This year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Plymouth Colony by the Pilgrims in 1620. Plymouth was the first English settlement to establish itself successfully in the New World. You might think that the four-century mark of that event would be cause for big commemorations. Instead, there has been barely a peep.
Today, the trendy thing is to feel nothing but guilt and shame for the expansion of European civilization, particularly the English version, into North America. After all, there were indigenous people here when the first settlers arrived. What right did the English or other European settlers have to occupy this territory? To demonstrate its politically-correct bona fides, Google affiliate YouTube (among many others) took the occasion of Thanksgiving Day to celebrate instead something they call “Unthanksgiving,” a day of “Indigenous history, activism and resistance”:
Unthanksgiving is about acknowledging, educating, and honoring centuries of Indigenous resistance. Coinciding with New England’s National Day of Mourning, . . . Native Americans and Indigenous persons have shared their experiences, using Unthanksgiving as an opportunity for intergenerational and intercultural dialogue,
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Perhaps you may have the idea that prior to the Pilgrims North America was inhabited by Noble Savages living in peace and harmony with nature and each other. Then the evil Europeans arrived to commit plunder and rape and genocide. This is certainly the view pushed by much of trendy academia today, following the lead of America-hating Howard Zinn. But if you want a more full picture of the reality of the Native Americans at the time of early settlement, there are plenty of decent sources to look to. Two that I can recommend are Charles Mann’s “1491,” and Francis Parkman’s “France and England in North America.”
“1491” came out in 2005, and definitely has a more native-admiring perspective than Parkman’s opus, which was published over many years in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, an overriding issue permeates both books in their descriptions of native life pre- and shortly post-Columbus: the Indian tribes were engaged in constant, endless, brutal, murderous warfare against each other. Mann’s book has particularly harrowing accounts of the wars conducted by the Aztecs against their predecessors in the region that is today Mexico City.
