Bees or Butterflies?
Down here on the creek, I was taught American History in a little one-room school house. As I have aged I have discovered that so much of it was a fallacy. Discovering George Washington didn’t chop down the cherry tree was a little like realizing there wasn’t a Santa Claus. In the past few years I have been wised up to the real truth behind the first Thanksgiving celebrated in 1621.
In the Edmonson School the Thanksgiving myth unfolded yearly, complete with stereotyped Indians and stereotyped whites. No where in our textbooks did it tell us that Squanto had traveled to England in 1605 with an English explorer named John Weymuth. During this time he mastered the English language and returned to New England with Weymuth. Later he was captured by a British slaver who sold Squanto to the Spanish in the Carribean. A Priest befriended the Indian and assisted him in reaching Spain and then put him aboard a ship to England. Squanto located Captain Weymuth who arranged to get him back to America.
Not all the whites were as benevolent as John Weymuth. The truth of the matter is that the Pilgrims were not innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England but some of them were religious bigots themselves. They viewed themselves as the “Chosen Elect” mentioned in the book of Revelation.
Squanto, the Indian hero of the Thanksgiving story, had true affection for the explorer, John Weymuth and he viewed the Pilgrims as Weymuth’s people. Squanto was a member of the Wampanoag Indian nation and his village was Patuxet. When he arrived back from England in 1620 he found his village deserted and there were skeletons everywhere. All his village had died from an illness the English slavers had left behind, smallpox.
One year later Squanto and a friend were hunting along the beach near his old village of Patuxet when they viewed the Pilgrims in his old home. Squanto and his friend Samoset observed the newcomers for several days before they made themselves known. They walked into the village and said “welcome”, surprising the Pilgrims that they spoke English. The pair found a sickly group suffering from lack of food and adequate shelter. Squanto lived with them for the next few months, teaching them to cultivate corn and vegetables and how to build an Indian style home.
He taught them the difference between poisonous plants and which plants to harvest for medicine. He taught them to dig and cook clams and how to obtain the sap from the maple trees and many other skills required for their survival. Because there was enough food to last the winter and they had adequate shelter they decided to have a harvest feast to celebrate their good fortune. It would be reminiscent of the Thanksgiving feasts they had observed in England before coming to the New World.
Captain Miles Standish, the leader of the Pilgrims, invited Squanto, Samoset and Massasoit the leader of the Wampanoags, along with their families to join them in the feast. The Pilgrims had no idea how large Indian families could be and were overwhelmed at the large turnout of ninety people. Thanksgiving festivals were very familiar to the Indians as they held five a year to honor various gifts from the Great Spirit. They turned out in force and there would not be nearly enough food. Chief Massasoit sized up the situation and ordered some of his men to go home and bring more food. The Indians themselves furnished five deer, several wild turkey, fish, beans, squash, corn soup and cornbread, topped off with berries.
Captain Standish sat at one end of the long table and Chief Massasoit at the other end. It was the first time the Indians had ever eaten at a table and the Indian women sat with their men to eat. The Pilgrim women stood behind their men and waited until they had finished before they themselves partook of the meal. During the three day feast an agreement was made between Standish and Massasoit, giving the Pilgrims the clearing in the forest, for the new town of Plymouth.
In an ideal world they would all have lived happily ever after but alas just two years later Elder Mather delivered a Thanksgiving sermon in which he stated: “We should give special thanks to God for the devastating plague of small pox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians. Chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase.” He continued on, “this has cleared the forest to make way for a better growth.”
How could a people who fled to America seeking freedom and justice be so callous toward their Indian benefactors and particularly Squanto who was their very angel of survival that first year? The Pilgrims and the Indians are a parallel to the bee and the butterfly. A bee sips his honey and hums his thanks to the flowers as he leaves. The gaudy butterfly is cock sure that the flowers should be thanking him. We are preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving and now I ask, are you a bee or a butterfly?
