squanto's thanksgiving message

The story of Thanksgiving is the most central story in the american saga. It set the stage for all that was to come. "Europeans bring civilization to a savage land" became the catch-all rationale for everything that followed. And i was there. My name is Tisquantum. Many of you know me as "Squanto".
There are small myths and large in the history of any land. And things that get forgotten. Did you know, for instance, that at the height of the slave trade, 10,000 native american slaves were exported in a single year? I know...for i was one. I was first abducted by a british captain as a child in 1605. I spent nine years serving several masters in England, until one returned me to my home in Massachusetts. Less than a year later, i was enslaved again, this time to be sold in Spain. I escaped and made my way to England, where i convinced a captain to take me home. I walked back into the village of my people, the patuxet, the very same year the Mayflower sailed into the harbor.
One small american myth is that we natives were hunter/gatherers. Many of us were farmers. We all became hunter/gatherers when it became necessary to run from europeans at a moment's notice. Faced with kidnapping, killing, robbery, and rape, you might head for the hills too.
One of the bigger myths about the birth of this country is how europeans "tamed the wilderness". They didn't...because they didn't have to. The pattern was set in Plymouth. When i walked back into my village, there were only corpses to greet me. Everyone had been killed by one of the european diseases. The pilgrims moved in. They didn't have to clear any forest, or remove rocks from the ground to make fields for planting. I joined them, because i had no one else.
What made America so different from what was going on in the rest of the world? The period of european imperialism saw every single continent unquestionably dominated. So why didn't Europe settle Asia or Africa? Because the good spots there were already taken.
But when the Mayflower landed, America was becoming a ghost town.
Before european diseases swept our shores, the population of the Americas was as high as 100 million. But we had no immunities with which to fight back. Getting a flu was a death sentence. School books teach that the most devastating disaster in history was the Black Plague. 30% of Europe died, in just two years. People believed it was the hand of God. Crops went unplanted, social restraints were disregarded.
The epidemics that struck New England in 1617 carried a mortality rate of 90%. The survivors scattered, carrying death inland, where populations that had never seen a white person were leveled. As a result, it would be fifty years before the invaders met any real resistance. In the words of Plymouth governor William Bradford, "It pleased God to afflict these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of 1000, over 950 of them died, and many...lay rotting above ground."
The second great myth was "the frontier", which is thought of as a moving line on a map. But there was no border - the frontier was profoundly multi-cultural and interracial. A striking example of this was a town in northern Ohio known as "the Glaize", where french, africans, british, and members of at least six tribes lived together. They all celebrated native holidays, St. Patrick's Day, and Mardi Gras. It will surprise no one that escaped blacks ran to the arms of the natives. What may come as a surprise is that europeans were also defecting. Innumerable laws sprang up, to punish whites who "went native". The pilgrims even made it a crime for a man to wear long hair. If you've ever wondered why Granddad calls Billy a fairy when his hair gets a little long, we may have just found the reason.
This defection of men and women was mostly one-way; myself and Pocahantas notwithstanding, natives were not trying to get into white society. Ben Franklin himself said, "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies...there is no Force; there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment." Perhaps the most alluring part of native life was the lack of hierarchy. History's famous native american leaders were not leaders in the way you understand them. Though some tribal positions were hereditary, anyone could rise to a position of prominence, and no one was denigrated or ignored, including women.
And therein may lie the greatest myth of all, the idea that native american culture has been killed. When one culture absorbs another, both are forever changed. Each one of you here today is far more native american than you've probably ever considered. Native ideas most certainly made their way back to Europe, to thinkers like John Locke, who would write of "life, liberty, and property". Is it a coincidence that America's "founding fathers" embraced such radical ideas? All evidence suggests that the settlers were not driven by social experiments, but profit. A small minority came for religious freedom...even on the Mayflower, the pilgrims were a minority...but religious freedom is not the same thing as democracy.
My own time with the pilgrims was neither long nor happy. I was a go-between with the nearest tribe, the Wampanoag, who never trusted me because i was not one of their own. Less than two years after the Mayflower arrived, i was overcome by a sudden, bloody fever. A victim of either disease or poison, my spirit finally came to rest.
But on this day of Thanksgiving, in this country where any man or woman is free to go to any school, to work at any job, to express any opinion...it is perhaps entirely appropriate to give thanks to those who first lived in this beautiful land, and honor them by carrying in your spirits and manifesting in your deeds the best part of their desires and dreams.