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 Part 2 – Chapter 2 – New England and the Pilgrim Fathers (p 120)

 
READING
Read the text below and answer the questions.

1. Who is the writer of the extract?
2. Why did he write it?
3. Who really were the ‘Pilgrims’, according to him?
4. What was their purpose?
5. How did they behave with native Indians?
6. Who was Squanto?
7. Why did the ‘Pilgrims’ invite the Wampanoag Indians to their first Thanksgiving?
8. Who provided most of the food for the feast?
9. Did peace and friendship last between the Plymouth colonists and the Indians?
10. When and why did the myth of Thanksgiving develop?

The Pilgrim Fathers

The story of the Pilgrim Fathers and the foundation of Plymouth Plantation which is usually taught at school is a mixture of both history and myth. Some scholars have different information and opinions, which shed a very different light on the 'Pilgrim' image we have of them.
Chuck Larsen, an Indian historian and school teacher who has written several books on American and Native American history, wrote the following in September, 1986.
 […] Every year I have been faced with the professional and moral dilemma of just how to be honest and informative with my children at Thanksgiving without passing on historical distortions, and racial and cultural stereotypes. I have come to know both the truths and the myths about our 'First Thanksgiving', and I feel we need to try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historic truth. This text is an attempt to do this. […]
The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution.[…] They were outcasts and fugitives, most of them were strict Puritan orthodox who wanted to establish the ‘Kingdom of God’ in the new land. So they came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but in a hundred others as well, with every intention of taking the land away from its native people to build their prophesied 'Holy Kingdom'.
Later New England Puritans used any means, including deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve that end. They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. […]
The Wampanoag Indians were not the 'friendly savages' some of us were told about when we were in the primary grades. Nor were they invited out of the goodness of the Pilgrims' hearts to share the fruits of the Pilgrims' harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and interracial brotherhood.
To the Pilgrims the Indians were heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the Devil. Squanto, as the only educated and baptized Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely an instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide for the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims.
The Indians were comparatively powerful and, therefore, dangerous; and they were to be courted until the next ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists. The Wampanoag were members of a widespread confederacy. […]
They were actually invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be noted that the Indians, possibly out of a sense of charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the majority of the food for the feast.
A generation later, after the balance of power had indeed shifted, the Indian and White children of that Thanksgiving were striving to kill each other in the genocidal conflict known as King Philip's War. At the end of that conflict most of the New England Indians were either exterminated or refugees among the French in Canada, or they were sold into slavery in the Carolinas by the Puritans. So successful was this early trade in Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in Boston began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa for black slaves to sell to the proprietary colonies of the South, thus founding the American-based slave trade.
Our contemporary mix of myth and history about the 'First' Thanksgiving at Plymouth developed in the 1890s and early 1900s, complete with stereotyped Indians and stereotyped Whites. Our country was desperately trying to pull together its many diverse peoples into a common national identity. […] This was the era of the 'melting pot' theory of social progress, and public education was a major tool for social unity. It was with this in mind that the federal government declared the last Thursday in November as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving in 1898. […]

Questo file è un’estensione online del corso M. G. Dandini, NEW SURFING THE WORLD.
Copyright © 2010 Zanichelli Editore S.p.A., Bologna [1056]