Take the day off, pilgrim
Heather Cox Richardson provides a thumbnail sketch of how today became a national holiday. You can read that in full here. This Thanksgiving, Europeans can have the day off. I’d like to spend a little time with the Wampanoag, the People of the First Light.
Historian David Silverman introduced them inThe Atlantic thusly in 2019:
In the familiar American account of the first Thanksgiving, in 1621, the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth were pious English refugees, one of many boatloads of Europeans who fled the tyranny of the Old World to become a liberty-loving people in the New World. The Indians whom they encountered (rarely identified by tribe) overcame their caution and proved to be friendly (a term requiring no explanation). Their chief, Massasoit, was a magnanimous host who took pity on the bedraggled strangers, taught them how to plant corn and where to fish, and thereby helped them survive their first harsh winters in America. Like Pocahontas and Sacagawea, two of the other famous Indians in American lore, Massassoit’s people helped the colonizers and then moved offstage.
Contrary to the Thanksgiving myth, though, friendliness does not account for the alliance the Wampanoag tribe made with the nascent Plymouth settlement. The Wampanoags had an internal politics all their own; its dynamics had been shaped by many years of tense interaction with Europeans, and by deadly plagues that ravaged the tribe’s home region as the pace of English exploration accelerated. Chief Massassoit—whom historians today generally refer to as the sachem Ousamequin—faced stiff opposition from his own people as he tried to manage the English newcomers and looked for ways to survive the forces of colonization already tearing at the Wampanoags.
The pesky English immigrants did not take the Wampanoags’ jobs but they did swiftly move them “offstage.” But not before a lot of bitter politics and plague.
Here, briefly, is how the remaining Wampanoags of Noepe introduce their own story:
The last great North American glacier began its retreat some 10,000 years ago, leaving behind the accumulation of boulders, sand, and clay that is now known as Martha’s Vineyard. There, it is said, a benevolent being named Moshup roamed the land. One day, Moshup was making his way across the mainland to the headlands of the Aquinnah Cliffs. Weary from his journey, Moshup dragged his foot heavily, leaving a deep track in the mud. At first, only a silver thread of water trickled in the track. But gradually, the ocean’s force of wind and tides broadened and deepened the opening, creating an island named Noepe. The Wampanoag were the first people of Noepe.
The ancestors of Wampanoag people have lived for at least 10,000 years at Aquinnah (Gay Head) and throughout the island of Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard), pursuing a traditional economy based on fishing and agriculture. The Aquinnah Wampanoag share the belief that the giant Moshup created Noepe and the neighboring islands, taught our people how to fish and to catch whales, and still presides over our destinies. Our beliefs and a hundred million years of history are imprinted in the colorful clay cliffs of Aquinnah.
For over ten thousand years the Wampanoag have inhabited the island of Noepe. When the first Europeans dropped anchor off our shores in the 1500s – just before the Pilgrims – we numbered three thousand or more. To this day we still occupy our aboriginal land of Aquinnah and count 901 members, about 300 of whom live on the Island.
The Wampanoag Nation once included all of Southeastern Massachusetts and Eastern Rhode Island, encompassing over 67 distinct tribal communities. The Wampanoag people have undergone a very difficult history after assisting pilgrims in the early 1600s. With the European settlers came much adversity for our tribe – disease that virtually wiped out whole villages, systems of government that bore little resemblance to our tribal practices and values, missionaries intent on converting us to Christianity, and private models of land use and ownership that conflicted with our tribe’s own communal practices and values. The vast majority of these tribal communities were killed in battles initiated by colonists to secure land. Today, only six visible tribal communities remain. Mashpee and Aquinnah have maintained physical and cultural presence on their ancestral homelands. Linking these tribal communities through preservation efforts is essential for survival of the many cultural arts and traditions at risk of being lost.
Nevertheless, they persisted.
Three years ago, the Mashpee Wampanoag secured “substantial control of roughly 320 acres around Cape Cod.” Donald Trump’s administration ordered the land first placed in trust by the Obama administration removed from that protection, the Washington Post reported. A federal judge blocked the move. Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, withdrew the government’s appeal held over from the Trump administration.
Hundreds of years later, may we, the pilgrims’ ancestors, also persist. It’s looking to be a rough winter. Perhaps not as rough as those of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. Yet amidst a devastating civil war, he declared the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
Richardson concludes:
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And in 1865, at least, they won.
May we as well and, like the Wampanoag, survive what’s coming.
Happy Thanksgiving.