Some Find Very Little to Celebrate

Thanksgiving just hasn’t been the same in these parts since the Boat People came.

They washed ashore a ways up the beach, chilled and hungry, disease-ridden, dirty and stinking, not having bathed in six weeks. They couldn’t speak the language and wouldn’t learn it, belonged to an odd religious cult, had no respect for property rights and no job skills in the local economy. They survived the first year--by robbing graves and taking charity.

Some of the old families of Cape Cod took food baskets to the newcomers’ first Thanksgiving--and never even got invited back.

Now Amelia Bingham is so upset she won’t celebrate the holiday. “I think maybe I’ll just have a fish.”

The old neighborhood’s been going down ever since the illegal aliens arrived. That was 134,318 days ago, and Mrs. Bingham is still disgusted.

On Thursday night, however, her table will have a distinction vital to early Thanksgiving feasts.

The guests will be American Indians, her family.

Despite her blue-nose Yankee name, Bingham is clan mother (“the old lady of the tribe”) of the Mashpee Wampanoags.

Remember the Wampanoags?

As the old grammar-school texts have it, they were the guests, the happy natives, at the very first Thanksgiving dinner of those kindly Christians in white collars, the Pilgrims.

But not really.

It was Indian largess that made the day.

What happened is that a certain Wampanoag, name of Tisquantum, had been helping the Pilgrims get through their awful first year.

He taught them how to hunt animals they’d never seen; he showed them which plants were edible, what the growing seasons were--”to plant the corn seeds when the oak leaves in spring were the size of squirrel ears”--and when to harvest.

Wampanoags did go to the Pilgrims’ first celebration of giving thanks in 1621. They brought the meat.

A letter written soon after by one Edward Winslow states: “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together . . . many of the Indians amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoit with some 90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor. . . . “

It is disputed, however, how many actually sat down with the Pilgrims. Slow Turtle, a.k.a. John Peters, brother of Bingham and medicine man of the Wampanoags and executive director of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs, is the one who scorns the Mayflower forebears as “Boat People.”

And he opines that only one Wampanoag actually ate dinner with them. “The rest stayed well back, afraid of their nasty diseases.”

Perhaps. From Pugwash to Patagonia, natives were showing newcomers how to find food and getting sick for their trouble. Indians introduced the Europeans to 80% of the foods that Americans take for granted today, including corn, turkey, pumpkin, cranberries, chile peppers, potatoes, yams, raspberries, blueberries, Concord grapes--and tobacco and chewing gum.

In exchange, according to University of Minnesota sociologist Russell Thornton in his book, “American Indian Holocaust and Survival,” the Indians received introductions to bubonic plague, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, whooping cough, gonorrhea and common colds.

Not that the Americas came close to French philosopher Rousseau’s notion of a paradise of Noble Savages. Thornton says afflictions already present included bacillary and amoebic dysentery, viral fevers, roundworms, pellagra and salmonella.

Recently, some scientists cited archeological evidence that the Indians had non-venereal syphilis and passed it to the Europeans, among whom it became a sexual disease.

Still, the Indians’ end of the bargain was, as Thornton calls it, “a demographic collapse”--a holocaust proportionately as destructive as any the world has known. He counts up to 93 epidemics and pandemics of Old World pathogens wasting the Indians until the beginning of this century. They simply had no immunities to Eurogerms.

When Columbus bumped into some Caribbean island in 1492, Thornton calculates, there were 5 million Indians in what is now the United States.

By 1850, only 250,000 could be counted.

Today, their numbers are climbing back, toward 2 million, at a rate of growth twice that of this nation as a whole. Yet they make up little more than one-half of 1% of the American population. And they remain among the poorest, least-educated, shortest-lived of all Americans.

The Public Health Service reports the Indian death rate from alcoholism is 3.8 times that for all races in the United States. They are 1.8 times more likely to be murdered, 1.3 times more likely to die of suicide. According to the 1980 census, median household income for Indians was $11,471, compared with $16,841 for the American population at large. Nearly one in three lives below the poverty level.

That’s why Slow Turtle says today, “If you want to know what I’m doing for Thanksgiving, it’s nothing. What have I got to be thankful for? Dirty air? Dirty water? It’s not Indian air. It’s not Indian water. It’s for all of us. But look what these Boat People have done to the land and the water and the air! What kind of people are these who destroy the future of their own children and grandchildren? What are they giving thanks for?”

Another question Indians keep asking themselves: Why did old Massasoit even go to the Pilgrim’s feast?

“Political expediency,” says Nanepashemet, a historian and Wampanoag. “A plague, contracted from the crew of the European slaver Captain Thomas Hunt, who raided the coast in 1614, had greatly weakened us in the years just before the Pilgrims got here. Maybe one in five was left alive. The Wampanoag could muster only a few hundred warriors. Our enemies to the West, the Narragansetts, were far enough away to have escaped the epidemic and could field maybe 5,000. And the Europeans had the guns. We thought they would protect us.”

It is arguable that the Pilgrims would never have been able to found “Plimoth Plantation” on the Cape had it not been for disease among the Indians that wiped out whole tribes.

As it was, they simply moved into the ruins of the Wampanoag village of Pawtuxet.

All they had to do, says Bette Haskins of Harvard’s American Indian Program, was sweep away the human bones that littered the ground because no Pawtuxet was alive to bury the dead.

The advantage of being able to take possession of cleared ground was incalculable in a thickly forested land where an ordinary hardwood tree was three feet thick.

Even so, Haskins asserts, the Pilgrims were so ill-prepared, so lacking in tools and provisions, they were soon reduced to grave-robbing. “They found that Native people buried their dead with stores of corn and beans. The Pilgrims dug up many graves, taking the food.”

But that and the handouts from the Wampanoags weren’t enough. Out of 103 who landed on the Mayflower, only 55 survived the winter. That first Thanksgiving dinner for 50 white and 90 Indian men invited along with Massasoit was cooked by just five women--the only ones left alive.

One thing sure about that dinner, the Pilgrims weren’t giving thanks for Indian help. Gov. William Bradford wrote in 1620 that America was unpeopled country, “being devoyd of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men, which range up and downe, litle otherwise than the wild beasts of the same.”

This was an attitude repeated wherever the white people met the Indians. In Virginia in 1607, as the colonists were starving, Capt. John Smith wrote: “Our provision being now within twentie dayes spent, the Indians brought us great store bothe of Corne and bread already made. . . . With fish, oysters, bread and deere, they kindly traded with me and my men. . . . “

But within 15 years, he was calling them “hell-hounds” who “put on a more unnatural brutishness than beasts.” Justifying a war on them, he wrote: “where before we were troubled in clearing the ground of great Timber, which was to them of small use; now we may take their own plaine fields and Habitations, which are the pleasantest places in the Countrey. Besides, the Deere, Turkies and other Beasts and Fowles will exceedingly increase if we beat the Salvages out of the Countrey.”

Very efficiently they did just that.

In his book, Thornton cites one recorded incident when the Virginia colonists negotiated a treaty with rebellious tribes in the Potomac River area: “After a toast was drunk symbolizing eternal friendship, the Chiskiack chief and his sons, advisers and followers, totaling 200, abruptly dropped dead from poisoned sack, and the soldiers put the remainder out of their misery.”

Out on Cape Cod, the Wampanoags are remarkable for having been able to hang on right where they were when white colonists first arrived.

They lost most of their population, lost their language, lost many of their traditions, lost almost all of their land and even lost their original looks, now showing traces of white and black blood.

But they’re still here, most notably at Mashpee and on the Gay Head cliffs of Martha’s Vineyard. There are 7,000 to 13,000 Indians in Massachusetts. Maybe 3,000 of them are Wampanoag. Nobody even bothered to try to tally Indians until the 1980 census, and the true head count of American Indians is still in dispute.

Yes, the Wampanoags survive all right, as something of a minor pain in the Back Bay. In Massachusetts, state spending on Indian matters is being cut by a third--to a not-so-grand total of $52,000 a year.

As Slow Turtle’s assistant, Burne Stanley, puts it: “Very soon, the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs will consist of one Indian sitting at one desk in somebody else’s office.”

The Wampanoags haven’t had a lot of luck with the judicial system, either.

A few years back, they filed suit to gain title to the land around Mashpee. The case was dismissed. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. As Amelia Bingham recalls it: “The judges say it would set a precedent all up and down the East Coast.” Slow Turtle puts it this way: “You think a judge is going to give Indians the land the bank sits on?”

So today, in Mashpee, immigrants have found something that may prove more effective than disease and warfare for getting rid of the Wampanoags.

It’s called taxes.

The natives had governed themselves from 1870 until 1967, when the influx of non-Indians tipped the voting balance and newcomers took over the local government. Mashpee, one of few towns missed by developers, became the site of several vast projects of shopping centers and summer homes.

“Property taxes are stacked against us,” contends Bingham. “Most Wampanoag own several acres. But because of the developers, half-acre lots are valued at $25,000. Most of our people work as laborers. They cannot afford those rates. Today, our young people are having to leave. Yes, yes, I know that happens in white communities where developers go in. But our young people have never left. I mean never. I mean in 10,000 years!”

Nanepashemet, the Wampanoag historian, sees no future for Indians on the Cape, and no point in Thanksgiving.

He is wryly amused by the ironies of his life. He was born on Nov. 26, on which Thanksgiving sometimes falls. He works at Plimoth Plantation, the tourist attraction that tries to re-create life here in the 1620s.

Nanepashemet portrays the Indians who helped the Pilgrims get settled, but he doesn’t make enough money to buy his own home.

“As far as setting aside one day of your life to give thanks, that’s a sign of a very ungrateful people,” he says. “Amongst our people, children are taught to give thanks every day for the simple fact of being alive. A lot of our ceremonies are of thanksgiving, not just one.”

On Thursday, he’s not sure what he’ll do. He’s got the day off, and maybe he’ll drive to Plymouth and go to the statue of Massasoit that stands on the hill above Plymouth Rock.

That’s where, for the past 18 years, Indians from across America have gathered to mark Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning.

“The first year there were 500 of us. In recent years, there’ve been about 100. There are speeches about our past history, about present issues, about the rain forest. Unfortunately, most people have heard it all before. You see the same people every year.”

From where they stand, the Indians cannot see the Rock. It is topped with an edifice that looks for some reason like a tiny Greek temple. But they make jokes about it. The Wampanoag have a saying, that the Pilgrims upon landing fell first upon their knees, then upon the aborigines.

“If only,” Nanepashemet muses, “Plymouth Rock had landed on them.”