Latest Breaking News On - Kim christopher - Page 3 : vimarsana.com
>> along welcome to the washington times for this episode of history as it happens. a podcast for people who want to think about current events, historically. today we're gonna talk about thanksgiving it's history as an american holiday, rather it's meeting as american organ story, why some people see very little to celebrate and much to -- let's welcome to the set historian, martin di caro david silverman -- welcome to the washington. superbly author of this land is their land. wampanoag indians, and the troubled history of thanksgiving. well timed book. you actually timed it for the 200th anniversary for 16 19. no, no 400 anniversary. i'm not a math major. well we were talking about how history books sometimes come out of the right time. you are planning this one so there's never a bad time to talk about this. right? . >> no, i certainly did time it that way. focusing the public's attention on historic events. i could write the same book five years later and it wouldn't generate the same interest. so, it was quite elaborate. >> yeah, 400 years 16 19 to present. let's begin with a hypothetical because i think all of us can remember when we were kids we do thanksgiving pageants or reenactments, what are we want to call them. from first, second grade, whatever it might be. here's a hypothetical. david silverman, your teaching let's say, third grade social studies class and it's time to talk about the pilgrims and plymouth colony. instead of reenacting the feet in 16 20, one with kids wearing their buckled shoes and some of the morning handed headdresses saying 1 million have you thomas goes on the other i have few bone arrows -- lousy things, but i don't know if that's an appropriate t shirt for the first grade. all right. we don't have to wear all our truths. christopher columbus was a murderer. i'm not sure that's an appropriate. and that's appropriate decorum for an instructor. you get my point, though, about teaching kids about colonialism. it's difficult because the pendulum is usually swinging the other direction. we do these thanksgiving pageants where everyone's kind of happy, right? well, colonial ism was and i think we can say is a bloody business. and in the american context, colonialism was characterized by cologne, nil indigenous warfare, which historians are increasingly characterizing as as genocidal and the enslavement of literally millions of people over the course of the life of of the colonies of the western hemisphere. and so those are very difficult subjects to grapple with as adults, never mind as young people. and so i don't envy educators who are teaching at the grade school level and trying to address that topic. those teachers come to you for guidance, don't you? or you you give content to these teachers. i'm not an expert in childhood education. i'm a professional historian. and my job is to capture complex past in all of its complexity. it's the job of those >> my drive is to capture complex past and all of its complexity is the job of the teachers on the frontlines to help to distill that complex passed and two digestible process-able, if he, well trunks for young people. >> i think you mention to me once that you often, honestly i don't say consult but your contacted by teachers. routinely. . i share documents with them, and assure points of fact an interpretation but i must say i am completely at a loss with how one should change colonial american history to young people. i've even discussed the issue with my indigenous colleagues. they too are at a loss. it's such a disturbing period of history. it's such a dark time characterized by the worst and human behavior that i'm not sure most of the content is appropriate until young people are in the teens. >> i never really thought about it that way until speaking to you last year, we did podcast wheeler about thanksgiving, i wanna touch about some of the same themes. but yet, this is a history of colonialism. never really occurred to me they were teaching a bloodless colonialism. that's a term that you've used. willis colonialism, which is a fantasy. >> that's what the thanksgiving story is all about. it is about indigenous people in european columnist making friends, right? the native 03 -- we hold up is that they had together as the symbols of the relations and then the natives disappear. actually signing over their country to the newcomers so the newcomers can establish the united states as a bastion of liberty, democracy, religious freedom and opportunity. that tail leaves out the details with which that there was this alliance between the english and native people. it went to and a hand basket in the space of a generation. there was a war and a war shortly after that we're gonna get into the history and we're also gonna return to the educational issues of the history wars as they're called, a little bit later. ron i want to talk a little bit about the holiday itself. thanksgiving. a blinken declares this in the national holiday in 1863, but first of all thanksgiving of thanksgiving bistro complaints all throughout colonial america. >> -- >> whenever a society won a military victory or drowned ended, you know, any number of events that are social importance, authorities would declare days of thanksgiving. those days could happen at any point of the calendar, they were just-limited to november. in colonial america, that tradition continued. overtime those days of thanksgiving became relegated to late fall, when people close the account books, effectively became the tradition. >> it has nothing to do with the harvest or anything like that? >> well, you know, the books are closed after the harvest and you know cold weather is coming, and that became the routine, really by the late 17th century. so, days of thanksgiving, in late fall, were part of an american tradition, really from the 1600 onwards. >> but the song called first thanksgiving, the dinner between the pilgrims and the indians, we're gonna get into the feast and a little bit, but that so-called first thanksgiving dinner, didn't have any connection to the holidays declared by a blinken in 1863 for quite awhile, right? there is no connection at all. >> by the time lincoln victors a holiday, there was an association but it's not until the mid 18, the mid 19th century, you know, so about 15 years before lincoln makes this declaration that that association started to become ingrained in the popular american mindset for the 16 hundreds, the 17 hundreds, and the first portion of the 18 hundreds, there's no connection whatsoever between days of thanksgiving and the story of pilgrims and indians. it is a 19th and early 20th century invention. >> so there was an editor, magazine, editor sarah josefa hail, she had read a story about the 16 21 event and decided to use that as a model for an annual holiday. else was going on there? i mean, she published the story in a popular book, -- ladies book, where she had recipes for turkey and stuffing but there was more to this than just sara joseph a hail, right? >> she now to, be sure, there's a lot of reasons in the late 19th century for white americans, and especially protestant americans, to link this mythical thanksgiving or friendly programs and indians to the thanksgiving holiday. for one, the country had been torn, was torn apart by the events of the civil war and the political issues that led up to it. hale and lincoln were looking for is something that could unite the people during that period of division. but, there were other pressures as well. bearing on american society, that the story helped to address. number one was that protestants were losing their control over american society. you have a mass migration especially from ireland and germany, of catholics. >> we are ducking the mid 19th century. >> the mid 19th century. by holding up the pilgrims as colonial america's founding fathers, it was a way for protestants to assert their cultural authority at a time when it was being diluted, as they sought by immigrants. and as you know, as messam accretion continues throughout the early 20th century with peoples from eastern europe, the myth continue to be, to do that kind of work, the myth also serve to paper over what was ineffective genocidal war against indigenous people on the great plains and the rocky mountain. >> i want to ask you about that. the second half of the 19th century, after the civil war, and the completion of the indian wars, it was after those wars that had been won by the united states, is when indians could take different place in the public consciousness? they were in vilified as an enemy any longer, so they could just take, let's just say less threatening appearance as actors in the thanksgiving play. >> that's right. and already, by the mid 19th century, there is a national divide between people in the east and boston, philadelphia, new york, and what have, you for whom native people don't pose any direct threat. and white americans, in the west, who were engaged in bloody conflict with the indigenous people, you hear year in and year out, these eastern areas were very comfortable having native people play an important role in a national founding story. you know, another factor, in all this, especially after the civil war, is that you have a large, free community of color, for the first time. and what this, this national mid to it is that also helped assert white authority in the nation. it would, in encouraged, people who had no direct ancestry among the pilgrims, well people with the last names like mine and last names like yours, and it encourage those people to identify with the english colonists as we, and to think of the native people as them. even though, the descendants of both groups were americans. >> i want to return to a 20th century immigration in a second. i wouldn't go just go right back to the 19th century. something from your book, this land is their land, the first suggestion that a link between pilgrims and the indians and the thanksgiving holiday existed, appears to date to 1841, a reverend alexander, and publish the only primary source accounts of the event, a paragraph of forlines, but it had an influential footnotes. tell us about the footnotes. >> there aren't a lot of influential footnotes and history. i can tell you as a historian. we write very lengthy footnotes that hardly anyone rates. >> i read them, but i think most people. don't >> i in my colleagues appreciate that. but most people do not. in this particular case, this footnote red, this was the first thanksgiving, the great harvest festival of new england, that's it. but this primary source accounts so broadly, and so many people read the footnote, that this idea stuck. early 20th century something a simple as that. this was the first thanksgiving. well, you mentioned before, early 20th century immigrants and how they were not welcome, immigrants from southern and eastern europe. the door was open and ellis island, but they were not welcomed largely by the white protestant majority in this country. this isn't the time that eugenics is starting to become popular, are native native is, and xenophobia, i never, maybe this is my mind working tricks here in projecting my current mindset back to when i was a teenager and learning about these things and school, but i never really felt much of an emotional connection myself to the pilgrims, and the puritans, right? my talent ancestors came here in the early 20th century to america and as mentions, they were presented by people like the puritans, white protestant majority. italians were catholic. they were an educated. they were ignorant. going over all the stereotypes, and you know there were left to live in tenants and dirty crime infested cities, et cetera. but you know the more learn about the pilgrims, the less i like about them. >> well, right, you know the early modern period doesn't live up to the modern sets abilities very well. >> but as far as founders, exalted founders, and assessments of america, the shining city on the hill, ronald reagan's thanksgiving address, he gives a thanksgiving day address on the radio in the mid 1980s. i think people should seek out and listen to. it i don't see them as founders really of the country. >> you might not, but generations of americans have been taught to view them in precisely that way i think among other things, about the singing of my country to is of the during these thanksgiving school russians back when i was in great school, where we are encouraged to think of the pilgrims as my father's right, which is to say our fathers. no, it doesn't mean that the kids follow the lesson and do think of them as their father, but you have authority figures encouraging school children to think of them that way and the iconography of thanksgiving doubles down on that message. it stays in your head. even if you think of it is silly, it's hard to think clear that stuff totally out of your head a i'm not a catholic anymore notably than that stuff, but the sisters and saint joe roses still residing in the deep recesses of my mind. i can hear them scolding me. >> we are taught many things. the pilgrims are the progenitors of american religious liberty. and that the mayflower compact, where they agreed to live by majority rule, is the origin of american democracy. now those origins are widely overblown. but those have been ingrained in multiple generations of america school children. >> so, a basic question that, who were the pilgrims? where the puritans? they were protestants, we know that, but where they puritans? >> they're part of the puritan movement, with one important distinction. we call puritans puritans because their goal was as they saw, to purify the anglican church, by purging it of its catholic holdovers. the separate, the pilgrims, were self identified separatists. they felt, that it was impossible to purify the anglican church from within. that it was so futile, that the only way to maintain their integrity, was to separate from the anglican church. so, on matters of theology, the pilgrims and the puritan saw eye to eye. the minor point difference between them, is that the puritans still formally were part of the anglican church, even though they didn't follow its authority, whereas the pilgrims had separated from it. >> and the indians, to say who are the indians? we could be out at all day, because there's no such thing is just the indians. but that's part of what we are discussing here, right? of these origin stories develop and how we call an entire group of people indians with no distinction of tribe, ethnicity, what have you. so, before we get to the feast, because this is the point i want to make about origin stories, before we get to the nitty-gritty of that 16 21 dinner. who are the indians that the pilgrims interacted with? >> they were the wampanoags, they were a group of, the numbers are impossible to determine, we're talking somewhere between ten and 40,000 people, living between the south shore of what is now massachusetts bay, all through cape cod, and then westward to the border of -- where the center piece of rhode island today's. there and algonquian speaking group. algonquian is a language family that extends from the canadian maritimes down to virginia, and then west across the great lakes, to the rocky mountains and beyond their one of many tribal groups were indian nations, -- including -- >> and it out >> the head of a better glitter. see >> well they gained alphabetical undersea after the english began evangelism. they don't have native people -- before kamala season begins. but putin's being puritans, they placed a very heavy emphasis on lay peoples direct access to the bible. and so when they began evangelizing wampanoag another new england native people in the mid 17 century, they began taking native languages. putting them into alphabetical and receive, and then teaching those skills in school. indeed, the first bible printed in north america, is in the wampanoag language. >> wow. i did not know that. so we are talking about the how the pilgrims may seem strange as american founders. i have an old politics professor from ithaca college, i keep in touch with him, he's actually been a guest on my post. -- he told me something once. he has a way of describing these origin stories. he says they're in the lining of our cribs. our earliest memories of american history, really, christopher columbus, i want to touch on columbus very briefly in the context of origin stories because, you know, as a kid and then as a young adult, how critical it to be look at these things. until fairly recently in my life did i start to question, why is kim christopher columbus considered american, or part of the american origin story, other than the obvious reason he began the era of exploration. he wasn't an american, did note that name even meant, he never stepped foot in north america. and he thought he was somewhere around china. i often think of a passage in a book that i read a few years ago by joel report called, these truths. i'm gonna share a few lines of it and have you respond. again, origin stories. columbus as being like the originator of america. she says, when the united states declared its independence in 1776, plainly, it was a state. but what made it a nation? the fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face. they came from all over the world. having waged war against england, the very last thing they wanted to sell bright was their languish-ness. in an attempt to solve this problem, the earliest historians of the u.s. decided, in their accounts to begin them with a combs's voyage surging, 17 76 to 14 92. it's like they're writing a tapestry. george bankrupt publishes history of the united states from the discovery of the american continent, to the present, that was an 1834, the nation had been barely half a century old. but look horses he does this, bankrupt does this because when you make the united states three centuries older than it actually was, you are not only engaging history, or engaging in a bit of propaganda, you're believing in manifest destiny, your promoting the idea that the united states was faded to cross the content east to west, the nation's fate all but sealed the day columbus set sail. it gives americans a more ancient past, and it makes the american founding appear inevitable, and its growth more inexorable. so 14 92, instead of 1776. i guess you can say that's the work that origin stories do. >> that's the work that origin stories do! and, you know, let's be clear. origin stories always contain a grain of truth to them. >> it's not like columbus wasn't an important person. >> the white americans from the time of the american revolution onward saw the united states as the advance guard of western civilization in this hemisphere. and they're not entirely wrong in that respect. they are spreading the institutions that characterize western civilization across the continent. so if that's the mission of the nation as imagined by its later ship, then it makes sense to start with columbus. we've come a long way since then though. let's be clear, right, native people are not the foils of the nation anymore. there are country men and women. they deserve to see themselves represented three dimensionally in the nation's history, and the rest of americans should too, because there's a lot of lessons to be learned here. and so, when i teach my american history courses, our starts with the first people, with their migrations to the americas, and the civilizations that they built. and by the time columbus arrives, the story then becomes the meeting of civilizations, the clash of civilizations, rather than the beginning of history. >> the very first sentence in your book, what you just said made me think of it. not gonna find. it serious critical history tends to be hard on the living. >> that's right. >> these complexities, not only are they just difficult to convey, it's complex. you take a course in history to learn about the stuff. but they don't necessarily fit into the framing of an origin story that's designed to make us feel good. when you get together for thanksgiving with your family. although lots of thanksgiving dinners devolve into arguments these days. but you get what i'm saying. [laughter] >> i do. look, there's a fundamental difference between the way that professional historians approach history on the way most people. to professional historians discipline themselves not to say their historical actors, the actors of the past, as we and they. they're all day. so we don't have a personal investment in who's a hero, who is an enemy, what we're trying to do is capture a complex passed in all of his complexity. most people in the world, see history as a way to tell stories about we. and they defined other people as they to establish foils. -- in many ways those are the debate we have over history now, it's are we going to approach it more objectively as the historical actors of they or are we going to see them as we? >> and, you know, you don't want balance for balance sake. right? you want balance for truth sakes. because people on the right are criticize and often with reason for whitewashing a past, but also in the left, and i'm thinking of the 16 19 project, which by the way, barely mentions native americans. 16 19 project goes the pendulum swings all the other way, to help with this. it's our founding principles, where a lie and there's one line that is woven all through american history and that is white supremacy as the determining force above all other things. it's not entirely inaccurate, but i'm just trying to compare, we need to move away from the two poles here, the extremes, it's much more complex and rich than that. >> the historical method involves starting with questions rather than starting with answers. >> yes, that's a better way of putting. it >> the processes that you're describing, they start with the answers on the cherry pick their facts to fit those narratives. historians have to be prepared to be surprised by what they find in the evidence. to allow the evidence to lead them wherever it goes. >> that's a much better way of putting it than my as somewhat incoherent with. ask them just about one of these meng, i think this puts spiked cider in here. a little early for thanksgiving drink, but it's okay all recover. so i think you touched on the big picture issues here, let's dive into the granular history part. before the feast of 16 21, you told me something that i was ignorant of, that i did know, history that's largely forgotten but it does speak to the thanksgiving myth and the origins of that dinner in 16 21. so it's really relevant to what we're discussing. there were many years, decades of contract between the indian tribes and now what we call, new england, and your pants. there was trade, violence, and slave taking. let's start with trade. what was being traded, and by whom? >> right. so i think most of your listeners will be surprised to know that the wampanoags were in contact with europeans from at least 15 24 onwards. >> wow. >> this is practically a century before the mayflower. the arrival of the mayflower is not a first contact absurd whatsoever. as you know, there had been years, and years, and years of contact between europe and native america. by and large, the voyages from europe were trying to explore the curves, trying to get a sense of the rover weighs and good anchorage along the coast and so on. but they're also looking for profitable resources. those profitable resources are disproportionately controlled by native people. not entirely fish, for instance, was -- caught fisheries off the canadian maritimes and cape cod were a boon to you opinion fishermen. but what they also discovered is that native people have resources that can be sold at high prices in europe. first and foremost among them was first. beaver pelts, above all, but also smaller furs as they called them like martin, and fox, and mink, and the like. then there's human beings. europeans routinely raided the coast from canada all the way down to south america to capture native people and then sold them overseas. a slaves. >> where were the slave sold to, and what kind of industries if you will wear the working in? >> sugar plantations? >> not yet. sugar plantations have yet to develop by and large to the degree that they will in the 17th sumptuous. they're doing all manners of labor. they're all rain on the kings galleys, they're building fortifications, they're doing agricultural work, or their house servants, anyone of a number of things. >> there brought back to europe? >> there brought back to europe by and large, that is correct. >> this proves to be very difficult, right, because the header say this, the slaves that are taken by the sleigh raiders, they don't live very long, today? it doesn't turn out to be a very, i should say profitable enterprise. i'm getting ahead of myself here? >> we lose track of these people once they're captured and sold. we have a couple of examples from the wampanoags of people who europeans captured. this is in the decade of 16 ten, so ten years before the arrival of mayflower. two examples of the wampanoags to the english captured brought to england and managed to make their way back armed with english language skills and a pretty fine sense of english culture and how it worked. examples like that are incredibly, incredibly rare. >> i think i'm getting a little ahead of myself because as far as i understand one reason why transatlantic slave trade and africans exploded was because it proved impossible to enslaved native americans for a number of reasons, but it might begin ahead of myself. >> well, the last 15 years of scholarship or so has exploded that idea. which you know, was standard fare in colonial american history courses for a long time. what we've now discovered is that over the course of the big colonial era, so 16th century all the way to the mid 19th century, europeans and then your pain columnist enslaved upwards of five and a half million indigenous people. hemispheric play, not within the boundaries of united states. so it's about 40 per cent of the transatlantic trade slave. in north america, this would be an english, french, dutch and, spanish colonies. during the 17th century, so during the 16 hundreds, you would've been as likely in a colonial setting to encounter native american slaves as africans. that will change dramatically in the 18th century largely because if you are in sleeping the people you live near it's a recipe for chronic war. it is safer to enslaved people from across the ocean then transfer them to a new land where there is no hope of escape, and be, no possibility of their home societies coming our shores. >> this is depressing. i don't think i want to celebrate thanksgiving. >> this is my. point >> i think i won talk about thanksgiving. that's a great point, thank you for letting me know my information, obviously is outdated there. she said trade, slave trading, or sleep taking and violence. we're not talking about full scale war. 1500 here. >> now. basically these and supporters will arrive off the coast, very often there and michelle contacts with a native people are more or less friendly. both sides are uneasy about the other. they will try to trade with one another, and then almost invariably something goes wrong. sometimes native people steal an object of the year pants, sometimes european rough up a native person or tried to kidnap one of them and when those incidents occur, the two sides exchanged blows. this happens over, and over, and over again on the coast. what that means is that by the time the mayflower passengers arrive, wampanoags have upwards of a century of experience with trading with your pants, slave rating by your pans, these coastal battles with your pants and they have the experience of the small number of wampanoags who have been taken to europe, and managed to find their way back. >> and they knew english. knew how to speak english. while. so they know who they were dealing with, they weren't strangers who just stumbled upon a dinner table one day. so one more important developments before we get to the so-called first thanksgiving. the wampanoags, which is the name of the school kids as far as i know aren't taught right off the bat. i mean i went to school on time, go pilgrims and indians. >> they're just the indians. >> right. they were ravaged by an epidemic disease break out a few years before the mayflower arrives. how did that such up the wampanoags to seek out an alliance with the english? >> yeah this is a key event. so among the things that are exchanged between europe and the americas, you know, we've already talked about the sort of fair trade, this now epidemic disease. so most of the rest of the world had what we call, crowded diseases. like smallpox, pneumonia, chicken pox, and we can go down the line which developed for a handful of reasons, but the two most important ones are that you have large urban centers in europe, asia, and africa. in those large urban centers people are living with livestock, cheek by jowl. it's a development for terrible diseases. native people didn't have livestock. they have the dog, the llama, and in the few cases, but they don't have the kind of draft animals are so common in much of the rest of the world. very rarely do they live in urban settings. so for a millennia they had been spared these diseases which so ravaged europe. then all of a sudden, they're in contact with the rest the world and it's a disaster. no i'm unity at all to these. they haven't developed immunity to these diseases, right. that's precisely it. you think a chicken pox, you get it as a kid, you're miserable for the, days and then we don't get as an adult. if you catch it wasn't built it, could be fatal. they don't have that experience. so in the case of the wampanoags, around 16 16, they contract a terrible disease. we don't know what it is. we don't know what it was. many european explorers acosta new england, they call it a plague. that could mean the bubonic plague, but it could mean anyone of a number of diseases. i suspect it was smallpox, we just don't know. >> smallpox is known to have killed 30% of the people who get it. so there was smallpox. >> with nursing. but if everyone is sick at the same time, which is a case one no one has had it before, it means everyone's down at once, which means, you're gonna have catastrophic losses of population. in this particular case, this disease is ravaging the wampanoags and their allies, the massachusetts people, and the southern up knock-y people. moving up the coast through massachusetts and maine. according to native testimony, some communities lost of words of 90% of -- >> oman. >> it's impossible to fathom, right. and they're devastated. there utterly deep populated. well, let their enemies to the west don't contract to the disease, which shows -- it says that they're not in regular contact with each other. will the narragansett pier take advantage of the wampanoags weakness to subjugate them to tributary status. we forcing them into a subordinate we position. and what do the wampanoags know about these europeans? they got guns, they have sorts, they have all sorts of metal tools, they have long history of conflict with these people, they realize well if we can harness these resources to our own ends, perhaps we can reestablish our independence from the narragansett pier. furthermore, you have a phrase social population that's been decimated, the wampanoags leader as mr. soya realizes that if he can corner the trade in european he can start to drop his people back under his authority. those two considerations, military alliance and controlling european trade, galvanizes the wampanoags to reach out to these people, to try to bring them into an alliance for the wampanoags benefit. >> so the myth that were taught is, and there's some truth to the, the indians did help them survive for the first couple winters, but there's more to it than that. >> it's not just that they're friendly, they're calculating. >> but yeah, didn't just watch them say hey, who is in first place on the al east. can you give me an update on that. so, with my wonderful interviewing skills or funding and get to the first thanksgiving, the first thanksgiving. the feast comes about by kind of an accident, right? >> that's exactly right. so the english have brought in their first harvest. up to that point, they are teetering on the edge of starvation, and it looks like plymouth could very well join a very long list of failed colonies. the 16th an early 17 century is littered with colonial attempts -- >> jamestown was like lord of the. flies >> in the case of jamestown, they actually had holed up anchor and was stealing away just as their new governor is coming up to chesapeake bay, it forces them to run, it could've gone -- plymouth almost goes the way. but they managed to bring in their first harvest, including indian corn, which native people have taught them how to grow. oh, okay, so it looks like they're going to survive longer than they had anticipated. they decide, it's time to take a break, pause, letter held down a little bit. >> did they dance? >> that's a good question. i now there are games of skill and strength. some target practice, wrestling, you know such. >> you don't want to offend god with this provocative dancing. i know the puritans did. >> yeah, you have to ask somebody about that, someone else about that. so they're having a feast. and then, all of a sudden we, the wampanoag leadership with 90 men. okay, well there's only about 50 english colonists at this party. and they're not all men. so all of these native warriors show up at plymouth colony. >> how did -- it's and they track them there? >> while this is a question. how could they show up so quickly? now, the wampanoag oral tradition is that the wampanoags heard the gunfire ring, the celebratory gunfire and thought that the colony was under assault from the french, for the spanish, or what have you and therefore they came to plymouth's defense. that would make sense, right? we have a leader, and you warriors are ready to go. i would point out that in almost any other early colonial context, a native leader with 90 men showing up would've produced a bloodbath. somebody would've gone trigger-happy and everything would've gone wrong. but they had established enough trust between the parties up to this point, that nobody overreacted and instead, the wampanoag stay when they contribute some dear to the feast, the to sit down together feast and celebrate together for a couple days, and that is over. i must point out, no one bag a big deal of this event. we have two very minor written accounts of this event. both of them are just a few lands long. in diplomacy between the two peoples in the years that followed, nobody mentioned it again. and when overt is important -- that people always mentioned at the beginning of diplomatic contacts. they always recite the history of the two people before they get down to serious talks. no one mentioned and again this was not a big deal to the parties the rather elements of their alliance there were more point of this event that we've memorialized over the generations. >> had not been recorded in these couple of instances that you mention, who knows if it would ever have -- a fire, a war, or a hurricane that destroyed the records which means that was it. we won't have that beautiful painting >> i forgot who did that painting. it's and one of the books of the -- >> third dozens of these paintings. they're all over america. >> very moving, well it's a moving story. >> right. that image is designed to reinforce the religious impulse of these we -- >> there is more history after that dinner of 16 21. what happens to the wampanoags on the pilgrims. how long does their lines last. what brings about its and? >> it's an uneasy alliance from the start. in the short term, buscemi glenn massasoit, the wampanoag lead when -- he did establish their independence. he did corner the english trade for a short period of time and by doing so enriched his people and enhanced his authority. but in the long term this alliance is a disaster because it gives people a beach head in southern england. ten years after the founding of prime, we see the founding of massachusetts. by the founding of plymouth -- massachusetts bay begins with a migration of 15,000 people over the course of ten years. and of those 15,000 people, the women of that migration were on average having eight children over the course of their childbearing years. here we have a recipe for a population explosion. meanwhile, native numbers are being reduced by epidemic disease furthermore, for every englishman who arrives in america, there are ten, 12, 20 head of livestock house courses she, coats, pigs. >> mainly territory, right it was comes at the expense of native people, so that by the time we get to the 16 50's english population is about equal with that of the native population but is also much more united. i was gonna ask you, are the native peoples, and there are a lot of shrubs that wound up fighting in what's called king philips war. >> wampanoag, -- good to me there she has an indian hours in the. one part of that were which i believe should place in the 16 70s where the native peoples, were they allied with one another as this european population explosion is happening. >> think of native america like europe. some states are alive -- allied with others some aren't. -- >> yeah. >> it is a multi polar political environment in which some charts or trying to expand at the expense of other groups another groups are trying to forge alliances to fend off that subjugation. >> i started our conversation with a half a joke about teaching your kids rather than doing thanksgiving pageants. you have them reenact a battle where there are -- your kind of reaction that would cause into's cultural climate, i was thinking of king philippe swore. i mentioned your book this land is their land. there's another book i want to mention to our audience today, an older book by joe a poor, a fine historian, called the name of war. king philippe swore, the origins of american identity. i did not know anything about this one in 12 on this book at a shelf in a bookstore about ten years ago. what we taught him is kids. friendliness on a lot of lessons, even at the college level i don't take courses about native americans. how -- we don't time to get into everything about james phillips war. but how important was this as a turning point in european or english, or white, relations with indians. >> it's critical. it is the war that establishes english -- over southern new england. the war is not purely an indian clan neil war. there are very few indian colonial. by which i mean this. colonists very rarely fight wars against native people without native allies. so what you normally have our colonial indian versus indian wars. and that certainly is the case here. the english had some powerful indian allies,. >> they do. including the wampanoags who had adopted christianity. and the mohawks among others. but by and large, most native people in southern new england rise up in this war against english expansion. this eludes to the question that you were asking earlier. do these people see the -- united people see themselves as indians? well in the colonial period starts, now. they don't have anywhere to suggest such an idea. europeans don't see themselves as white either. >> not at all. but by -- one field war starts, they have adopted the english word indian to describe their common identity. what you have and the run up to this where our native leaders meeting on a regular basis. native leaders who normally don't get along with each other saying for all of our differences, we have to recognize that these newcomers represent a threat to all of us. but they are going to destroy our way of life, we're going to render us all endless, and slaves. and if we don't unite, we're all done, done for. >> the poor makes appointed you just said about racial differences. the ideas of racial difference on the start of racial categorizations, or racial identity. she said europeans had contemplated the possibility with encounters yuck -- a rigid system of racial classification would be centuries in development but this is where it starts. do you agree with her on? >> now. i think in the context of new england, this is where it starts. but this is a complex process taking place throughout the atlantic world during this period of time. what i will note is this. the racial category indian, is invented insulin. meaning it has people in -- white is going to like behind. that colonists routinely treat all indigenous people as the same. long before there is this notion of a white identity uniting various peoples of western europe. that's going to develop in the late 17th century and become more normal over the course of the 18th. >> and king philippe was an indian? or he was a wampanoag. >> he's the son of buscemi glenn. yuck so there's a powerful family story here. the father head forge this alliance with the english of the mayflower. the sun leads the multi tribal uprising against english expansion. and it's quite poignant that when this war ends, on the very sites where that first thanksgiving takes place, the english pie phillips head. the son of the man who permitted their colony to survive. they left it there to rot for 20 years as a reminder. >> 20 years? >> as a reminder for about the cost of resisting colonial rule. >> can we draw a line between king philips warren andrew jackson speech in 1829 on indian removal? >> yeah. >> a continuous line? >> yeah, well i think we can. so andrew jackson says to justify. he's trying to cast removal as a humanitarian effort rather than a power play in an exploitative effort. he says look, if we allow the cherokee's in the creates and the so on and so forth to remain where they are, they will suffer the same fate as the mohegans and the delawares and the -- and in our humanity we cannot possibly permit that to occur. >> they're surrounded by superior civilization so for their own good let's move on. so in the ideas that savages cannot survive in contact with civilization. >> he's not entirely wrong in most native people in the east managed to survive these colonial wars, largely by signing with the colonists. in the suffered enormously in the way. >> the wampanoags barely hang on, right? >> what happens to them after the war's? well, the english encroach on their land they drive them in the -- and force not only the adults, -- precisely why native people rose up and tinkle soar in the first place. but, the very groups that andrew jackson named were surviving on small plots of the very land. i think if he had been interested in with the cherokee's thought among other people, and he wasn't, they would've taken, barely surviving on their ancestral lands to being forced and mass west of the mississippi. >> there's a lot of tragedy in the story. it's not all tragic, but i guess that depends on your perspective, right as an american citizen living today. i look back in american history, i found a lot to be inspired by, on this plenty of good, but a lot of what we've been talking about here today is tragic, you can even say, evil in some respects. was it genocide? >> well, the historical profession is having a reason debate over this issue today. let's just start with the big picture here. we don't know the total population, native population of the america on the eve of contact. suffice it to say it was in the tens of millions of people. >> 14 91? >> sure, we don't know the -- dirt there about 250,000 indigenous people. what do you want to call that? now we're not talking about industrial genocide like the yuck nazi holocaust. what we talk about his death by 1000 cars. removal would be a perfect example we're talking about andrew jackson's as we're doing this to return -- removal takes place over the course of 15 years. by the end of the first year we the united states government -- >> and genocide, there are cultural aspects of genocides one china. it's not, as you just said, industrial mass murder in hole, or in part with the intention to wipe a certain people out, right because of who they are. their culture aspects to it, right. if you destroy somebody's culture under raphael's definition of genocide that is genocide. >> first of the united states does participate in mass murder. study the plains wars, that is a strategy of the united states to kill women, children, and the elderly, and starve civilian populations into submission. >> this is the second half the 19th century. >> from the cohen implored onwards. this is a consistent pattern in colonial indian war for and then in the united states. >> wiping out villages in the revolutionary war. once it subjugates people, it really gets them to the worst tracks of land on the continent where they can bring then it takes the kits from them. it forces them into boarding schools, to try to de-tribalism. the united states has signed on to a human definition of genocide. we take a look at it like i. think the definition fits. it includes by the way taking peoples kids from them. so this is a word that understandably gets people's backs up. makes people defensive. let me say this. when you study native american like i do, you see the united states through and a set of eyes. it's a valuable perspective. and i think everyone in this country would benefit by taking a deep breath and looking this difficult history square in the face and reckoning with it. >> we're gonna close with the question you don't teach this history, and this it is history. it's not propaganda, or stories designed to make us feel good. you don't teach this history to make people stop celebrating thanksgiving. you want people simply to, if we can have an origin story, to be based in fact. >> well, i love thanksgiving. it's my favorite holiday of the year. and i'm not in any way trying to cancel thanksgiving, or declare war on thanksgiving. >> has anyone accused you of canceling thanksgiving? >> yes. left and right. >> really? >> here's what i'm saying. you can celebrate thanksgiving without invoking a false, and i think damaging history. we can get together with family and friends. we can offer thanks for it's good in our lives without referencing pilgrims, indians, in a sugar coated colonial history. indeed, white americans celebrate thanksgiving through the 16 hundreds, the 1700s, and the early 1800s without ever invoking this false history. it is a fairly recent invention. what i say is let's really get the mid to the dustbin of late -- and retain the holiday and on that's good about it. >> the wampanoags to this day, have a day of mourning on thanksgiving. right? >> some do. one of my wampanoag -- asked ten wampanoags, you'll get about what they think about thanksgiving, you'll get a handgun and sirs. some have a traditional thanksgiving, like any other american. others will hold a traditional thanksgiving, and go to this day of mourning protest. morning with you, that they hold in plymouth everything's going to. others say the columnist holiday, we want nothing to do. it >> decolonize a holiday? >> do you call him as a holiday. we can take issue with that given their ordeals. i take the point of the organizers of the day and morning, and it's one of the renewed sense that i wrote this book. this mess hurts our indigenous countrymen and women who deserve to have truth in our national holidays. who deserve to be able to see themselves in a national holidays. and for that matter, i think it's hurtful to other americans by blinding them to the reality of our colonial past. >> when are certain about these things are said, oh my gosh hot and different i have been. these -- we can't be children forever. we can part with childish fairytales in a sense about who we are as a people. not to throw out in the garbage, and one of the aim of mike podcast is to get people start thinking about these things, to put it, simply take the good with the bad. there's no such thing as a totally good person, or good nation, or a totally batter evil person, with a couple of possible exception of, that one being adolf hitler probably. >> i think we have emotional attachments to this. thank you for good citizen to good country historically great country that broke ground, broke new frontiers, a new age. the age of enlightenment, and the declaration of independence, and the -- of congress and all that. when you learn about this as a kid, it's not about the facts, it's emotional. it takes an emotional toll on. you >> write, -- in closing. you said a quote from the book the critical histories harder -- let me be clear, the sister's hard on native people to. seeing their own astors in three dimensional form is difficult because they like to think of their ancestors as better than all of us. as better than themselves. >> every nations origin story has greatness in it. >> none of our ancestors can live up to that standard. and what i will say yay is this. i know it's hard on the general public to have historians continuously poking holes in their cherished myths, but you don't want to live in a society where you don't have a class of professional historians living that role, because then we will be subject to the manipulations of politicians. when they're not interested in getting the past right, all they're interested in us doing is supporting their agendas. >> and for a long time historians were propagandist as well. >> they were always historians who are propaganda. we have to fight within our own protests against. we self policing that way. >> david solomon, on that note, i will wish you a happy thanksgiving. just a little bit of water here, do you see water. i don't think all of you for listening and watching this episode of history as it happens. >> and with great confidence in our caucus, i will not seek reelection to democratic leadership in the next congress. >> in november how speaker nancy pelosi announced that she was stepping down after two decades in the top leadership spot. and on sunday, christmas day, we'll talk about journalist susan page who wrote a biography on miss pelosi. we'll discuss the lawmakers most memorable moments as party leader using the c-span archives. >> electing the speaker, you have brought us closer to the ideal of equality, that is americas heritage and america's hope. this is a historic moment, and i think the leader for acknowledging it. thank you mr. banner, it's a historic moment for the congress, it's a historic moment for the women of america. [applause] >> what our conversation on speaker of the house nancy pelosi's career sunday at 10 am eastern on c-span and online at c-span.org. >> the new 118 congress convenes on tuesday, january 3rd at noon eastern for the first time in two years i returned to washington as a divided government. republicans will control the house of representatives, will democrats retain control of the senate by a slim majority. the new incoming members are younger, with an average age of 47, compared to the average age of 58 in the previous session. the new congress will also be more diverse with a record number of women serving, including more women of color. follow the process as the 118 congress gavels into session, holds the election for new speaker of the house, and new members take the oath of office. new congress, new leaders. watch the opening day of the 118 congress, tuesday, january 3rd at a noon eastern, live on c-span and c-span two. also on c-span our free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. >> this week, explore the people and events that tell the american story. every day on american history tv on c-span 3, and watch our featured program on saturday at c-span 2 at four premised or a look at holiday hope during the holocaust with the u.s. holocaust memorial museum island -- jewish people that defied the nazi regime -- amid occupation in the holocaust. and a ten peony stern, military historian harry lever exams george what shrink crossing of the delaware river christmas day 1776. and the situation of the american revolution that led george washington post this military gamble and beat the haitians at the battle of trenton. exploring the american story, watch american history tv all this week on c-span 3. saturday on c-span two, and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. >> weekends on c-span two are an intellectual feast. every saturday, american history documents america story, and on sunday's book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span two comes from these television companies
New-yorkUnited-statesPhiladelphiaPennsylvaniaWashingtonChinaBostonMassachusettsSouth-shoreVirginiaMassachusetts-bayRussia