At least we are beyond construction paper pilgrim hats and goose feathers! There is now real discussion of the relationships among the first Europeans in North America and the Wampanoags and other tribes in “New” England.
We don’t stop to think when we say “New England” that it means a literal replacement of lands left on one side of the Atlantic to lands taken from the Indigenous peoples of North America on the other side. The confusion is addressed well in the new Revolutionary War documentary. The Indians and Africans bounced back and forth between French and English settlers and military forces, and then, with France’s official withdrawal from the lands, between the pro-British settlers and those seeking independence. These white revolutionaries would have more autonomy—and then full autonomy with a new nation.
The last segment of the Burns and company Revolutionary War series was deeply troubling. Blacks who had been promised freedom by one side or the other didn’t get it. Indians who had sided with the British were treated ruthlessly—Washington ordered destruction of scores of Seneca villages. And even the Indians who threw their lots in with the insurgent Americans ultimately lost their lands. They were reduced to being bystanders as English and American forces wrangled here and made treaties across the ocean, and, as Native historian Phil Deloria points out in the film, their homelands were promised to white settlers even as they were being recruited to the Americans’ cause.
It’s a messy mess, even as a few voices, including Black voices, rise to tell us that the words in our Foundation Documents are the most important legacy of the Revolution, and that it is our charge as a nation to grow into them. “We the people” must eventually encompass all—whites without property, slaves and their progeny, women, Indians, and immigrants from other places—no matter the founders’ original intentions and compromises.
Let’s for a moment consider women. Burns and company were able to summon a few female voices and images, Abigail Adams’ diary entries the most used, white women caring for wounded soldiers, Native women and women slaves lumped in destiny with their husbands and children also noted. But in battles and in founding words it was all men’s work.
Now consider Thanksgiving. Discard the pilgrim hats and feathers, and attempts to show friendships among Natives and Whites. There were undoubtedly some, and it is true that the pilgrims would not have survived without the foods left in caches by Indians who had been decimated by European diseases brought ashore by European fishermen. And without Tisquantum, who we know as Squanto, who had been captured by European fishermen or traders and sent to Europe as a slave, who learned English and worked his way back to his home village to find it lost to disease. Squanto did serve as interpreter and did teach foods and survival to the colonists.
But Thanksgiving as we know it, proclaimed in President Lincoln’s time, was apparently the work of a woman. Bret Stephens, the mostly conservative opinion columnist for the New York Times, tells the story:
“The idea for a national Thanksgiving holiday was not Lincoln’s own. It came from Sarah Josepha Hale, among the most influential Americans you’ve probably never heard of. ‘A partial list of Hale’s achievements on behalf of women,’ wrote Melanie Kirkpatrick, Hale’s biographer, ‘includes leading the fight for property rights for married women, campaigning for women to be welcome as teachers in public schools, supporting medical education for women, creating the first day care center for small children and the first public playground, founding a society dedicated to increasing the wages of working women, and helping to found Vassar College, the first college for women.’
“That wasn’t all Hale did. She wrote a best-selling antislavery novel. She spent decades as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated magazine in the United States before the Civil War. She wrote ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ And, beginning in the 1840s, she petitioned president after president to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.”
So, today I am thankful for the new news we have of African Americans and Native Americans and the many immigrants from far lands who have made and continue to make our country. And for Sara Hale and my mother and grandmothers and the mother of my children, for all the women teachers, co-workers, and friends who have enriched my life.
When I read this new news about Thanksgiving and Sara Hale, I thought about Ursula LeGuin, who calmly and persistently taught that gender is not the mark of worth, and that the stories of warriors going forth to do battle must be tempered by stories of the women who have attended everything, who have learned and taught food and love and survival and wonder in worlds we all share.
Without the Revolutionary War, there would be no America. Without Sara Hale and Ursula LeGuin, and millions of women and Blacks and Indians excluded in those earliest documents, ours would be a much harsher world.
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