@jeanne-mayell When you stop and think of how they purposely traded small pox ridden blankets and other worthless trinkets and killed without remorse - you know instinctively that Native Americans had no reason to celebrate when their kindness was returned with scorn and greed.

There are several Eagle's songs that touch me including, "The Last Resort".

@paul-w Paul, I never noticed those lyrics. Thank you. I love the Eagles. The Heart of the Matter haunts me and fills me up, it goes so deep.

I feel the ancient people here on this land.

Back in 1989, when I was first giving readings and had placed a tiny classified ad in a local magazine for my services, a student from the Harvard Crimson magazine called and asked me for predictions for the Massachusetts economy for the 1990's.  It was the first time I ever thought about reading an economy.  I decided I could just think of Massachusetts as a person and read it's economic future. 

But when I closed my eyes and focused on this person who was Massachusetts, I had a startling surprise. The spirit of this land appeared to me as a Native American man with feathers in his hair. I knew about the Wampanoag tribe that had lived here. 

It wasn't just that I saw them. It was the energy behind the man, the power.  He was more present here than the white people who presently live here. 

If you take a family heirloom or any antique and hold it in your hands and close your eyes and meditate on it, you may begin to see images of those who had owned that object. It's an exciting practice that I have done many time with students. We will do it in my upcoming class Become Deeply Intuitive.  It works especially well when we do it as a group. The energy of those who handled that object is still there. Their lives and thoughts are all still connected to that object. 

So imagine for a minute that it you were to hold the land upon which you live your hands, as I was imagining myself doing that night that I was trying to read Massachusetts, what might you see? I realized when I saw that Wampanoag man, that while we Europeans have lived here for four hundred years, they've lived here for 10,000. 

No they are not gone. Not only are their descendants still here, but the original people are here too. Their consciousness is here, and we can learn from them if we listen.

A couple of years ago I read the book "Mayflower" by historian Nathaniel Philbrick (published 2006). I think this is the most thorough and balanced account of the Plymouth colony I have ever run across.  There were "good guys" and "bad guys" on both sides of the situation.  The original religious group were indeed looking for a place to freely practice their religion (they were chased out of England and into the Netherlands before coming to America), but they did end up sailing with some other people who were more mercenary in their goals. 

One thing I did not know until I read the book was that the population of the native people in coastal New England had  been decimated by European diseases brought by French and English fishing fleets--- even before the Europeans established permanent settlements.  The Mayflower settlers found "ghost towns" --- Native settlements abandoned because of depopulation.  There were vacant houses, cleared fields (some still with crops hanging on), and caches of grain. According to the book, they took the grain to keep from starving, but upon realizing that some of the Native owners were actually planning to come back for it, they agreed to reimburse them. The general gist of the book is that the pilgrims were at first respectful to the Natives and negotiated with them, and the Natives were generally agreeable, but this broke down on account of combinations of miscommunication and greed (mainly from the more secular of the English).  And then of course, more and more English came after, many looking to get rich, and simply taking what they wanted.    It's a sad tale.   Like refugees today, the pilgrims were looking for a decent, peaceful life,  They were not after riches like the Spanish conquistadors or Sir Walter Raleigh.  I do not think the original "pilgrim" group deserves to be demonized.  The potential was there for them to live peaceful lives on depopulated land.  Greed and fear messed everything up, as it usually does. 

@unk-p,  I did not know that. Would it be too late to make a pumpkin pie for Christmas? I am going to do that. Kind of a Black Lives Matter pie.

@jeanne-mayell it's never too late for pie ? 

I was going through my reading list of web pages I had bookmarked on my computer, some several years old, and I came across this:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-11-27/lyla-june-on-the-truth-of-thanksgiving/

It's a video/article by Lyla June, a Native scholar, telling the story of Thanksgiving from an indigenous perspective. It's shot at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts.

@coyote Thanks for the Lyla June article.  It's is counter to everything we have been taught that Thanksgiving might have been officially declared for a successful massacre:

"A really important thing too, is that in 1637, when you have the governor of the Massachusetts colony, John Winthrop — this is only 16 years after the supposed Pilgrim feast with the native people — he declared the first day of Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t for what we think it was. It was actually after the massacre of hundreds of Pequot people down in Connecticut. And the Thanksgiving feast was to thank God that all of his soldiers had returned from this massacre. They massacred hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children. So we have to understand that the colonies here in Massachusetts were not peaceful. They were colonial. They were fearful and they were aggressive and they harmed many, many, many indigenous peoples. And that’s really, really important for us to understand so that we don’t rose-tint the history that we stand on." -- Lyla Lune. 

And then of course that Pocahontas was not happily in love with John Smith since she was a 12 year old child who had no choice about marrying him and going to England where she died in England of disease.

@coyote @unk-p @ana @Paul-W @journeywithme2 Thanks for posting in this little thread. I have learned so much from each of you.  Paul-W, your Eagle's line got me spending a half hour catching up with Don Henley's career and hearing him twice singing The Heart of the Matter which is one of my all time favorite songs. 

Kisha James is the young Wampanoag woman in my town who gave that talk and her grandfather was the person who founded TG as the Day of Mourning.  I still haven't found a link to her talk but I have  included the link to an article she wrote. She had interrupted her studies at Wellesley College to speak to our town leaders and help us   get Columbus Day changed to Indigenous People's Day last year. 

Here are some books recommended by the Wampanoag members of our community:

The author of the incredible presentation I heard on zoom was Kisha James who has a link here to an NPR interview she did. Her grandfather's landmark speech is the top link. 

On the history of Thanksgiving and National Day of Mourning:

The Suppressed Speech of Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, Wampanoag - United American Indians of New England 

Kisha James on WBUR - For Native Peoples, Thanksgiving Isn’t A Celebration. It’s A National Day Of Mourning  

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

This Land is Their Land by David Silverman 

The writings of William B. Newell

The works of Richard Drinnon 

@ana Thanks for pointing out the book The Mayflower by Philbrick which I have not read. I read some reviews and sent it to the Indigenous People's Day group I joined last year for their thoughts. So far I haven't found someone who has read it. But one person who is not Wampanoag or indigenous, but is a person of color, got back to me with this: 

Posted by: @jeanne-mayell

@ana Thanks for pointing out the book The Mayflower by Philbrick which I have not read. I read some reviews and sent it to the Indigenous People's Day group I joined last year for their thoughts. So far I haven't found someone who has read it. But one person who is not Wampanoag or indigenous, but is a person of color, got back to me with this: 

"I've been thinking about this for a bit and also am struggling with a response, in particular a response that doesn't start a series of counter narratives.  I could imagine the pilgrims willing to venture beyond their homelands in search of a "decent and peaceful life" but that does not absolve them of colonizing Indigenous land. I would also not equate pilgrims to refugees who migrate to new land in search of a peaceful life, as refugees generally assimilate to the place they migrate to, and certainly don't colonize it. The line of reasoning here kind of reminds me of the argument that Christoper Columbus wasn't such a bad guy, and was only a man of his time. Whereas in this case, the line of reasoning seems to hinge on the premise that the pilgrims didn't mean any harm nor did they intend to take land and resources from Indigenous people, but it so happens to be the case that they did." 

 

I don't want to start a series of counter-narratives either... esp. with those who haven't read Philbrick's account.  

 Just one thought, though:  I think if one is going to judge another person's actions, the person's intentions should be taken into account.  When it comes to intent, I don't see much in common with Columbus (intent: obtain wealth, glory, honor, and bonus! slaves ? ) and the original 1620 Mayflower group (intent: live mundane lives without being persecuted for their (admittedly cultish) religious beliefs). 

Well, one more generalized thought from a Libran mind: Indeed, sometimes relatively innocent intentions do end up having nasty results ("the road to hell is paved with good intentions").  Ignorance can be dangerous and can lead to evil outcomes, but ignorance itself is not inherently evil. Maya Angelou's statement " ...when you know better, (you) do better" applies to most people, or at least I like to believe so.  

@ana Good point. Maybe I shouldn't have passed along his comments and just waited to read it myself. For that I apologize. I have ordered the book from my library, and look forward to reading it. I did notice that one of the main criticisms when I read up on it,  when it came out,  was from people who said it was too pro-Native American. So that must mean something regarding your thought that it was the most balanced account you had read.