“It is a constant thorn within me remembering the first celebration after the early settlers’ gratitude massacred the Pequot nation. Thanksgiving Day originally was the celebration of the murders of Pequot women, men and children that almost wiped them off the Earth and to date, the bloodiest thank you the Pequot ever experienced..
I do get together with my family on this day wrestling with these images, and my emotions. On preceding days I often spend time in the forest listening to the voices of ancestors. So, I leave offerings of prayer, or tobacco, but the painful truth is Americans depend upon time to erase their memories and connections to the histories of the belief-systems that have brought us so much 'progress'. Consequently, we as a nation are fond of giving heart felt, but hollow thanks into the veil of time pulled back on Thanksgiving Day by the ancestors of Turtle Island’s many nations we cannot remember. All the red nations, leaders, and people betrayed in the name of American progress, the Manifest Destiny, the call of the West, etc. have experienced the great betrayals, and the type of gratitude today’s Thanksgiving participants revel in. Thanksgiving is a day the pathos of an era gone by but present in our daily lives, and rituals moves a veil aside through which the Pequot peer out of aghast at our ignorance of why we celebrate this day. The sound of our celebration, and gratitude for the things we have and the families we have alive is disconnected from the soul sickness that the world’s missionaries are coming to America to assist in our healing as a nation.” – Gregory E. Woods
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| eye above the mountains by Debby King |
Gregory... A much deeper understanding of the earliest years after the English came here to stay grows through learning more than road-brush history, whether the familiar kind or the unfamiliar kind. Read the book Mayflower: A Story of ...Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Filbrick (2006).
I post this comment in honor of -- and gratitude to -- both my ancestor Elizabeth Carpenter Southworth and Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoag, who attended her wedding in August 1623 to William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. Bradford's first wife Dorothy had come with him on the Mayflower, insisting their toddler son remain in Holland with family and come later if this unknown land was safe. The ship anchored off the coast of what is now known as Cape Cod on 11 November 1620, after a hellish 2-month journey. Only Bradford and a small group of men left the ship each day; the other passengers, many ill and two already dead, had to stay on the boat. On 7 December, Dorothy either fell or jumped overboard and died. (A number of others died aboard ship that first winter; ultimately only 50 of the original 102 survived.)
William Bradford had wanted to marry Alice Carpenter before the Separatists ever left England for Holland to escape religious persecution, but her parents objected because he was an orphaned farmer’s son and she was born into aristocracy. In 1613, he married Dorothy instead, and Alice married Edward Southworth, a member of the landed gentry who had also fled to Holland, the same year. Alice’s husband died of illness by 1622, after which she accepted Bradford’s proposal. William and Dorothy’s son and Alice and Edwards’ two sons all joined the Bradfords in Plymouth Colony later.
My ancestor work has made this clear: history becomes much more complex when we learn more than one “side,” and when we seek to learn the people instead of just the wars. While detailed histories like the Filbrick book and contemporaneous writing from the early 17th century like Bradford’s journal do indeed take time to read, they also do away with broad-brush understandings.
Do you know about the “memory holes?” I’d never heard of them before Filbrick’s book. That first July, Winslow and Hopkins went with Squanto to visit other villages to seek alliances like that formed with Massasoit. The native trail was marked with round holes wherever some significant event or teaching had occurred, and those using the trail were responsible for maintaining the holes and recounting what had happened there each time they passed.
Here’s Winslow’s 1624 account: “Instead of records and chronicles, they take this course, where any remarkable act is done, in memory of it, either in the place, or by some pathway near adjoining, they make a round hole in the ground about a foot deep, and as much over, which when others passing by behold, they inquire the cause and occasion of the same, which being once known, they are careful to acquaint all men, as occasion serveth therewith. And least such holes should be filled, or grown up by any accident, as men pass by they will oft renew the same: by which means many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory….”
Our centuries of war-based histories have not served any of us, or our ancestors, nearly as well as memory holes would have done. - Worth Cooley-Proust
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| men gathered together of the Maidu nation |
“Worth, your ancestral work is deep and intense. I'd forgotten you were doing that work. Your family story softens me as does your reflective spirit. I was overwhelmed with the English versions of history in school, and independent readings throughout my school and college years... It took awhile to hear the other side, but the memory holes?? No, that is new knowledge for me. I am going to make a note to read up at your suggestion.
But beyond that have a good holiday tomorrow, get some rest, and see if you can make some time to see my father soon.” – Gregory E. Woods
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