Missing History

"In the American popular imagination, the nation’s history began with the Pilgrims and then leapfrogged more than 150 years to Lexington and Concord and the Revolution." "Thanksgiving and its reassuring image of Indian-English cooperation became the predominant myth of the Pilgrims." -quotes from Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick

Shattering myths is always a dangerous business, especially when the myth that is being shattered goes straight to the heart of national, religious, or ethnic identity.

Our Transylvanian Unitarian friends do not want to hear that religious toleration in 16th century Transylvania may have had less to do with the eloquence of their founder Francis David than with the Ottoman Turkish administration of that region, which understood that dividing their Christian subjects among themselves was the easiest way to maintain control over them. Protecting religious radicals like Francis David and our Unitarian ancestors turns out to have been a pretty good example of dividing and conquering, a strategy which the Ottomans used very successfully in Eastern Europe and the Balkan region during the almost five hundred years of their rule.

Shattering myths is even more troubling when it shows us not as the people we thought we were or wished or hoped to be, but as the people we actually are. In his recent book Mayflower, historian Nathaniel Philbrick shatters a number of myths about the origins of our nation. One of those, as the quotation included on your orders of service indicates, is the myth of Thanksgiving and the image of Indian-European cooperation.

The reality is that while some Indian-European cooperation did exist in the earliest years of the Plymouth colony--indeed, it is likely that the colony would not have survived even its first winter had it not been for that cooperation--already by the second generation of colonists the cooperation had almost completely disintegrated, leading to the bloodiest and possibly the most forgotten war in American history. King Philip’s War, as that terrible conflict was known, ended for all intents and purposes any pretense of cooperation between the colonists and their Native American counterparts. (According to Philbrick, the war "was more than twice as bloody as the American Civil War and at least seven times more lethal than the American Revolution." Huge numbers of both Natives and Europeans, by percentage of population, were killed during King Philip’s War-- which is named for the ill-starred Pokanoket sachem whose questionable leadership of the Indians is most often associated with the conflict.)

The irony is that there was a lot of truth to Edward Winslow’s famous description of the first Thanksgiving, especially in his description of the Pilgrims’ relationship to their Indian guests:

We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us, very loving, and ready to pleasure us. . . . Yea, it hath pleased God so to possess the Indians with fear of us and love unto us, that not only the greatest king among them, called Massasoyt, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us, or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us; so that seven of them at once have sent their messengers to us to that end. . . .We, for our parts, walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just.

On the other hand, popular pictorial representations of the First Thanksgiving probably are not so accurate. As Philbrick describes it,

Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other’s hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement with five freshly killed deer. Even if all the Pilgrim’s furniture was brought out into the sunshine, most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages--stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown--simmered invitingly.

After the First Thanksgiving, as Philbrick points out, our American story typically skips ahead more than 150 years, directly to the American Revolution. What happened in between times is not the pleasant stuff of feel-good national mythology. As the colonists pushed westward and good land became more scarce and thus more valuable, the Native population was pushed into a more and more untenable position. King Philip’s War in the 1670’s changed European-Indian relations forever, and basically determined how the relationship would be acted out in the course of the western migration over the next two centuries.

The war essentially destroyed whatever possibilities of cultural accommodation there might have been, and changed European attitudes toward the Native population for the next two hundred and fifty years. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" thereafter became an unstated American byword, shameful though it might be, years before the phrase was actually uttered by Phil Sheridan of Civil War and Indian fighting fame.

Not until the American Indian Movement made its appearance at the base of the statue of Massasoit in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day in 1970 did this missing history begin to emerge, and it has been emerging ever since. How many of us still remember this event? AIM’s takeover of Mt. Rushmore, and more memorably of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, followed shortly thereafter, and the publication of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee began to uncover the painful and often sordid history of mistreatment that Native Americans had suffered since the Pilgrims’ arrival on these shores in 1620.

My argument this morning is that it is absolutely necessary that this missing history be recovered and brought to light, awful though it may be. Indeed, it is ultimately a religious issue, for how can we be whole and healthy people--the actual meaning of "salvation"--unless we are willing to confront the entirety of our history? This is as true on the personal level as it is on the national. Unless we are willing to confront and come to terms with the totality of who we are and what we have experienced, the good as well as the bad, there is little likelihood that we will achieve the full humanity we so desperately seek.

What Native Americans have been teaching us over the course of the last thirty-six years, since that first demonstration in Plymouth, is that in order to be healed and become whole we must confront the ghosts of our past. To be the people and the country we want to be, we must look in the mirror of our national life and see all the blemishes and imperfections that are there. It is important that we look at the dark side of our history as well as the light.

To skip from the idyllic First Thanksgiving celebration described by Edward Winslow to "the shot heard round the world" at Lexington and Concord is to overlook an important and instructive part of our history: not the most beautiful part, perhaps, but one which might stand to explain a multitude of evils which came later, like slavery and racial segregation, and which may even save us from other such failures in the future.

I daresay that a better understanding of our history and of our literature as well as of the motives, both negative and positive, that have driven the development of our nation over the course of the last 386 years, could actually serve to protect us from the kind of ill-considered responses to perceived national threats that have characterized our collective life in the last fifty years.

We don’t have to abandon all of our national mythology along the way. It is clear from Philbrick’s book and others that some of that mythology is based on reality. Some of the Pilgrims and early Bay colonists actually had a more enlightened point of view about their Indian counterparts, which if it had become the majority view might have resulted in a very different world than the one we are trying to save today. It must remain our hope that it is never too late to learn from the past and to reclaim our missing history in order to help make us the better people we long to be.

May our thanksgiving at this time of year, or any, be as genuine and heartfelt as that of those long ago Pilgrim ancestors of ours. And may we be grateful always for all that helps us to understand ourselves and others better, so that we might yet come to embody those godly attributes that the Pilgrims so hoped to acquire on this new and mysterious continent. May it be so, now and in the days to come. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock