanoo celebrations of the Bahamas, Bermuda, Jamaica, and North Carolina, are associated with the Christmas season. But there is no organic connection. The African-inspired carnivals have an origin and substance of their own, but at least in this aspect of outward form, they assume a European cloak. But it is assuredly a cloak of convenience. As in the carnival itself, separation must be drawn between the mask and the masquerader. No, the African carnival took on a European mask because the structures of European domination permitted it no other choice.

It is on this outward appearance that the repeated lie is based that carnival is a European creation. I do not deny that French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonialists, whether in Port of Spain, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, or wherever else in Latin America, celebrated their own form of carnival in the costumed balls and parties that they had in the days and weeks prior to Lent. Nor do I deny that the British colonialists of the Bahamas, Bermuda, Jamaica, North Carolina and elsewhere gave themselves over to merriment and debauchery in the “holiday season” of Christmas and New Year. No doubt that is true. Junkanoo merely took the occasion for merry-making afforded by the enslaver’s calendar to re-create a palpably African tradition right here in the New World. And the carnivals of the Catholic enslavers provided yet another opportunistic avenue of expression for what always was, and remains today, a fundamentally African form of cultural expression in all the Lent-related carnivals.

So what’s the difference, you might ask. To get a sense of the European cultural expression in carnival, one of course looks to Europe. And likewise, to get a sense of the African cultural expression, one looks to Africa. It is of course the case that every society, however inhibited or repressed, finds occasion for celebration, feasts, festivals, merry-making, and the like: it is an aspect of humanity in which we all share. Most societies also have the idea of the masquerade or the costume in one or another form, whether in the theater of social or religious ritual, the theater of the stage or drama, or the theater of the street or parade. The lines dividing these various forms of masquerade/theater are not that sharp, and the reader may no doubt be able to think of yet other categories. Carnival is a form of theater, obviously, since masquerade is involved. If we remained stuck on the outward form — the name — we would think that carnival is defined by its name, but we would be mistaken if we thought that that was the end of it.

The word carnival is derived from Latin words meaning, as some have put it, “a farewell to flesh”, referring to that season of merry-making just prior to Lent, the Christian season of fasting and fleshly denial. But one can have a season of merry-making without necessarily saying farewell to flesh, which is the case, for example, with Christmas merry-making (and Junkanoo). Therefore, to understand carnival, at least in its New World African expression, we need first of all to think of it in broader, more abstract terms than its European name would imply. We also need to focus on the differences between the European and African cultural expressions that the Europeans call carnival, that the Africans call something else, which from a New World African perspective appears to be lost, but which, in the abstract, is a form of theater of the street … to play mas’ being literally to lose oneself in the character one is supposed to be portraying as part of the masquerade.

Where Africa and Europe appear to diverge in this respect is in the aspect of costumed bands. The writings on the historical origins of the New World carnivals all speak of French, Portuguese, or Spanish colonialists having costumed balls. Individuals wore individual costumes, and the merry-making was largely indoors, though spill-over onto the streets could be expected. It is the same today still with the European carnivals of Quebec, and Venice, etc. Individuals wear costumes to indoor balls, but spill over onto the streets. This European style of merry-making is present also in the North American Halloween. By contrast, the African style of street theater called for costumed bands, and for the merry-making focus to be outdoors, rather than indoors. Which is what we see with today’s New World carnivals. It is also what we see when we look at the African (Yoruba) Egungun festival. In the Egungun festival, during which every extended family honors its collective ancestors, all the members of an extended family lineage wear the same colors, thus constituting a “band,” [3] which is the defining feature of the carnivals of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Port of Spain, and others like it, and conversely absent from the European tradition that we still see today in Venice, Quebec City, etc.

From the Egungun celebration also comes a feature that we find prominent in various of the Caribbean carnivals: throwing talcum powder on fellow masqueraders, from which comes the (Trinidad) expression — “you can’t play mas’ and ‘fraid powder!”. The Egungun festival is at bottom a religious festival, at which ancestral possession is invited; celebrants who become possessed are powdered down, for reasons which probably have to do with putting on a mask, that is to show outwardly that the celebrant is no longer himself, his or her bodily vehicle having been possessed by an ancestral spirit. So… although at some level the New World carnivals appear linked to European cultural expressions — Lent and Christmas notably — at a deeper level we find that the present form of these festivals really owe more to Mother Africa than to Europe, its wayward son.

But there is more! When we trace the origins even of the European carnivals, we find that it is again to Africa we must go. This time to the Nile Valley, and to ancient Egypt — Kamit. Herodotus’ “The Histories” [4] is replete with references to the borrowings that Greece owes to Kamit: “It was the Egyptians who originated, and taught the Greeks to use ceremonial meetings, processions, and processional offerings: a fact which can be inferred from the obvious antiquity of such ceremonies in Egypt, compared with Greece, where they have been only recently introduced.” (Book II, para. 58). Later, Herodotus goes on to describe one of the ceremonial processions, at the festival of “Artemis” at “Bubastis,” as follows: “… they come in barges, men and women together, a great number in each boat; on the way, some of the women keep up a continual clatter with castanets and some of the men play flutes, while the rest, both men and women, sing and clap their hands. Whenever they pass a town on the river-bank, they bring the barge close in-shore, some of the women continuing to act as I have said, while others shout abuse at the women of the place, or start dancing, or stand up and pull up their skirts. When they reach Bubastis, they celebrate the festival with elaborate sacrifices, and more wine is consumed than during all the rest of the year. The numbers that meet there are, according to native report, as many as seven hundred thousand men and women…” (same source, para. 60). That seems to describe what today we would call a carnival.

Just so there is no doubt, Herodotus also tells us that the ancient Egyptians — the Kamau — were a black people with woolly hair. Herodotus tells us this very plainly in many places in his “The Histories”, for example, in para. 55 of Book Two, he says “as to the bird being black, they merely signify by this that the woman was an Egyptian”, in explaining the Egyptian origin of the oracle of Dodona in Greece. Elsewhere, in para. 102, as another example, in explaining his belief that the Colchians, a people found near the Black Sea in what is now Russia, were a people of Egyptian descent, the remnant of an Egyptian army left behind, he says: “my own idea on the subject was based first on the fact that they have black skins and woolly hair.” And if all else fails — because Eurocentrist historians have found all sorts of reasons to discount Herodotus and other contemporaneous European writers who say that the ancient Egyptians were a Black African people, as did, by the way, the ancient Egyptians themselvs — it helps to look at the features of the Sphinx, which are clearly Black African in phenotype.

I had to laugh when I first read the part about women pulling up their skirts. Thousands of years later, they do the same thing, completely unaware that what they do with orgiastic abandon today, possibly even with some sense of Judeo-Christian-Islamic guilt or sin, would have been considered part of an approved social and religious ritual. The Kamitic deity corresponding most to Artemis, by the way, would be Heru. Although Artemis is female, and Heru male, we see from the Greek mythology that Artemis and Apollo were brother/sister twins, and Apollo clearly corresponds to Heru. In the Kamitic tradition, there is a close relationship between Heru and Het-Heru, evident even in the name. Het-Heru literally means “house of Heru.” This relationship exists at many levels. At one level, Heru represents the will, and correspondingly Het-Heru represents the imagination. That which is willed must first be brought into and entertained in the imagination. So the relation between Heru, and Het-Heru is here apt. At another level, Heru represents testosterone, for the presence of testosterone is critical to the aggressiveness needed to exert one’s will. Correspondingly, Het-Heru represents the gonads, the sex organs within which testosterone is produced. So a Kamitic festival in honor of Heru, in its female aspect, would be likely also to honor both testosterone and its means of production. For those who are familiar with the Yoruba deities, Shango would correspond to Heru. And Shango is known, among his many qualities, for being the “ladies’ man”, the embodiment of “testosterone city”, etc. So this festival that Herodotus characterized in terms of the Greek equivalent god Artemis, is likely to have been a festival in honor of one or both of Heru and Het-Heru, or in the Yoruba correspondence, of Shango and Oshun. The latter, in particular, governs joy, the imagination, sensuality, and, yes, the sex organs, [5] which might explain Herodotus’ reference to women pulling up their skirts in the festival in honor of the deity he characterized as corresponding to the Greek deity, Artemis. Anybody who has only looked on at a carnival, knows in his gut that carnival is a dance of sex hormones, male and female in symbiotic embrace.

Nor should we assume that there is anything spiritually or morally backward about celebrating the principles for which Het-Heru, and Oshun stand as spiritual exemplars, namely the principles of joy, the imagination and sensuality; rather the reverse, for it is the spiritual role of joyfulness to propel us forward on our spiritual path. Take that away, and you have piety perhaps, but piety by itself never caused a spirit to soar; or you have hypocrisy, which is corrosive of the spirit. By the same token, I hasten to add, joyfulness taken to extreme quickly propels one onto a downward trajectory of destruction, however much the short-term pleasures for example of drinking and feteing every night. The ancient Egyptians and the traditional African seem to have understood these principles very well, and in particular the need for balance. By contrast, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is riddled with contradictions on this score, which is why the enjoyment of sex and sensuality are considered somehow inherently sinful or dirty in these religions, the Song of Solomon apparently to the contrary notwithstanding. The traditional African religion, ancient Egyptian included, had no confusion on that score, all activities — 24 hours a day, seven days of the week — having a legitimate spiritual place and function within the religion. It is in this framework that a carnival, with all the lewd, sexually charged carryings-on, could be considered also religious, as Herodotus tells us it was in the case of the ancient Egyptian. We should credit that ancient wisdom, and seek to relearn it in a conscious way. I say in a conscious way, because the folk wisdom is such that all the Judeo-Christian-Islamic piety and proselytizing over two thousand years and more did not succeed in stamping out the practice; it only forced some of us to compartmentalize our existence in a way which cannot really be spiritually healthy, but is better than completely falling for the pious know-nothings who seek control above all, and so are afraid of anything that bespeaks liberation, carnival included.

Islam of course long ago stamped out such “pagan” rituals in Egypt. Christendom never quite succeeded in stamping out the pagan rituals of the past, but rather co-opted many of them, to the point now where the church calendar is littered with one and another pagan festival dressed up as Christian, the most important being Christmas, and Easter. [6] There clearly is no theological sanction for carnival either, but it too is tied resolutely to the Christian Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. So, based on Herodotus, I would speculate that Greece borrowed aspects of the carnival — festival of “Artemis” for one — from ancient Egypt, and that these practices, termed “pagan” in the Christian era, and accordingly derogated, survived in Europe in various forms up until Europe again culturally encountered Africa in the New World. Meanwhile, the ancient Egyptian practice was merely part and parcel of Mother Africa — of which Egypt remains a part, we need to be reminded — which gave it sustenance, and to which it gave back both culturally and genetically. [7] As Diop has informed us, the Yoruba, the Wolof, and other West African peoples also trace their heritage to the Nile Valley. [8] Hence, when Europe and Africa again met in the New World, the cultural transmission of ancient Egypt was embodied in both, in ways that neither knew. The cultural expression known as carnival was one of those transmissions. By the normal processes of cultural mutation, the European form differed from the African one when the two again encountered each other. But there was enough in common that in so many places of the New World, carnival could bring enslaver and enslaved together, however briefly when it happens, in joyous abandon.

Be that as it may, it is time to correct the record when it comes to carnival, and to the question to whom is owed the credit. Carnival is an African expression through and through, whether directly out of West Africa via the slave trade, or indirectly out of Africa (ancient Egypt) via Greece, Rome, and Western Europe. If that is not convincing enough, go to any one of the modern carnivals, whether Port of Spain, Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, or Brooklyn on Labor Day. The sounds you hear, and the vibrations you feel, clearly, are “out of Africa.” So, please, let us hear no more of those “histories” of Carnival that look no further back than slavery or emancipation, that see the African implicitly as a blank sheet on which it is the European who writes, and see in the New World carnivals Africa imitating Europe, or newly freed slaves imitating erstwhile enslavers, when it is Herodotus, the European, who would tell us exactly the opposite.

Grisso

*Grisso is a 48 year old African of the diaspora, born and raised in Trinidad. . He may be reached via email at .

Notes:

[1] See, for example, http://www.allahwe.org/History.html,
http://www.noconnect.com/entrtn/events/mardigra/history/history.htm
http://www.tidco.co.tt/local/carnival/car7.htm
http://ipanema.com/carnival/home.htm
www.travelgrenada.com/carnival.htm

[2] See http://melanet.com/Johnkankus/ [Author's update (July, 2007): This link is now apparently broken -- try instead:
http://www.melanet.com/johnkankus/roots.html]

[3] Information based on lecture I attended given by Baba Wande Abimbola, Chief Spokesperson for Ifa in the world. (Ifa is the traditional religion of the Yoruba.)

[4] Herodotus hardly warrants a footnote, having been credited (by Europe) as the "father" of history. His "The Histories" is available in English translation from Penguin Classics (1954, 1972), with translation by Aubrey de Selincourt, which is the version on which I rely.[Author's update (July, 2007): See Book 2 online at
http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.2.ii.html.]

[5] See my article entitled "African Cosmology" in this publication: http://TheAfrican.Com/Magazine/cosmo.htm. See also "Metu Neter, vol. 1," by Ra Un Nefer Amen. And compare the Greek deities as described in http://www.mythweb.com/gods/index.html.

[6] See "African Cosmology", mentioned above, which cites Charles A. Finch, III (1991), "Echoes of the Old Darkland", p. 191

[7] See, for example, my article entitled "The Ancient Wisdom in Africa", at http://TheAfrican.Com/Magazine/MagAncWis.htm.

[8] See Cheikh Anta Diop, "African Origins of Civilization", and "Pre-Colonial Black Africa".

Today I felt the need to share this piece by brother Manu Ampim one of our great historians, critical thinkers and defenders of ourstory. Please read it and become acquainted with a side of Dr King hidden from the public record.(PBUH)

AFRICANA STUDIES

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

SUPPORTED BLACK POWER

He was one of the best of us may he rest in eternal peace. May we strive to life up to what he asked of us.

By Prof. Manu Ampim

(Excerpts from 1989 Master’s Thesis, “The Revolutionary Martin Luther King, Jr.”)

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How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to Be Afraid

By Robert Jensen

I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays, I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against Indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.

Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning.”

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.

The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?

Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).

Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.

However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.

As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.

Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Citizens of Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, published by Soft Skull Press. He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

source

Thanksgiving: First Genocide, Then Lie About It

By Mitchel Cohen

With much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh and others whose names have over the years been lost.–MC

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,, and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition 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.

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As a person of African descent with Indigenous ancestry I do not celebrate Thanksgiving and stopped doing so a very long time ago. I do celebrate the spirit of family and giving thanks to the creator for family friends and a healthy life. But that is something I do everyday. Only in American culture is a simple thing as family values commodified into something to make $$ from. I was just talking to a coworker recently about the fact the Africans are the only people known to celebrate the genocide of our own people by celebrating the holidays and ancestors of our former enslavers, kidnappers and those who commit genocide against our people even until this very day.  Hopefully this article will lay out for those who do not know what Thanksgiving is truly all about.

The Truth about The First Thanksgiving

By James W. Loewen

Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students, “When was the country we now know as the United States first settled?”

That is a generous way of putting the question. Surely “we now know as” implies that the original settlement happened before the United States. I had hoped that students would suggest 30,000 BC, or some other pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was “1620.”

Part of the problem is the word “settle.” “Settlers” were white. Indians did not settle. Nor are students the only people misled by “settle.” One recent Thanksgiving weekend, I listened as a guide at the Statue of Liberty told about European immigrants “populating a wild East Coast.” As we shall see, however, if Indians had not already settled New England, Europeans would have had a much tougher job of it.

Starting with the Pilgrims not only leaves out the Indians, but also the Spanish. In the summer of 1526 five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby Indians caused many deaths. Finally, in November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and escaped to the Indians. By now only 150 Spaniards survived, and they evacuated back to Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind. So the first non-Native settlers in “the country we now know as the United States” were Africans.

The Spanish continued their settling in 1565, when they massacred a settlement of French Protestants at St. Augustine, Florida, and replaced it with their own fort. Some Spanish were pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know that one third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been “American.” Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible impact on the West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.

Beginning with 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is now Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first permanent British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent settlers to Jamestown, Virginia. No matter. The mythic origin of “the country we now know as the United States” is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is 1620. My students are not at fault. The myth is what their testbooks and their culture have offered them. I examined how twelve textbooks used in high school American history classes teach Thanksgiving. Here is the version in one high school history book, THE AMERICAN TRADITION:

After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in December and were not prepared for the New England winter. However, they were aided by friendly Indians, who gave them food and showed them how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the colonists planted, fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter. After harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends celebrated the first Thanksgiving.

My students also learned that the Pilgrims were persecuted in England for their religion, so they moved to Holland. They sailed on the Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower Compact. Times were rough, until they met Squanto. He taught them how to put fish in each corn hill, so they had a bountiful harvest.

But when I ask them about the plague, they stare back at me. “What plague? The Black Plague?” No, that was three centuries earlier, I sigh.

“THE WONDERFUL PLAGUE AMONG THE SAVAGES”

The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. Black (or bubonic) Plague “was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind.” In three years it killed 30 percent of the population of Europe. Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the horror. Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers failed to plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself.

For a variety of reasons — their probable migration through cleansing Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or livestock-borne microbes — Americans were in Howard Simpson’s assessment “a remarkable healthy race” before Columbus. Ironically, their very health now proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes Europeans and Africans now brought them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. A plague struck that made the Black Death pale by comparison.

Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influenza are also candidates. British fishermen had been fishing off Massachusetts for decades before the Pilgrims landed. After filling their hulls with cod, they would set forth on land to get firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. On one of these expeditions they probably transmitted the illness to the people they met. Whatever it was, within three years this plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only “the twentieth person is scarce left alive,” wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many corpses, survivors fled to the next tribe, carrying the infestation with them, so that Indians died who had never seen a white person. Simpson tells what the Pilgrims saw:

The summer after the Pilgrims landed, they sent two envoys on a diplomatic mission to treat with Massasoit, a famous chief encamped some 40 miles away at what is now Warren, Rhode Island. The envoys discovered and described a scene of absolute havoc. Villages lay in ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them.

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. Europeans caught smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered, including, in a later century, the “heavily pockmarked George Washington.” Indians usually died. Therefore, almost as profound as their effect on Indian demographics was the impact of the epidemics on the two cultures, European and Indian. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, inferred that they had God on their side. John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague “miraculous.” To a friend in England in 1634, he wrote:

But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the small pox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not fifty, have put themselves under our protect….

Many Indians likewise inferred that their God had abandoned them. Cushman, our British eyewitness, reported that “those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted.” After all, neither they nor the Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian healers offered no cure, their religion no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol or began to listen to Christianity.

These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single geopolitical event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the planet. They meant that the British would face no real Indian challenge for their first fifty years in America. Indeed, the plague helped cause the legendary warm reception Plymouth enjoyed in its first formative years from the Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

Moreover, the New England plagues exemplify a process which antedated the Pilgrims and endures to this day. In 1492, more than 3,000,000 Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300 remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandan’s of North Dakota from nine villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues; a fourth of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela died in the year prior to my writing this sentence.

Europeans were never able to “settle” China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or most of Africa because too many people already lived there. Advantages in military and social technology would have enabled Europeans to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China and Africa, but not to “settle” the New World. For that, the plague was required. Thus, except for the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence was surely the most important event in the history of America.

What do we learn of all this in the twelve histories I studied? Three offer some treatment of Indian disease as a factor in European colonization. LIFE AND LIBERTY does quite a good job. AMERICA PAST AND PRESENT supplies a fine analysis of the general impact of Indian disease in American history, though it leaves out the plague at Plymouth. THE AMERICAN WAY is the only text to draw the appropriate geopolitical inference about the importance of the Plymouth outbreak, but it never discusses Indian plagues anywhere else. Unfortunately, the remaining nine books offer almost nothing. Two totally omit the subject. Each of the other seven furnishes only a fragment of a paragraph that does not even make it into the index, let alone into students’ minds.

Everyone knew all about the plague in colonial America. Even before the Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to “Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us,” for sending “this wonderful plague among the savages.” Today it is no surprise that not one in a hundred of my college students has ever heard of the plague. Unless they read LIFE AND LIBERTY or PAST AND PRESENT, no student can come away from these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact on North America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled, in short, and were then killed by disease or arms.

ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

Instead of the plague, our schoolbooks present the story of the Pilgrims as a heroic myth. Referring to “the little party” in their “small, storm-battered English vessel,” their story line follows Perry Miller’s use of a Puritan sermon title, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS. AMERICAN ADVENTURES even titles its chapter about British settlement in North America “Opening the Wilderness.” The imagery is right out of Star Trek: “to go boldly where none dared go before.”

The Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, where there already was a British settlement, according to the texts, but “violent storms blew their ship off course,” according to some texts, or else an “error in navigation” caused them to end up hundreds of miles to the north. In fact, we are not sure where the Pilgrims planned to go. According to George Willison, Pilgrim leaders never intended to settle in Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana versus Massachusetts precisely because they wanted to be far from Anglican control in Virginia. They knew quite a bit about Massachusetts, from Cape Cod’s fine fishing to that “wonderful plague.” They brought with them maps drawn by Samuel Champlain when he toured the area in 1605 and a guidebook by John Smith, who had named it “New England” when he visited in 1614. One text, LAND OF PROMISE, follows Willison, pointing out that Pilgrims numbered only about thirty-five of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower. The rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. “The New England landing came as a rude surprise for the bedraggled and tired [non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower,” says Promise. “Rumors of mutiny spread quickly.” Promise then ties this unrest to the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a uniquely fresh interpretation as to why the colonists adopted it.

Each text offers just one of three reasons—storm, pilot error, or managerial hijacking–to explain how the Pilgrims ended up in Massachusetts. Neither here nor in any other historical controversy after 1620 can any of the twelve bear to admit that it does not know the answer—that studying history is not just learning answers–that history contains debates. Thus each book shuts students out from the intellectual excitement of the discipline.

Instead, textbooks parade ethnocentric assertions about the Pilgrims as a flawless unprecedented band laying the foundations of our democracy. John Garraty presents the Compact this way in AMERICAN HISTORY: “So far as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a group of people consciously created a government where none had existed before.” Such accounts deny students the opportunity to see the Pilgrims as anything other than pious stereotypes.

“IT WAS WITH GOD’S HELP…FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?”

Settlement proceeded, not with God’s help but with the Indians’. The Pilgrims chose Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted in corn, “and a brook of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor,” in the words of TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN NATION. It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in the hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why so many town names—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield–end in “field”.

Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims’ second full day in Massachusetts. A colonist’s journal tells us:

We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God’s help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. …The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow…We also found bowls , trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again. A place “like a grave!”

More help came from a live Indian, Squanto. Here my students are on familiar turf, for they have all learned the Squanto legend. LAND OF PROMISE provides an archetypal account.

Squanto had learned their language, the author explained, from English fishermen who ventured into the New England waters each summer. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Would the small band of settlers have survived without Squanto’s help? We cannot say. But by the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).

What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned English. As a boy, along with four Penobscots, he was probably stolen by a British captain in about 1605 and taken to England. There he probably spent nine years, two in the employ of a Plymouth merchant who later helped finance the Mayflower. At length, the merchant helped him arrange passage back to Massachusetts. He was to enjoy home life for less than a year, however. In 1614, a British slave raider seized him and two dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, made his way back to England, and in 1619 talked a ship captain into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

It happens that Squanto’s fabulous odyssey provides a “hook” into the plague story, a hook that our texts choose to ignore. For now Squanto walked to his home village, only to make the horrifying discovery that, in Simpson’s words, “he was the sole member of his village still alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before.” No wonder he throws in his lot with the Pilgrims, who rename his village “Plymouth!” Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid account in LAND OF PROMISE. “He had learned their language from English fishermen.” What do we make of books that give us the unimportant details–Squanto’s name, the occupation of his enslavers–while omitting not only his enslavement, but also the crucial fact of the plague? This is distortion on a grand scale.

William Bradford praised Squanto for many services, including his “bring[ing] them to unknown places for their profit.” “Their profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. It too came from the Indians, from the fur trade; Plymouth would never have paid for itself without it. Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to “go boldly where none dared go before.|” They went to the Indians.

“TRUTH SHOULD BE HELD SACRED, AT WHATEVER COST”

Should we teach these truths about Thanksgiving? Or, like our textbooks, should we look the other way? Again quoting LAND OF PROMISE. “By the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).” Throughout the nation, elementary school children still enact Thanksgiving every fall as our national origin myth, complete with Pilgrim hats made of construction paper and Indian braves with feathers in their hair. An early Massachusetts colonist, Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, advises us not to settle for this whitewash of feel – good – history.

“It is painful to advert to these things. But our forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.”

Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even called them “Pilgrims” until the 1870s. Plymouth Rock achieved ichnographic status only in the nineteenth century, when some enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so its significance as the “holy soil” the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible. The Rock has become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a sacred text, and our textbooks play the same function as the Anglican BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, teaching us the rudiments of the civil religion of Thanksgiving.

Indians are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian guests. Thanksgiving silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the handouts that school children have carried home for decades, with captions like, “They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!” When his son brought home this “information” from his New Hampshire elementary school, Native American novelist Michael Dorris pointed out “the Pilgrims had literally never seen `such a feast,’ since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.”

I do not read Aspinwall as suggesting a “bash the Pilgrims” interpretation, emphasizing only the bad parts. I have emphasized untoward details only because our histories have suppressed everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims’ courage in setting forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year, like the Indians, they suffered from diseases. Half of them died. The Pilgrims did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its true origin as the stricken Indian villagers. Pilgrim-Indian relations began reasonably positively. Thus the antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history, but honest and inclusive history. “Knowing the truth about Thanksgiving, both its proud and its shameful motivations and history, might well benefit contemporary children,” suggests Dorris. “But the glib retelling of an ethnocentric and self-serving falsehood does no one any good.” Because Thanksgiving has roots in both Anglo and Native cultures, and because of the interracial cooperation the first celebration enshrines, Thanksgiving might yet develop into a holiday that promotes tolerance and understanding. Its emphasis on Native foods provides a teachable moment, for natives of the Americas first developed half of the world’s food crops. Texts could tell this–only three even mention Indian foods—and could also relate other contributions from Indian societies, from sports to political ideas. The original Thanksgiving itself provides an interesting example: the Natives and newcomers spent the better part of three days showing each other their various recreations.

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous. The genial omissions and false details our texts use to retail the Pilgrim legend promote Anglocentrism, which only handicaps us when dealing with all those whose culture is not Anglo. Surely, in history, “truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.”

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Bush Pens a True Crime Book

By Bill Quigley

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In his memoir (which some wise people have already moved in bookstores to the CRIME section) George W. Bush admitted that he authorized that detainees be waterboarded, tortured, a crime under US and international law.

Bush’s crime confession coincides with reports that no one will face criminal charges from the US Department of Justice for the destruction of 92 CIA videotapes which contained interrogations using waterboarding.

Where is the accountability for these crimes?

Bush and other criminals will be brought to justice if the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) have their way.

CCR and ECCHR jointly intervened into a criminal investigation in Spain examining the role of former civilian and military officials from the Bush administration in the commission of international law violations, including torture. The investigation is ongoing and includes the crimes that Bush admitted he authorized.

CCR and ECCHR made it clear that they are committed to pursuing criminal accountability and Bush’s confessions help. In a joint statement they said:

“As Attorney General Eric Holder stated during his confirmation hearings, waterboarding is torture. Calling these acts what they are, torture, is not the result of differing legal ‘opinion,’ as Bush states; it is a matter of law. Harold Koh, the State Department Legal Adviser, confirmed this in Geneva last week, stating during the U.S. Universal Periodic Review that “the Obama administration defines waterboarding as torture as a matter of law” and it is not a ‘policy choice.’

“There are no circumstances or excuses—including ‘national security’—under domestic and international law that allow for the use of torture. And there is an obligation to investigate and prosecute torture.

“Bush’s decision to authorize torture and other illegal acts against detainees held in U.S. custody led to the use of torture at Guantánamo, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in secret prisons by U.S. forces, and contractors, certain allies and the national forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. His decision led to Abu Ghraib.

“Debates as to whether or not waterboarding of detainees led to intelligence or make the nation ‘safer’ are not relevant questions. The only valid question is: can we torture? The answer is no.

“Without accountability it is impossible to ensure that such actions are never authorized by any future president or other U.S. official. No immunity protects Bush from prosecution for acts which violate federal and international law. The Pinochet precedent demonstrates that the law eventually catches up with former presidents—even those who flout their impunity.

“Bush states that accountability ‘would set a terrible precedent for our democracy.’

“We answer that not doing so is failing our democracy—yet again. We therefore urge the Obama administration and the Department of Justice to act upon their recognition that waterboarding is torture as a matter of law, to investigate and prosecute acts of torture and other serious violations carried out by officials of the former administration, including George W. Bush.

“But we will not wait any longer for the Obama administration to act—we will continue seeking justice and accountability under the principle of universal jurisdiction and as counsel in the ongoing investigation in Spain.”

Sell those books, George W, you may need the money for legal fees yet!

Click here for more information on CCR’s work towards accountability.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at

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The Art of Mehendi

By Phoolo Danny-Maharaj South Bureau

Oldest High-Altitude Settlements Discovered

Oct. 1, 2010 — Researchers have unearthed the remains of about six camps, including fragments of stone tools and food, in an area near the town of Kokoda. Te settlements are at about 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) and believed to be the oldest evidence of our human ancestors, Homo sapiens, inhabiting a high-altitude environment.

The world’s oldest known high-altitude human settlements, dating back up to 49,000 years, have been found sealed in volcanic ash in Papua New Guinea mountains, archaeologists said Friday.

Researchers have unearthed the remains of about six camps, including fragments of stone tools and food, in an area near the town of Kokoda, said an archaeologist on the team, Andrew Fairbairn.

“What we’ve got there are basically a series of campsites, that’s what they look like anyway. The remains of fires, stone tools, that kind of thing, on ridgetops,” the University of Queensland academic told AFP. “It’s not like a village or anything like that, they are these campsite areas that have been repeatedly used.”

Fairbairn said the settlements are at about 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) and believed to be the oldest evidence of our human ancestors, Homo sapiens, inhabiting a high-altitude environment.

“For Homo sapiens, this is the earliest for us, for modern humans,” he said. “The nearest after this is round about 30,000 years ago in Tibet, and there’s some in the Ethiopian highlands at around about the same type of age.”

Fairbairn said he had been shocked to discover the age of the finds, using radio carbon dating, because this suggested humans had been living in the cold, wet and inhospitable highlands at the height of the last Ice Age.

“We didn’t expect to find anything of that early age,” he said.

The findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that the prehistoric highlanders of Papua New Guinea’s Ivane Valley in the Owen Stanley Range Mountain made stone tools, hunted small animals and ate yams and nuts.

But why they chose to dwell in the harsh conditions of the highlands, where temperatures would have dipped below freezing, rather than remain in the warmer coastal areas, remains a mystery.

“Papua New Guinea’s mountains have long held surprises for the scientific community and here is another one — maybe they were the home of Homo sapiens‘ earliest mountaineers,” Fairbairn said.

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African Presence in the Americas before Columbus

Traditionally history had been taught from a eurocentric point of view. The reason is the content of education, textbooks, religious teachings and the Bible itself had been controlled for 500 years by Europeans. Sometimes this point of view obscures reality. There were some recent finds which might indicate an error in our translation of history. Sometimes we are so reluctant to change our way of thinking that we need overwhelming evidence, far beyond a reasonable doubt. This article will attempt to lay the foundation for African presence in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, not as slaves, but as explorers and traders and they were even leaders who helped to build the Olmec civilization. click image