Where Are the Voices of Indigenous Peoples in the Thanksgiving Story?

In some ways the annual rehearsal of the Seminole Wars is analogous to the Confederate reenactments. In both, the population honors their foreparents who fought valiantly and lost but also won. Although the Seminole are an unconquered people, their land was stolen again and again. Their current economic victory hinges upon the sovereignty of Indian

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Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal f... See more

Colonial era Europeans observed that many people removed from European society by Native Americans for substantial periods of time – even if captured or enslaved – were reluctant to return; the reverse was seldom true. Therefore, it is reasonable to postulate that, if the colonists were assimilated, they or their descendants would not seek reintegr... See more

Thus our popular history of the Pilgrims has not been a process of gaining perspective but of deliberate forgetting. Instead of these important facts, textbooks supply the feel-good minutiae of Squanto’s helpfulness, his name, the fish in the corn-hills, sometimes even the menu and the number of American Indians who attended the prototypical first

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We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles of freedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound influence on their thinking. To deny any possibility that they were right is, effectively, to insist that indigenous

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