Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
November 7, 2021
Suddenly, it’s November. Like the trees, who spend autumn drawing nourishment back into their roots, we, too, find that our instincts begin to turn us inward, toward memory and introspection. We begin to think back on all those who have gone before us, and their stories.
Our theme for this month is Holding History. What are our stories, and how do we remember and tell them? And of course, November is also a time when we begin to plan for our great holiday centered on giving thanks. Spiritually, November is an important time.
It struck me that this would be a good time for us to think back to our childhoods, and to remember the stories we learned about the First Thanksgiving.
I imagine if you attended school in the United States that you remember this narrative well:
The Pilgrims came ashore at what would become Plymouth in early December of 1620. The land appeared uninhabited, with virgin forests, and so they claimed it as their own. The Pilgrims practically starved that first winter. Malnutrition and disease took many members of the tiny colony. Then when spring came, the survivors made contact with friendly indigenous people, including one who spoke English, who showed them how to plant corn and beans and squash. Their first harvest was very successful, and so they gathered to have a harvest festival to give thanks for the bounty and for their survival. The Pilgrims invited their friends, the local Indians, to join them for a feast.
That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But what if the narrative had a different side to it, the story told by the indigenous people? Well, that story, well-documented, goes something like this.
The Pilgrims were not the first to make contact with indigenous people. The Atlantic coast was well-known to English seamen, who beginning in the 1500’s travelled up and down the coast seeking to trade for furs. The part we were never told was that they would trick indigenous people onto their ships, and hold them captive, ultimately selling them as slaves in the Caribbean, or in Spain and eventually England.
One of the stories we learned was that the Pilgrims were helped by a friendly Wampanoag named Squanto. Did we ever stop to wonder how it was that Squanto (whose real name was Tisquantum, by the way) spoke English? We knew he had been to England. Did we ever stop to wonder why? Tisquantum had been captured and sold in Spain, was befriended by sailors returning to England, and shortly before the Pilgrims arrived, managed to make his way home. I guess I was absent from school the day they shared that.
In the years before the Pilgrims landed the English ships also brought smallpox to the Massachusetts coast, and the Wampanoag people were decimated; there are estimates that around 90% of people died. Thriving villages were gone; fields of corn were overgrown.
The Wampanoag, greatly diminished, were threatened by the neighboring Narragansetts, who had somehow largely managed to escape the smallpox epidemic. And so it was that the Wampanoag made a fateful decision: their leader, who we know as Massasoit, but whose real name was Ousamequin, decided to offer an alliance with the English to help protect his people from the Narragansett. The English accepted, and the two offered mutual support. Now, in the end, we see that Ousamequin, or Massasoit, protected his people in the short term, but over time they lost most of the tribal lands as more and more white settlers arrived in Plymouth Colony. Some of his people had advocated allying with the Narragansett in order to drive off the white settlers. Remember, they had been watching for close to 100 years as the English raided them, stole from them, and captured them.
We know the outcome: we have all heard of King Philip’s War, when the native population, its lands disappearing, tried to fight back. It was too late. Most indigenous people left this area, for Canada, for the west. Historians think that the people who lived here on Cape Ann and as far west as Lowell, the Pawtucket, ultimately made their way to what is now Wisconsin.
Two people, two histories. Which one do we hold?
For hundreds of years now, we’ve held on to, we’ve handed down, the settlers’ version. This sanitized version grew in importance in the 19th century, during the Civil War, when we desperately needed an origin story and a holiday to unite around. The story of the first Thanksgiving was amplified and has come down to us since that time.
Was there a feast? Were the Indians invited? Well yes, and no. There was indeed a feast, and in celebration, according to a Wampanoag historian, the settlers were firing their weapons. The Wampanoag decided they had better pay a visit to see what all the noise and gunfire was about. They ended up camping nearby to keep an eye on things, and there was apparently some casual visiting and sharing of food. (in “Unequal Helpings,” by Ted Resnikoff, an interview with Ramona Peters, https://www.uua.org/blueboat/guides/unequal-helpings-%E2%80%93-thanksgiving-history)
Two people, two histories. How do we balance the two? Is there room in our hearts to hold both?
The United States is at something of a crossroads right now. Today, in this era of social media and much more equal access to the microphones that create public opinion, more and more people who have been oppressed and marginalized are finding ways to tell their stories. It is an uncomfortable time, as cherished stories are challenged, are discovered to be only partly true, and the ancestors we were taught to revere are discovered to have beliefs and have committed actions that we find hard to swallow. Statues of people long thought to be heroes are torn down. Buildings and streets are renamed. In a society that is conditioned to think always in terms of winners and losers, suddenly many white people feel threatened. They fear the loss of their cherished stories, and part of their identity.
All across America these days we are hearing reports of conflict at local school board meetings with angry parents trying to prevent their children from being taught new stories, different history. We see this fear of loss, of losing the narrative, and hear comments such as, “We don’t want our children to be made to feel guilty! To hate being white!” And of course, that is not the intent. But people fear losing. They know no other way to respond.
It’s a frustrating time in our history. How can we be our best as a country if we cannot bear to look at the different histories, and accept that we have complicated pasts? How will we ever heal; be able to forgive and to be forgiven, if half of the stories remain hidden from view? In short, we cannot. We will never heal this way.
In Unitarian Universalism, we are guided by our fourth principle: we affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We are seekers of truth; we examine our religious beliefs, we believe in science and knowledge. We believe that the path forward to growth for ourselves and our society leads through dark forests sometimes, but is always guiding us ultimately toward the light.
Now some might say that all is required of us is intellectual curiosity, and of course that is important. But there has to be something else besides the desire for knowledge. What is it that allows us to move along the path toward understanding, toward being woke, putting aside our very human fear of what we might discover, of what we might lose?
Always, the response to fear must be courage. Courage, which comes from the root ‘coeur’, which is French for ‘heart’.
For this reason, it is not enough to be dedicated to a free and responsible search for truth. That sounds so very heady. We must follow our hearts as well, and be brave enough to allow them to break, to feel the heartbreak of learning a new story. Following our hearts is a choice that takes courage.
I will leave you with one more story – this will be a month of stories! This one is told by Parker Palmer, the Quaker educator and writer:
“Jewish teaching includes frequent reminders of the importance of a broken-open heart, as in this Hasidic tale: A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.” (as told in Soul Matters packet, November 2021)
“One day the heart breaks, and the words fall in.”
This congregation is no stranger to heartbreak, of many different kinds, or to courage. Think of the books we’ve been reading together, the conversations we’ve had. Think how many of you have shown up for racial justice, even in the midst of the pandemic. You have demonstrated over and over again your willingness to seek the truth, to look at hard topics straight on. You allow your hearts to be broken.
I know I shied away from thinking deeply about our Thanksgiving story for many years. It’s my favorite holiday. I was a child when the Wampanoag began to hold a National Day of Mourning in Plymouth on Thanksgiving, and I tended to put those images and words out of my mind. But as a UU my mind is not meant for games of hide and seek, and I understand and embrace the actions of the Wampanoags to demand that their story be told.
We all know heartbreak. As one of my professors used to say, “We are all cracked pots.” But in the words of the famous song, ‘that’s how the light gets in.’ May we have the faith and the courage to remember to allow our hearts to break, to allow the light to find its way in, and to make room for all the stories.
May it be so,
Amen.
For further reading:
https://www.uua.org/blueboat/guides/unequal-helpings-%E2%80%93-thanksgiving-history
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/thanksgiving-belongs-wampanoag-tribe/602422/
