Cooking the History Books: The Thanksgiving Massacre

Because the conquerors write the history books?

The winners always get to write the stories, mostly because their opponents are dead or so few of them survived. Who you gonna believe 10,000 pilgrims or a handful of Pequot survivors?

Powerisknowledge:

I was saying that the information is disputable. The description in this article --about a holiday that celebrates according to the Pequot information--which is about the Pequot's and the European paints a picture that the Pequot today do not support. There is also not real context to explain the Pequot people. I feel that the article portays the Pequot as defenseless victims and I think that does a disservice to the Pequot and to history-- I really don't see how it has that much to do with the Lakotah. And I don't think that all Native Peoples are the same -and this seems to really blur the lines.

I think this article takes one thing that did happen where there was a compassionate coming together--even if warily and adds other events that are not included in the current hoiiday even as celebrated by the Pequot.

If we are going to "fill in " the historical gaps? We need to fill it in on both sides. The Pequot were actually known as "the destroyers" (their name means that) and they certainly were no weakling victims slaughtered by Europeans. I think that is insulting to all indigenous and first nation people everywhere for a variety of reasons.

A couple of thoughts:

What people today think of what happened then should not matter. Today's witches might not be angry, hurt or alarmed by what happened to witches in Salem a couple of centuries ago, but we should still learn about the events and not just from the white male Christian POV. By stating they're fine with it, thus it should not be addressed in history books, you are denying the rest of us the right to hear the truth.

As to the Pequot, I haven't seen anyone say history should be written with glossed-over words about them or their actions prior to, during or after the slaughter. However, what they were like or what they did should not be formed from a purely white Christian male POV. That would defeat the entire purpose of rewriting it.

I really don't see how it has that much to do with the Lakotah

So being a Lakotah automatically disqualifies them from having an opinion on this historical whitewash? How about me? I wasn't there. I'm not of Pequot heritage. I'm also not descended from the Pilgrims. Does that mean I should not be heard either? Because I'm not a witch, I should also not be able to state I want our history books to contain the complete truth about the murders of witches in Salem?

How far does this denial go? Since the people who are writing the history books were not Pilgrims or Pequot, then perhaps they should be denied the right to write the history books at all. Since none of us sailed with Columbus, he should be left out of history, right?

they certainly were no weakling victims slaughtered by Europeans

So the slaughter of children via being burned or hacked to death should not be considered the slaughter of the weak and defenseless?

How about when the Mormons slaughtered the wagon train at Mountain Meadows, including the children?

How about the Hebrews in the OT slaughtering babes by dashing their heads against rocks and ripping open the wombs of pregnant women?

How about the children who died in the Towers on 9/11?

Just where do we draw the line and say, well, those children weren't weak and defenseless, so their slaughter was legitimate?

So being a Lakotah automatically disqualifies them from having an opinion on this historical whitewash? How about me? I wasn't there. I'm not of Pequot heritage. I'm also not descended from the Pilgrims. Does that mean I should not be heard either? Because I'm not a witch, I should also not be able to state I want our history books to contain the complete truth about the murders of witches in Salem

No , I was responding to this:

are the "Indians" even acknowledged by a tribe? No, because everyone assumes "Indians" are the same. So, who were these Indians in 1621?

and this .-

Who you gonna believe 10,000 pilgrims or a handful of Pequot survivors?

to which I linked a link to the Pequot Museum Website and to their version of what they do and don't celebrate.

And what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Not all white people are the same either--there are different tribes of white people as well. My wife's ancestry is indigenous first nation and is blond and green and blued eyed and were also persecuted by the middle eastern relgions, but that doesn't qualify her or anybody else to speak for the Pequot. The Pequots were also really misrepresented in this article in my opinion and I find the noble , victimized primitive picture to be equally degrading and ridiculous.

As to the Pequot, I haven't seen anyone say history should be written with glossed-over words about them or their actions prior to, during or after the slaughter. However, what they were like or what they did should not be formed from a purely white Christian male POV. That would defeat the entire purpose of rewriting it

The Pequot were painted in this article to look as if they were outsmarted and held rancor against the white people they clashed with. This was not ever proven and from their own website this was not the case. They were a very violent warrior tribe who were named "The Destroyers{ by themselves and East Coast Native rivals who revered and HATED and feared them for their massacres of other native peoples. Other native peoples helped the whites attack the Pequot because they had been being constantly victimized by them.

Cultures clash. The winners write the immediate history, but this has been fleshed out for a long time now and not all native Americans feel the same way. Some chose to celebrate the 1621 coming together in different terms , that are probably as difficult and fearful, but less cynical

. I want our history books to contain the complete truth

Me too and I have seen enough revisionism on all sides to choke the Thanksgiving Turkey.

Think of the hurt and disrespect Native Americans feel.

Many Native Americans feel pride in the 1621 meeting and do NOT feel this way, I think revisionism and speculation with an agenda to promoting racism and hatred , not a search for truth fans those flames. I think there is in some a blood lust for violence that transcends all history. HIS being the operative part of that word here."

In 1621, Pilgrims did have a feast but it was not repeated years thereafter.

Just because people choose to take the positive doesn't mean they don't "get it" that what happened to the native AMericans was overall a terrible crime. It just means that the part they want to celebrate was not. Nelson Mandela was the master of understanding this along with the dalai lama. I don't think it is an obscure point.

It seems that writers of history omit anything that casts the Pilgrims in a bad light. I wonder why that is?

Its not omitted. It is everywhere. It just isn't in this celebration of a coming together unless you want it to be. Like the story where the Germans and Allies came together Christmas Eve, story or reality is something to be celebrated, but doesn't excuse the rest of the war.

Pilgrims perceived Indians in relation to the Devil and the only reason why they were invited to that feast was for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands for the Pilgrims

The Pequot, feared warriors would disagree. They definitely misjudged the sheer numbers of the white man and the sentiments and beliefs of the white man--but that is not part of this motive where I can find it in anything from the Pequot POV. They seem to feel that this was a compassionate act on their part. I tend to go with what they say.

Penobscot Indian

Think of the hurt and disrespect Native Americans feel.

And think of those who feel pride in it as well. Which flames do you choose to inflame? That is what this is about. A perpetuation of hatred and resentment and revisionism of history from one side that really doesn't have much to do with what happened then either.

Is not the same a Pequot, Lakotah is not Peqout and neither are European. So I go with the Peqouts on this.

No matter what anyone says on what website, whether or not you or I agree with them, we -- the entire nation -- deserve to know the truth of what happens or has happened in our country.

Claiming that a desire for history to reflect truth is a form of "revisionism and speculation with an agenda to promoting racism and hatred" is simply wrong. It is also offensive.

I gave info below where my own gggrandmother was prominently involved in an important part of US history. Her diary is in the BYU library, and their home is preserved in a Utah State Park. Sophia and Samuel Jewkes were important contemporaries of Brigham Young. They founded many towns, brought sugar crops and equipment to Utah and created many industries that survive to this day. She was a respected midwife. Both of them were important in organizing the church after their arrival.

Yet she and her POV was not included in "history." Asking for her and other women's POV is not revisionism or speculation. It is just and important.

The same goes for any group labeled as "the other" by white, Christian males. As a person whose entire sex was deleted from "history," I also have sympathy for "the others" who were likewise deleted as unimportant.

Claiming that a desire for history to reflect truth is a form of "revisionism and speculation with an agenda to promoting racism and hatred" is simply wrong. It is also offensive

I made no such claim. I said that revisionism by any side can have an agenda that is fueled not by history, but by hatred. I am not saying this is always the case by any means. I am saying that this can be the case and is wrong when it is.

Not all revisionism is truth. Sometimes it is not.

The "truth" also contains items that do not back up the Lakotah version here and OMIT (as is the big complaint) information about the Pequot that is crucial to understanding the situation. This is why I refered to the Pequot source. It is their culture and their museum and their history as a people that is being referenced here. so I would say there website from their museum is very relevant. And I find it offensive that revisionist history that OMITs crucial information and has its own slant based not on the primary source information that the people in question have gathered is dismissed in favor of the stories and his-stories of others--this sounds very agenda driven to me and well, offensive as well.

Just because white Christian males victimized your grandmother's story and the story of others doesn't give others the right to do the same thing to others but taking over their stories.

I want truth--not just another version of untruth that serves yet another agenda. It isn't truth to put that out the way this article did--and to dismiss the website of the people in question really raises a red flag. Why wouldn't you want the Pequot version. They are the ones who are described badly according to this by the white side, and equally badly in my opinion and in their s from their own info from this Lakotah POV. So "truth" on this seems elusive and I am not against truth. I am for truth--but 1/2 truth plus half truth doesn't equal whole truth.

No one but you is taking sides between this article and the site you referenced. I specifically said it does not matter what either site said, or if you or I agree with either of them. The point is not what is said on either site but that the truth be contained within our history books.

I used my gggrandmother as an example, but that isn't the only case. All of our national "history" has been written through the POV of the WMC. Only in recent years has that begun to change and only because people of other races and women have fought hard to be included in "history."

They never should have been excluded in the first place and asking for their complete deletion from "history" be corrected is not an offensive agenda unless you take the stand that only WMCs were or are important.

One problem I have with history being written from a male POV is that it glorifies violence. Read any history book and the major events are always war, shown in a positive light, creating heroes and legends about how the battle deaths and maiming were a good thing -- as long as they happened to the other side.

This self-righteousness has always bothered me. When women began to try to reclaim their own herstory, there were screams of outrage. We were trying to "change" history. My thought: it should be changed because it only glorified one sex and only glorified the worst traits of that sex.

Even now, few men are interested in reading women's contributions in history. When they do, they generally want to argue with it. Otherwise, they are simply not interested. Not all men, of course. Those that are willing to include the importance of women's achievements are heartening to me.

The same complaints are true about white men who don't want the history books changed to reflect the contributions of other races or Christians who don't want to have to share time with other POVs.

The POV of a nation, organization or individual defines who they become and what guides them. When that POV is not fair, then they too cannot be fair -- and they don't even know they aren't being fair.

I just spent the afternoon reading a chapter from Women and Men on the Overland Trail by John Mack Faragher

I'm researching women during the Westward trek across the plains because my ggggrandmother made that trek, and I want to write about her life. I found this chapter while researching the clothing worn by women as they came west, but I found much more that gave me insight to her world, including the fact that most women were isolated, virtual prisoners in their own homes because of the distance between homesteads, the never-ending childcare they had to perform and the fact they were unwelcome in the villages because their presence restricted actions of men in the male domains.

I often wondered why Sophia would have chosen to become a polygamous wife. She was the first wife and asked her husband to marry her best friend. That sings across the ages as the answer. She lived a very public and accomplished life in England before she came to America. To go from working in the kitchens of Parliament and Queen Victoria to being isolated on a farm in Utah would have been intolerable. By having a second wife in the home, they would keep each other company and free each of them to be out and about in turns. Sophia was a valued midwife, a profession she could not have pursued if not for her friend, Mary.

It is this kind of information that is lacking in our perceptions of history. Men look at polygamy as having two women to have sex with. Women's POV would have been far different.

We need all voices to be heard across the ages if ever we are to transform our nation from a patriarchal nation whose views are punitive to "the other" into a nation where all people can live comfortably with each other based on their common mythologies rather than the mythologies that were devised from one POV only.

The Japanese placed in internment camps here in America, their POV is not mentioned.

actually the Japanese Internment Camps have finally made it into the history books and into the minds of the popular culture and political mindset. Did you even know that there were also camps for those of German Ancestry--most people don't. There have been studies of how few people even know about this and it has been compared to the numbers who know about the German Camps.

In any case, I am not big on the White POV, but all whites are not Christians and all whites are not males and the history written in the case of many revisionist Native American Males is just that "Very testosterone filled" itself. There is an agenda there too. I am not for whitewash at all. I wish we did have better history taught on the consequences of cultural clash worldwide that made even a modicum of sense. All over the world we were taught the same myth of overpowering European domination and overwhelming--when in reality this isn't always how it worked at all, IT doesn't even take a lot of common sense to figure most of it out.

Europeans were seafarers in a way that brought them into contact with many cultures--sometimes they brought the smallpox, sometimes the malaria(for instance) killed them. Sometimes they brought wool clothing to trade in the tropics and were only small badly armed crews who could never have overwhelmed anyone.

There are many many good books on these cultural clashed with Europe and between other non-european cultures. (Clash of Cultures by Fagan is pretty good) The Colonizer and the Colonized by Memmi is also interesting.

There are tons of great books from tons of points of view about this topic from all over the world.

But those books aren't making it into the classrooms of our public schools. In our schools, the sanitized, rah-rah view of history is still being preached as truth. That is, in and of itself, racist and sexist since it excludes the POV of the majority of people who were alive at the time.

But those books aren't making it into the classrooms of our public schools.

Well they made it into the classrooms of our dinky rural school. But I agree in general text books are full of hooey. We - our last kid for the last two years of HS for many reasons.

But Our other children had pretty good anthro courses in their public HS. If anything they were slanted towards the terrible consequences of what the Christian West brought to the Native Americans--The hideous Black Robe etc etc.

But then we live in an area with much access to primary source material. The Iroquis museum is about a 1/2 hour away, the Seneca and Mohawk nations are all around us. We live with a long native American presence that continues to this day.

We live near the Mohawk Valley and in a place with more Native American names than Euro names of places. We also live near Seneca Falls and the beginnings of women's suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement. We are listed as "hearty and independent". Central Leather Stocking Area of "last of the Mohican's legend.

My wife is of indigenous ancestry and has follewed her Genetics to as close as she can come to being sure she is a member of a first nation. But it is not American. Still, she can't move "back" and reclaim her traditions as she is now American and when her family came here, they moved on and became American.

But it is not American. Still, she can't move "back" and reclaim her traditions as she is now American and when her family came here, they moved on and became American.

Okay, I'm not sure if I'm understanding this correctly. I'm interpreting this to mean her family were immigrants. If so, she can still work to reclaim her heritage just as I am doing. We all lose some of our heritage over the generations. For some, it is harder work than others. I'm starting at an advantage because of the genealogical work of others in my family and because some of my family members are part of known history, like my gggrandparents in Utah and the Butterfields, both John and Daniel. Of course, their wives are lost from the history books. I don't know if I can recreate their lives, but I will try.

My wife was adopted as a baby. Her heritage was in doubt. She had to search things that had been hidden. Many of her ancestors (biological) had come here as members of persecuted first nation Europeans. They had tried hard to disguise their heritage as such and tried to blend into other groups. This has changed some recently with the revival of their first nation status. She can never totally recreate her genealogical heritage as there are too many barriers. But the point is that when we revise our history to include women, the caste-less, classless. the defeated, the enslaved the conquered those who were forcibly converted, we have to take care to put these histories into a context that matches the times they happened in and not put them into a modern light that distorts what happened. We may not like what happened but we can't paint it with today's paintbrush or we are asking for distortion.

That is all I am saying. We have to take the sensibilities of the descendants into consideration and make sure that we don't impose our modern moralistic sense ( derived from the middle eastern religions) that really was not in play for many indigenous peoples until much later.

We are all human beings on a small planet. To me there is no point in fanning the flames of hatred. There have their been injustices that need to be addressed-most certainly. I think most thinking people would welcome this. This is a good thing and it is time for that to happen-to become truly not just HIStory. This being said, it must be done with caution. Hindsight is not 20/20 as they claim. It is more like looking into a side view mirror wearing bifocals. Things look "closer than they appear"? Sometimes revisionism when inadvertently set in a modern context unfortunately does not do this. It just further distorts. This to me is just a continuation of the injustice.

The author of this article used text from original documents. This is how we need to approach it, by finding authentic sources that were never exposed to the public before, at least not on a broad basis.

The book I mentioned that gave me insight to Sophia's decision to make her marriage polygamous used diaries kept by both men and women to recreate what it was like to immigrate west on the Oregon Trail and live in the Old West.

What people today think about it is not part of history (at least, not yet) and should not be included as if it is nor should today's attitude of some prevent others from learning the formerly deleted parts of history.

the William Bradford stuff is primary source and does not connect the massacre to the pilgrims. The William Newell stuff is pretty iffy.

William Bradford was a leader in the Pilgrim community and recorded their first three decades, so who else would he have been writing about?

OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION :
THE JOURNAL OF WILLIAM BRADFORD

However, I checked out Newell, who did the research cited in the article. I found this on Snopes. It is a letter from the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council and cites Newell also:

[William B. Newell (Penobscot Tribe) Former Chairman of the University of Connecticut Anthropology Department.] 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.”

Source: Documents of Holland, 13 Volume Colonial Documentary. History, letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the King in England and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, Britsh Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years.

millerb, from your comments I can tell you only know about your world and compare everything based upon it. If you truly want to have an intelligent dialogue I recommend you learn more about all Americans.

you didn't answer my questions about your basis of anything. You personally attacked me and I would bet you have no idea about who I am , what race or gender I am, or what my family is like or has gone through or been through. And I would bet that you live within 100 miles of a city if not in one.

I don't live in a city-never would, and my community works together quite well most of the time. I won't argue that white male privilege and that it has extracted a toll, but you are way out of line on your assumptions about me. I was in the midst of compiling links and evidence, but you obviously have an agenda yourself going on here.

Which Americans is it that you think you know about that I do not. I really doubt it. I would say you are at the most 40 have never served in the military and don't have many friends who are very different from you in any way except possibly skin color or ethnicity. Big @!$%#ing deal.

I don't need to be personally insulted by someone who can't even answer a simple questions.

See you elsewhere Loretta, no quarrel with your posts or refutations--don't agree and had some info--but yours is researched and come by honestly--this personal assault on my being an idiot--no thanks. I can't deal with this @!$%# this week. Don't need the aggrivation.

millerb, from your comments I can tell you only know about your world and compare everything based upon it. If you truly want to have an intelligent dialogue I recommend you learn more about all Americans.

you didn't answer my questions about your basis of anything. You personally attacked me and I would bet you have no idea about who I am , what race or gender I am, or what my family is like or has gone through or been through. And I would bet that you live within 100 miles of a city if not in one.

I don't live in a city-never would, and my community works together quite well most of the time. I won't argue that white male privilege and that it has extracted a toll, but you are way out of line on your assumptions about me. I was in the midst of compiling links and evidence, but you obviously have an agenda yourself going on here.

Which Americans is it that you think you know about that I do not. I really doubt it. I would say you are at the most 40 have never served in the military and don't have many friends who are very different from you in any way except possibly skin color or ethnicity. Big @!$%#ing deal.

I don't need to be personally insulted by someone who can't even answer a simple questions.

See you elsewhere Loretta, no quarrel with your posts or refutations--don't agree and had some info--but yours is researched and come by honestly--this personal assault on my being an idiot--no thanks. I can't deal with this @!$%# this week. Don't need the aggrivation.

double post 4.11 please delete-this has been happening this week.

what do you know about the German American Camps?

about the Japanese Camps

Too little too late.

What do you base this on?

My neighborhood is racially diverse too. It makes for a more interesting life.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley when it was home to movie stables, movie ranches, circuses, regular ranches and farms, and movie stars. That meant it too was filled with a diverse bunch of people, from economic status to race to talents and professions.

My dad owned a carnival, which meant we worked their ethnic celebrations. There is no better way to get to know a people's customs and best attributes than to help them celebrate.