This ecosystem engineering mostly took the form of controlled burns. The Pilgrims therefore enjoyed the benefits of living in an area which had been, until recently, a site of likely substantial ecosystem engineering by the Patuxet. Squanto was said to have been the last surviving Patuxet as he had been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Europe in 1614, thereby avoiding the disease outbreak that killed the rest of his tribe. The land around Plymouth was so productive because in fact, Plymouth was built directly on the village of Patuxet, a Native American settlement that had been abandoned not long before because of an epidemic disease outbreak. The Pilgrims landed in a region of North America that had been tended to by its Native inhabitants for generations. Archaeologists, historians, and environmental scientists have long recognized that Native peoples actively managed their environments-and of course Native peoples themselves have long said this was the case. It is a mistake to imagine the landscape of North America as a pristine and untouched wilderness prior to the arrival of Europeans. The land around Plymouth Colony was likely so productive due to thousands of years of modification and management by Native peoples, who had created a symbiotic network of connections between people, plants, and other animals. While the Pilgrims thanked their God for the natural abundance of their new home, they should have been thanking the Native American inhabitants of the region. But why was the land around Plymouth so productive? Why was the soil so fertile, and why were plant and animal resources so abundant there? The ease at which the Pilgrims and Wampanoag were able to harvest and hunt speaks to the existence of the highly productive environment that the Pilgrims were celebrating. The Pilgrims wrote that the feast in the autumn of 1621 was to give thanks to God for leading them to a place where they had “ all things in good plenty.” After the harvest of corn was brought in, a group of Wampanoag men went out and returned with five deer, and four Englishmen killed enough waterfowl to last the colony a week, while others hunted turkeys. In addition to its historical context of colonial conflict, the First Thanksgiving must also be put into its ecological context. The English saw this event as divine justice against the Pequot “ wrought so wonderfully” by God, and the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a day of thanksgiving in response. The several hundred Pequot men, women and children inside the fortified village were all killed or burned alive. In 1637, during the Pequot War, a contingent of English soldiers and their Native allies surrounded and burned a Pequot village near present-day Mystic, Conn. While not the inspiration for the Thanksgiving holiday we now celebrate, one such day of thanksgiving was announced in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to celebrate the event now known as the Mystic Massacre. Thanksgiving celebrations were regular occurrences in colonial North America, with some commemorating the sort of colonial violence that would become commonplace. The English and the local tribes were highly suspicious of one another, and violence between them would become increasingly common in subsequent years. In contrast, fewer than 50 Pilgrims had survived that first winter. After all, 90 Wampanoag warriors showed up at Plymouth, likely unannounced. The feast was almost certainly a tense political moment, not a carefree celebration of cross-cultural understanding. While the legend describes how two cultures came together peacefully to enjoy a meal, the reality was likely rather different. This year marks the 400th anniversary of that feast, which would later be considered the mythical origin of the Thanksgiving holiday we celebrate today.īut we must place the “First Thanksgiving” into its proper historical context: one of brutal violence under colonialism. Sometime that autumn, the colonists enjoyed a three-day feast with the Wampanoag chief Massasoit (also known as Ousamequin) and 90 of his men who came to Plymouth. This was largely thanks to help from the neighboring Wampanoag people and particularly the now-famous Tisquantum, or Squanto. Yet by the autumn of 1621-exactly 400 years ago-their situation had improved. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony struggled greatly that first winter, with half of the Mayflower’s passengers dying of tuberculosis and pneumonia before spring arrived. It had been a harrowing two month-long voyage from England on the Mayflower, but their troubles were far from over. When the Pilgrims landed on the shores of what is now Cape Cod in late November of 1620, they “ fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven” for delivering them to a safe harbor.
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