History

Thanksgiving: Countries Are Built Both on Myth and Reality

This engraving, depicting a scene from the Pequot War, shows a militia as they attack and ultimately set fire to an encampment that belonged to the Pequots, in what became Mystic, Conn., 1637. Bettmann

By Pamela Nagler
Published 11/21/2022 12:00 Am PST
Updated 11/22/2022 9:41 Am PST

Whereas Columbus’ so-called ‘discovery’ of America has become our nation’s creation myth, a feast between Pilgrims and Native Americans has become our nation’s covenant myth. We repeat it, reenact it, celebrate it as Thanksgiving because it tells us that there was some kind of tacit agreement between Indigenous nations and the English colonists, though this is not the truth.

The true story of Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower and the Pilgrims began a few years before they arrived in 1620. Previous to colonization, European fisherman, explorers and slave traders had already visited the continent’s east coast. The true story of the European invasion did not begin as a story of fellowship, but rather a story of captivity and plague. 

Before Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, English enslavers had kidnapped Squanto, actually named Tisquantum, a Paxtuxet Native from the region. They took him and a handful of others to England to labor and be viewed as an oddity. While in Europe, a disease killed his people - likely imported by the Europeans - possibly smallpox or a parasitic disease brought by the rats that the Europeans brought with them. When Tisquantum returned to his homeland, he returned to find that his entire population of his village were dead, and that he was the last living Paxtuxet.

Tisquantum became extremely important for the Pilgrims - along with the Wampanoag. It is unlikely that the Pilgrims could have survived without the support of him along with the support of the Wampanoag nation. Tisquantum surprised the Pilgrims with his ability to speak English, and he quickly became their ally, serving as their guide, interpreter and teacher. He taught them how to plant corn with fish for manure. He taught them the best locations to catch fish, and guided them to other sites that helped them survive. He helped them trade with other indigenous peoples.

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean had been rough for the Pilgrims. On the way, they became sick with various diseases, including scurvy. Less than half survived, and only four women. Though they landed in late fall, most did not emerge from the ship until March. Those who could, took care of the sick. 

The Pilgrims had few good reports to send back to England.
However, about a year after the Mayflower landed, in December of 1621, Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow submitted a brief report of a feast between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to their investors, the London Company, back in England:

“And God be praised, we had a good increase . . . Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling; that so we might, after a more special manner, rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four, in one day, killed as much fowl as, with a little help besides, served the Company almost a week. 

 At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our Arms; many of the Indians coming amongst us. ‘And amongst the rest, their greatest King, Massasoyt, with some ninety men; whom, for three days, we entertained and feasted. And they went out, and killed five deer: which they brought to the Plantation; and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain, and others . . . These things I thought good to let you understand . . . that you might on our behalf give God thanks who hath dealt so favourably with us.” Hanc

There were clear motives behind Winslow’s description of a bountiful harvest, a successful hunt and a three-day feast with friendly Indians. It was embedded in a report to convince investors back in England that the Colony was a worthy investment in spite of the many, dismal reports of sickness, death and hardship.

However, this momentary peaceful event belies the truth. Relations between the Indigenous people of this region and the Pilgrims quickly disintegrated into fierce and extirpative warfare that set the stage for even more extirpative warfare in the future.

Shortly after this feast, the Pilgrims began constructing a palisade for self-defense against the Native Americans. By February of 1622, the colonists had constructed a stockade eight feet high and twenty-seven hundred feet long that ringed their entire settlement that they had built on top of the hill. In the next year, they expanded this fort, adding six cannons. 

That year, 1623, the Pilgrims heard rumors that their Native American neighbors planned to attack them, so they attacked first. They invited the Massachusett men to a “peaceful summit,” and proceeded to ambush, poison and murder them. The Pilgrims cut off one of the warrior’s heads, and brought it back to their fort for public display, along with a flag drenched in “Indian blood.”

In 1630, even more English colonists arrived - a whole different group of Puritans - and not long after, in 1636, war, the Pequot War, broke out between the newly-arrived and the Native Americans.

Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford wrote about a major battle within  this war, the Mystic Massacre, in which few indigenous people escaped. Some 400 -700 Native Americans were  either roasted in a fire that the Pilgrims set, or they were hacked by swords:

“Those that scraped [escaped] the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw [run through] with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escapted. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. 

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.” 114, Stannard

In spite of the sheer numbers of murdered Natives, the rivers of blood and the stench, Mayor Governor Bradford considered it a “sweet sacrifice.”

After this, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop reported: “There was a day of Thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequot, and other mercies.” 123, Winthrop

In England, thanksgivings were somber days of prayer, fasting and private reflection - in New England, the Puritans often called thanksgivings to commemorate massacres and the mass murder of Indigenous people.

To the South, the Dutch learned from the Puritans about both massacre and taking body parts as trophies, and in 1643, the Dutch Governor Willem Kieft of the village of Manhattan, New York, ordered the massacre of the Wappinger People, a previously friendly tribe. The Dutch killed 80. Afterwards, they kicked around their severed heads like soccer balls on the village streets. One Native was castrated, skinned, and then forced to eat his own flesh, while the Dutch watched and laughed. 

In 1675, the Puritans launched another war - King Philip's War. The Pequot War had been more of a local action, but King Philip’s War involved the entire region and various Indigenous nations. It  is still considered the bloodiest war per capita in US history. It was never certain that the Puritans would win, but on June 20, 1676 the Puritans governing council held a meeting to determine a way to “express thanks for the victories in War with the Heathen Natives.” They proclaimed June 29 a "day of public thanksgiving,” saying, "there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled.”

Later, in 1704, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Thomas Dudley declared a “General Thanksgiving for God’s infinite goodness to extend his favors . . . In defeating and disappointing . . . the expeditions of the Enemy Indians against us. And the good Success given us against them, by delivering so many of them into our hands.” Overdine

Some eighty years later, in the late 1780s, when things looked bleak for the rebel forces who fought against the English, General George Washington sent out a plea to all that “supported the cause of Freedom” for a day of prayer and thanksgiving to rally everyone’s spirits. The Revolutionary War was also a war against Native Americans and thanksgivings came fast and furious after the Europeans and the English colonists waged war against them. Massacres were coming around with such frequency that, as President, Washington consolidated them into a single day, and in 1789, he proclaimed November 26th to be observed annually as a Day of Thanksgiving. 

Not all the states observed it, and neither did the Presidents who succeeded him, but to offset the bleak days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln revived the tradition. Struggling to unite his divided country, Lincoln declared a national day of Thanksgiving. This time, the other Presidents followed.

1960s Black family at dining table with turkey saying grace praying.

Some 40 years after President Lincoln’s Proclamation to celebrate Thanksgiving, US satirist, Mark Twain commented in his article, The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger, how odd it was to designate a day to celebrate the Native American genocide:

“Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that . . . the exterminating had ceased to become mutual, and was all on the white man’s side, hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it, and to extend the usual annual compliments.”

LINKS

Hanc, John. The Plymouth Hero You Should Really Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving: Without Edward Winslow, we probably wouldn’t even be celebrating the holiday. Smithsonian Magazine November 21, 2016.

Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Winthrop, John. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.


STILL HERE - “Ehkwashim!”

Text Pamela Nagler
Photography Julian Lucas
Published Dec 6, 2021 9:52am PST

The Original People of the Los Angeles Basin & the Channel Islands (4,000 square miles). The Los Angeles Basin has always been well-populated. Sometimes we fall into a habit of thinking that the Native people who lived here, before the Spanish, Mexicans, U.S. citizens came, were few, primitive, isolated and without technology, but nothing is farther from the truth.  

The Los Angeles Basin was heavily populated then, just as it was now - and the people who lived here were well-connected to each other through trade and culture that extended westward to the islands (they were navigators who negotiated the sea in plank canoes) and westward to the American Southwest and up into the northern regions and south to Mexico and Baja California.

There was an extensive network of trails - just as there’s an incredible network of highways and roads and freeways today. There is also a widely circulated belief that the people of the Los Angeles basin are extinct, but this is simply not true - they are still here, living and working amongst us - some 4,000.

The indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin lived in a patchwork or mosaic of ecosystems - a few miles to the South, it was desert; to the east it was mountains; to the west, it was ocean. Ten miles one way or another, people spoke slightly differently, harvested somewhat differently, hunted in different places, celebrated somewhat differently - according to their environment and customs. This is not so different from the towns and cities that dot Southern California’s landscape today.

Living in 100 or so villages or rancherias of 100 people or so, the original people had no name in common for the 5,000 who lived here, but they had names for other people who lived elsewhere - mountain people, desert people, coastal people - but those who inhabited these rich river valleys fed by rivers and springs from the mountains, self-identified by their village or rancheria rather than their linguistic group.

Make no mistake - this area was not a desert until we made it one. The story of the original ones who lived here is the story of rivers where the foliage was so dense, a squirrel could hop from tree to tree from Los Angeles to Long Beach and never touch ground. Families would wake in the morning and bathe in the river, warming themselves by the fire as they combed their hair and prepared for the day.

In the case of those who lived in Pomona, they called themselves Toybipet, the inhabitants of Toybingna - located nearby were the rancherias of Cucamonga and Asuksangna (Azusa).  On the Pomona High School campus, there is a graveyard for 118 bodies buried at what’s called the Palomares Cemetery. In 1837, Californio Ygnacio Palomares received a Mexican land grant for Mission San Gabriel’s Rancho San Jose - a vast cattle ranch. Palomares Adobe, located nearby, was located right next to a Native rancheria because that’s what the Spanish/Mexican colonists did, locate their rancho near a Native rancheria so they could take advantage of Native labor. When Ygnacio Palomares arrived, he reportedly said that the valley was filled with Natives.

Courtesy of Julian Lucas 2021

Since 2006, four organizations have claimed to represent the people of the Los Angeles basin: the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe, the Kizh Nation (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians); and the Gabrieleño/Tongva Tribal Council. Tongva comes from an Gabrielino informant at the turn of the last century. Kizh means ‘people of the willow houses.’ Gabrielino refers to the fact that they were descendants of those who lived at the Mission at San Gabriel. 

In recent years, the state of California has broadened its History-Social Studies framework to include more information about Native Californians - how they lived before colonization, how they were affected by the arrival of settlers, and how it is important that California public schools teach that missions were “sites of conflict, conquest and forced labor.”

The people of the Los Angeles Basin never ceded their land to Spain, to Mexico, to the U.S. We live and work and play on their ancestral lands.

Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

Rape & the Conquest

Photography Julian Lucas 2014

Photography Julian Lucas 2014

Text Pamela Nagler
Photography Julian Lucas

“In the United States, violence against indigenous women has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence. Alaska Native women continue to suffer the highest rate of forcible sexual assault and have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States. Though available data is limited, the number of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and the lack of a diligent and adequate federal response is extremely alarming to indigenous women, tribal governments, and communities. On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average.”

  • Indian Law Resource Center

The Conquests did not introduce rape to the regions, but they did introduce rape on a scale not seen before. The Spanish Conquest of California, as it was elsewhere in the Americas, was a masculine conquest and sexual assault having very much to do with it. Rape, sexual assault, was systemic to the Conquest.

The European invaders in the Americas believed that not just the lands, but the people, were there for the taking. It was not just about taking possession of the land, but about taking possession of indigenous bodies as well. Explorers, conquistadors, soldiers, sailors and Padres alike believed that the Americas and the Amerindians simply waited in ‘darkness’ and ‘ignorance’ for them to claim possession. In order to do so, the conquistador arrived with shiploads of weapons and strategies to gain the supremacy that they thought they deserved. Rape - sexual assault - was just one of these strategies.

Rarely did the conquistadors bring their own women. Women were there to be ‘acquired’ along the way, and this kind of thinking permeated everything the conquerors did. They routinely evaluated the lands they encountered as barren or fertile, placing value on the territories as to their usefulness for themselves. They routinely enslaved the peoples they encountered to serve their needs, and they subjugated women by sexually assaulting them.

In the early days in Alta California, it was customary for the explorers and invaders to describe the inhabitants as “quiet” and “tractable” - a projection of what they hoped for. When things did not go well, they instead described them as ‘hostile savages’ (though sometimes, they called them this even when things were going well). Integral to their evaluation of indigenous peoples was whether or not they could be subjugated, and how easily. 

On their explorations, sea captains and land explorers routinely kidnapped or “took” natives to serve as servants or translators - and they also routinely raped the women. Later, when the soldiers arrived to invade, occupy and colonize the Californias, they not only conscripted anyone they could to labor for them, but they raped the women or “took” them as concubines. It was part of the formula. Contemporary historian Virginia M. Bouvier describes that, in California, the indigenous people faced an “explosive sexuality” from their Spanish invaders. 

It is common to think of rape as a single horrible, ‘intimate’ action between an aggressor and his single victim, but rape in California had a scale of its own. It was multiplied hundreds of times by the soldiery. It was not just a single terrible act of aggression against one woman, but the symbolic castration of the men connected with the women. The physical ramifications of the assaults went beyond a single violent act. The rapes restricted mobility and the inhabitants of a rancheria’s ability to procure food. These assaults set up a cycle of fear and hatred, with retaliations resulting in casualties. The indigenous men who struggled to defend the women often wound up dead. In the end, rape became an act against the entire community, leading to the subjugation of everyone. 

Rape was both physical violence and psychological warfare, and it enabled the conquerors to gain territory and loyal subjects for the Crown.

In Las Californias, in both Baja and Alta California, these predatory soldiers were responsible for the spread of syphilis, ‘mal galico,’ throughout the indigenous communities. Disease became just one more way that the revolution was won against them. Syphilis, if it did not kill outright, weakened them, made the people more susceptible to other diseases, living as they were in the unsanitary conditions they endured in the missions, enduring the maltreatment of the Spaniards which included the systematic use of torture and incarceration.

Spanish soldiers, trained for war, trained to kill Indians, trained in the belief of their racial and cultural superiority, raped. They considered both sexual violence and exploitation as the ‘spoils of war’ - something deserved as a consequence for their service as soldiers. At times, they raped because they were bored. They raped for sport. They raped because they could. Their duties as soldiers did not occupy all of their time. Rape became a crime of opportunity. The conquering males, isolated, without their wives, mothers, sisters, cousins, took advantage of their circumstances. Sexual conquest was part of the language of the Conquest and It was fed by a literature and philosophy that promoted race and gender supremacy while romanticizing the vanquishing and the ‘taking.’ The conquistadors - the military and the missionaries - took advantage of the fact that In the Spanish patriarchal casta system in the Americas, indigenous women ranked on the lowest rung on the race, gender, socio-economic ladder.

And while the Spanish Crown, the Spanish government did not officially sanction rape, the officials expected it, anticipated it, and whatever they said about it, they lacked the will or the means to stop it. Tacitly, they recognized that it furthered their goals of  reduccion - of dislocating people from their ancestral lands and placing them in mission compounds modeled on Spanish townships as a means to turning them into loyal, tax-paying citizens for the Crown.

The Franciscan Fathers in California certainly railed against the multitude of sexual abuses. They considered each rape an act against God, but there was also some self-interest in their protestations. They recognized that the rapes were detrimental to their effort to convert California. In the end, however, no matter how much they railed against it, the Fathers had little effect in either stopping or curtailing the widespread, systemic abuse, and they remained complicit because they relied on the military to sustain the mission institutions that they valued so much.

The California military governors only half-heartedly placed any sanctions whatsoever on their own troops. Punishments were few and arbitrary, haphazard, and, in the end, ineffective in curbing the violence. It was a soldiers’ job was to terrorize and control, and the military and government officials simply recognized the efficacy of sexual violence - rape carved out space for them to take possession of the territories and coerce the people into Spanish compliance.

Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

LINKS