1637 Pequot Massacre: The Real Story Of Thanksgiving

Thu Nov 22 13:36:19 GMT 2018

1637 Pequot Massacre:  The Real Story Of Thanksgiving

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<http://tlio.org.uk/author/tony/>TONY GOSLING 
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Manataka American Indian Council
Introduction for Teachers

<https://www.manataka.org/page269.html>https://www.manataka.org/page269.html

The Plymouth Thanksgiving Story

<https://www.manataka.org/page269.html>THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING

by Susan Bates

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Most of us associate the holiday with happy 
Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast.  And that did happen  once.

The story began in 1614 when a band of English 
explorers sailed home to  England with a ship 
full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They 
left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out 
those who had escaped.  By the time the Pilgrims 
arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one 
living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who 
had survived slavery in England and knew their 
language.  He taught them to grow corn and to 
fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the 
Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of 
their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast 
honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.

But as word spread in England about the paradise 
to be found in the new world, religious zealots 
called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. 
Finding no fences around the land, they 
considered it to be in the public domain. Joined 
by other British settlers, they seized land, 
capturing strong young Natives for slaves and 
killing the rest.  But the Pequot Nation had not 
agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated 
and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of 
the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought.

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In 1637 near present day  Groton, Connecticut, 
over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot 
Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn 
Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. 
In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were 
surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who 
ordered them to come outside.  Those who came out 
were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified 
women and children who huddled inside the 
longhouse were burned alive. The next day the 
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared 
A Day Of Thanksgiving because 700 unarmed men, 
women and children had been murdered.

Cheered by their victory, the brave colonists 
and their Indian allies attacked village after 
village. Women and children over 14 were sold 
into slavery while the rest were murdered.  Boats 
loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left 
the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for 
Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.

Following an especially successful raid against 
the Pequot in what is now  Stamford, Connecticut, 
the churches announced a second day of 
thanksgiving to celebrate victory over the 
heathen savages.  During the feasting, the hacked 
off heads of Natives were kicked through the 
streets like soccer balls.  Even the friendly 
Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief 
was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in 
Plymouth, Massachusetts  where it remained on display for 24 years.

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The killings became more and more frenzied, with 
days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each 
successful massacre. George Washington finally 
suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per 
year be set aside instead of celebrating each and 
every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed 
Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday 
during the Civil War  on the same day he ordered 
troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.

This story doesnt have quite the same fuzzy 
feelings associated with it as the one where the 
Indians and Pilgrims are all sitting down 
together at the big feast.  But we need to learn 
our true history so it wont ever be 
repeated.  Next  Thanksgiving, when you gather 
with your loved ones to Thank God for all your 
blessings, think about those people who only 
wanted to live their lives and raise their 
families.  They, also took time out to say thank 
you to Creator for all their blessings.

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Our Thanks to Hill & Holler Column by Susan Bates  susanbates at webtv.net

More About Thanksgiving

INTRODUCTION FOR TEACHERS

By Chuck Larsen

This is a particularly difficult introduction to 
write. I have been a public schools teacher for 
twelve years, and I am also a historian and have 
written several books on American and Native 
American history. I also just happen to be 
Quebeque French, Metis, Ojibwa, and Iroquois. 
Because my Indian ancestors were on both sides of 
the struggle between the Puritans and the New 
England Indians and I am well versed in my 
cultural heritage and history both as an 
Anishnabeg (Algokin) and Hodenosione (Iroquois), 
it was felt that I could bring a unique insight to the project.

For an Indian, who is also a school teacher, 
Thanksgiving was never an easy holiday for me to 
deal with in class. I sometimes have felt like I 
learned too much about the Pilgrims and the 
Indians. Every year I have been faced with the 
professional and moral dilemma of just how to be 
honest and informative with my children at 
Thanksgiving without passing on historical 
distortions, and racial and cultural stereotypes.

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The problem is that part of what you and I 
learned in our own childhood about the Pilgrims 
and Squanto and the First Thanksgiving is a 
mixture of both history and myth. But the THEME 
of Thanksgiving has truth and integrity far above 
and beyond what we and our forebearers have made 
of it. Thanksgiving is a bigger concept than just 
the story of the founding of the Plymouth Plantation.

So what do we teach to our children? We usually 
pass on unquestioned what we all received in our 
own childhood classrooms. I have come to know 
both the truths and the myths about our First 
Thanksgiving, and I feel we need to try to reach 
beyond the myths to some degree of historic 
truth. This text is an attempt to do this.

At this point you are probably asking, What is 
the big deal about Thanksgiving and the 
Pilgrims? What does this guy mean by a mixture 
of truths and myth? That is just what this 
introduction is all about. I propose that there 
may be a good deal that many of us do not know 
about our Thanksgiving holiday and also about the 
First Thanksgiving story. I also propose that 
what most of us have learned about the Pilgrims 
and the Indians who were at the first 
Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation is only part 
of the truth. When you build a lesson on only 
half of the information, then you are not 
teaching the whole truth. That is why I used the 
word myth. So where do you start to find out more 
about the holiday and our modern stories about how it began?

A good place to start is with a very important 
book, The Invasion of America, by Francis 
Jennings. It is a very authoritative text on the 
settlement of New England and the evolution of 
Indian/White relations in the New England 
colonies. I also recommend looking up any good 
text on British history. Check out the British 
Civil War of 1621-1642, Oliver Cromwell, and the 
Puritan uprising of 1653 which ended 
parliamentary government in England until 1660. 
The history of the Puritan experience in New 
England really should not be separated from the 
history of the Puritan experience in England. You 
should also realize that the Pilgrims were a 
sub sect, or splinter group, of the Puritan 
movement. They came to America to achieve on this 
continent what their Puritan bretheran continued 
to strive for in England; and when the Puritans 
were forced from England, they came to New 
England and soon absorbed the original Pilgrims.

As the editor, I have read all the texts listed 
in our bibliography, and many more, in preparing 
this material for you. I want you to read some of 
these books. So let me use my editorial license 
to deliberately provoke you a little. When 
comparing the events stirred on by the Puritans 
in England with accounts of Puritan/Pilgrim 
activities in New England in the same era, 
several provocative things suggest themselves:

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1. The Puritans were not just simple religious 
conservatives persecuted by the King and the 
Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs. 
They were political revolutionaries who not only 
intended to overthrow the government of England, 
but who actually did so in 1649.

2. The Puritan Pilgrims who came to New England 
were not simply refugees who decided to put 
their fate in Gods hands in the empty 
wilderness of North America, as a generation of 
Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture at any 
time, settlers on a frontier are most often 
outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, 
do not fit into the mainstream of their society. 
This is not to imply that people who settle on 
frontiers have no redeeming qualities such as 
bravery, etc., but that the images of nobility 
that we associate with the Puritans are at least 
in part the good P.R. efforts of later writers 
who have romanticized them.(1) It is also very 
plausible that this unnaturally noble image of 
the Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology 
of Noble Civilization vs. Savagery.(2) At any 
rate, mainstream Englishmen considered the 
Pilgrims to be deliberate religious dropouts who 
intended to found a new nation completely 
independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643 the 
Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an 
independent confederacy, one hundred and 
forty-three years before the American Revolution. 
They believed in the imminent occurrence of 
Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to establish here 
in the new world the Kingdom of God foretold in 
the book of Revelation. They diverged from their 
Puritan brethren who remained in England only in 
that they held little real hope of ever being 
able to successfully overthrow the King and 
Parliament and, thereby, impose their Rule of 
Saints (strict Puritan orthodoxy) on the rest of 
the British people. So they came to America not 
just in one ship (the Mayflower) but in a hundred 
others as well, with every intention of taking 
the land away from its native people to build 
their prophesied Holy Kingdom.(3)

3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees 
from religious persecution. They were victims of 
bigotry in England, but some of them were 
themselves religious bigots by our modern 
standards. The Puritans and the Pilgrims saw 
themselves as the Chosen Elect mentioned in the 
book of Revelation. They strove to purify first 
themselves and then everyone else of everything 
they did not accept in their own interpretation 
of scripture. Later New England Puritans used any 
means, including deceptions, treachery, torture, 
war, and genocide to achieve that end.(4) They 
saw themselves as fighting a holy war against 
Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was 
the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was 
transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, 
and it sheds a very different light on the 
Pilgrim image we have of them. This is best 
illustrated in the written text of the 
Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 
by Mather the Elder. In it, Mather the Elder 
gave special thanks to God for the devastating 
plague of smallpox which wiped out the majority 
of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their 
benefactors. He praised God for destroying 
chiefly young men and children, the very seeds 
of increase, thus clearing the forests to make 
way for a better growth, i.e., the Pilgrims.(5) 
In as much as these Indians were the Pilgrims 
benefactors, and Squanto, in particular, was the 
instrument of their salvation that first year, 
how are we to interpret this apparent callousness towards their misfortune?

4. The Wampanoag Indians were not the friendly 
savages some of us were told about when we were 
in the primary grades. Nor were they invited out 
of the goodness of the Pilgrims hearts to share 
the fruits of the Pilgrims harvest in a 
demonstration of Christian charity and 
interracial brotherhood. The Wampanoag were 
members of a widespread confederacy of 
Algonkian-speaking peoples known as the League of 
the Delaware. For six hundred years they had been 
defending themselves from my other ancestors, the 
Iroquois, and for the last hundred years they had 
also had encounters with European fishermen and 
explorers but especially with European slavers, 
who had been raiding their coastal villages.(6) 
They knew something of the power of the white 
people, and they did not fully trust them. But 
their religion taught that they were to give 
charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone 
who came to them with empty hands.(7) Also, 
Squanto, the Indian hero of the Thanksgiving 
story, had a very real love for a British 
explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a 
second father to him several years before the 
Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto 
saw these Pilgrims as Weymouths people.(8) To 
the Pilgrims the Indians were heathens and, 
therefore, the natural instruments of the Devil. 
Squanto, as the only educated and baptized 
Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely 
an instrument of God, set in the wilderness to 
provide for the survival of His chosen people, 
the Pilgrims. The Indians were comparatively 
powerful and, therefore, dangerous; and they were 
to be courted until the next ships arrived with 
more Pilgrim colonists and the balance of power 
shifted. The Wampanoag were actually invited to 
that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of 
negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands 
of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It 
should also be noted that the INDIANS, possibly 
out of a sense of charity toward their hosts, 
ended up bringing the majority of the food for the feast.(9)

5. A generation later, after the balance of power 
had indeed shifted, the Indian and White children 
of that Thanksgiving were striving to kill each 
other in the genocidal conflict known as King 
Philips War. At the end of that conflict most of 
the New England Indians were either exterminated 
or refugees among the French in Canada, or they 
were sold into slavery in the Carolinas by the 
Puritans. So successful was this early trade in 
Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in 
Boston began the practice of raiding the Ivory 
Coast of Africa for black slaves to sell to the 
proprietary colonies of the South, thus founding 
the American-based slave trade.(10)

Obviously there is a lot more to the story of 
Indian/Puritan relations in New England than in 
the thanksgiving stories we heard as children. 
Our contemporary mix of myth and history about 
the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth developed in 
the 1890s and early 1900s. Our country was 
desperately trying to pull together its many 
diverse peoples into a common national identity. 
To many writers and educators at the end of the 
last century and the beginning of this one, this 
also meant having a common national history. This 
was the era of the melting pot theory of social 
progress, and public education was a major tool 
for social unity. It was with this in mind that 
the federal government declared the last Thursday 
in November as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving in 1898.

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In consequence, what started as an inspirational 
bit of New England folklore, soon grew into the 
full-fledged American Thanksgiving we now know. 
It emerged complete with stereotyped Indians and 
stereotyped Whites, incomplete history, and a 
mythical significance as our First 
Thanksgiving. But was it really our FIRST American Thanksgiving?

Now that I have deliberately provoked you with 
some new information and different opinions, 
please take the time to read some of the texts in 
our bibliography. I want to encourage you to read 
further and form your own opinions. There really 
is a TRUE Thanksgiving story of Plymouth 
Plantation. But I strongly suggest that there 
always has been a Thanksgiving story of some kind 
or other for as long as there have been human 
beings. There was also a First Thanksgiving in 
America, but it was celebrated thirty thousand 
years ago.(11) At some time during the New Stone 
Age (beginning about ten thousand years ago) 
Thanksgiving became associated with giving thanks 
to God for the harvests of the land. Thanksgiving 
has always been a time of people coming together, 
so thanks has also been offered for that gift of 
fellowship between us all.  Every last Thursday 
in November we now partake in one of the OLDEST 
and most UNIVERSAL of human celebrations, and 
THERE ARE MANY THANKSGIVING STORIES TO TELL.

As for Thanksgiving week at Plymouth Plantation 
in 1621, the friendship was guarded and not 
always sincere, and the peace was very soon 
abused. But for three days in New Englands 
history, peace and friendship were there.

So here is a story for your children. It is as 
kind and gentle a balance of historic truth and 
positive inspiration as its writers and this 
editor can make it out to be. I hope it will 
adequately serve its purpose both for you and 
your students, and I also hope this work will 
encourage you to look both deeper and farther, 
for Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving all around the world.

Chuck Larsen Tacoma Public Schools September, 1986

FOOTNOTES FOR TEACHER INTRODUCTION

(1) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., The White Mans 
Indian, references to Puritans, pp. 27, 80-85, 90, 104, & 130.

(2) See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., The White Mans 
Indian, references to frontier concepts of 
savagery in index. Also see Jennings, Francis, 
The Invasion of America, the myth of savagery, pp. 6-12, 15-16, & 109-110.

(3) See Blitzer, Charles, Age of Kings, Great 
Ages of Man series, references to Puritanism, pp. 
141, 144 & 145-46. Also see Jennings, Francis, 
The Invasion of America, references to Puritan 
human motives, pp. 4-6, 43- 44 and 53.

(4) See Chronicles of American Indian Protest, 
pp. 6-10. Also see Armstrong, Virginia I., I 
Have Spoken, reference to Cannonchet and his 
village, p. 6. Also see Jennings, Francis, The 
Invasion of America, Chapter 9 Savage War, 
Chapter 13 We must Burn Them, and Chapter 17 Outrage Bloody and Barbarous.

(5) See Chronicles of American Indian Protest, 
pp. 6-9. Also see Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., The 
White Mans Indian, the comments of Cotton Mather, pp. 37 & 82-83.

(6) See Larsen, Charles M., The Real 
Thanksgiving, pp. 3-4. Also see Graff, Steward 
and Polly Ann, Squanto, Indian Adventurer. Also 
see Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 
15, the reference to Squanto on p. 82.

(7) See Benton-Banai, Edward, The Mishomis 
Book, as a reference on general Anishinabe 
(the Algonkin speaking peoples) religious beliefs 
and practices. Also see Larsen, Charles M., The 
Real Thanksgiving, reference to religious life on p. 1.

(8) See Graff, Stewart and Polly Ann, Squanto, 
Indian Adventurer. Also see Larsen, Charles M., 
The Real Thanksgiving. Also see Bradford, Sir 
William, Of Plymouth Plantation, and Mourts Relation.

(9) See Larsen, Charles M., The Real 
Thanksgiving, the letter of Edward Winslow dated 1622, pp. 5-6.

(10) See Handbook of North American Indians, 
Vol. 15, pp. 177-78. Also see Chronicles of 
American Indian Protest, p. 9, the reference to 
the enslavement of King Philips family. Also see 
Larsen, Charles, M., The Real Thanksgiving, pp. 
8-11, Destruction of the Massachusetts Indians.

(11) Best current estimate of the first entry of 
people into the Americas confirmed by archaeological evidence that is datable.

THE PLYMOUTH THANKSGIVING STORY

By Chuck Larsen

When the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 
1620, they landed on the rocky shores of a 
territory that was inhabited by the Wampanoag 
(Wam pa NO ag) Indians. The Wampanoags were part 
of the Algonkian-speaking peoples, a large group 
that was part of the Woodland Culture area. These 
Indians lived in villages along the coast of what 
is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They lived 
in round- roofed houses called wigwams. These 
were made of poles covered with flat sheets of 
elm or birch bark. Wigwams differ in construction 
from tipis that were used by Indians of the Great Plains.

The Wampanoags moved several times during each 
year in order to get food. In the spring they 
would fish in the rivers for salmon and herring. 
In the planting season they moved to the forest 
to hunt deer and other animals. After the end of 
the hunting season people moved inland where 
there was greater protection from the weather. 
 From December to April they lived on food that 
they stored during the earlier months.

The basic dress for men was the breech clout, a 
length of deerskin looped over a belt in back and 
in front. Women wore deerskin wrap-around skirts. 
Deerskin leggings and fur capes made from deer, 
beaver, otter, and bear skins gave protection 
during the colder seasons, and deerskin moccasins 
were worn on the feet. Both men and women usually 
braided their hair and a single feather was often 
worn in the back of the hair by men. They did not 
have the large feathered headdresses worn by people in the Plains Culture area.

There were two language groups of Indians in New 
England at this time. The Iroquois were neighbors 
to the Algonkian-speaking people. Leaders of the 
Algonquin and Iroquois people were called 
sachems (SAY chems). Each village had its own 
sachem and tribal council. Political power flowed 
upward from the people. Any individual, man or 
woman, could participate, but among the 
Algonquins more political power was held by men. 
Among the Iroquois, however, women held the 
deciding vote in the final selection of who would 
represent the group. Both men and women enforced 
the laws of the village and helped solve 
problems. The details of their democratic system 
were so impressive that about 150 years later 
Benjamin Franklin invited the Iroquois to Albany, 
New York, to explain their system to a delegation 
who then developed the Albany Plan of Union. 
This document later served as a model for the 
Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of the United States.

These Indians of the Eastern Woodlands called the 
turtle, the deer and the fish their brothers. 
They respected the forest and everything in it as 
equals. Whenever a hunter made a kill, he was 
careful to leave behind some bones or meat as a 
spiritual offering, to help other animals 
survive. Not to do so would be considered greedy. 
The Wampanoags also treated each other with 
respect. Any visitor to a Wampanoag home was 
provided with a share of whatever food the family 
had, even if the supply was low. This same 
courtesy was extended to the Pilgrims when they met.

We can only guess what the Wampanoags must have 
thought when they first saw the strange ships of 
the Pilgrims arriving on their shores. But their 
custom was to help visitors, and they treated the 
newcomers with courtesy. It was mainly because of 
their kindness that the Pilgrims survived at all. 
The wheat the Pilgrims had brought with them to 
plant would not grow in the rocky soil. They 
needed to learn new ways for a new world, and the 
man who came to help them was called Tisquantum 
(Tis SKWAN tum) or Squanto (SKWAN toe).

Squanto was originally from the village of 
Patuxet (Pa TUK et) and a member of the Pokanokit 
Wampanoag nation. Patuxet once stood on the exact 
site where the Pilgrims built Plymouth. In 1605, 
fifteen years before the Pilgrims came, Squanto 
went to England with a friendly English explorer 
named John Weymouth. He had many adventures and 
learned to speak English. Squanto came back to 
New England with Captain Weymouth. Later Squanto 
was captured by a British slaver who raided the 
village and sold Squanto to the Spanish in the 
Caribbean Islands. A Spanish Franciscan priest 
befriended Squanto and helped him to get to Spain 
and later on a ship to England. Squanto then 
found Captain Weymouth, who paid his way back to 
his homeland. In England Squanto met Samoset of 
the Wabanake (Wab NAH key) Tribe, who had also 
left his native home with an English explorer. 
They both returned together to Patuxet in 1620. 
When they arrived, the village was deserted and 
there were skeletons everywhere. Everyone in the 
village had died from an illness the English 
slavers had left behind. Squanto and Samoset went 
to stay with a neighboring village of Wampanoags.

One year later, in the spring, Squanto and 
Samoset were hunting along the beach near 
Patuxet. They were startled to see people from 
England in their deserted village. For several 
days, they stayed nearby observing the newcomers. 
Finally they decided to approach them. Samoset 
walked into the village and said welcome, 
Squanto soon joined him. The Pilgrims were very 
surprised to meet two Indians who spoke English.

The Pilgrims were not in good condition. They 
were living in dirt-covered shelters, there was a 
shortage of food, and nearly half of them had 
died during the winter. They obviously needed 
help and the two men were a welcome sight. 
Squanto, who probably knew more English than any 
other Indian in North America at that time, 
decided to stay with the Pilgrims for the next 
few months and teach them how to survive in this 
new place. He brought them deer meat and beaver 
skins. He taught them how to cultivate corn and 
other new vegetables and how to build 
Indian-style houses. He pointed out poisonous 
plants and showed how other plants could be used 
as medicine. He explained how to dig and cook 
clams, how to get sap from the maple trees, use 
fish for fertilizer, and dozens of other skills needed for their survival.

By the time fall arrived things were going much 
better for the Pilgrims, thanks to the help they 
had received. The corn they planted had grown 
well. There was enough food to last the winter. 
They were living comfortably in their 
Indian-style wigwams and had also managed to 
build one European-style building out of squared 
logs. This was their church. They were now in 
better health, and they knew more about surviving 
in this new land. The Pilgrims decided to have a 
thanksgiving feast to celebrate their good 
fortune. They had observed thanksgiving feasts in 
November as religious obligations in England for 
many years before coming to the New World.

The Algonkian tribes held six thanksgiving 
festivals during the year. The beginning of the 
Algonkian year was marked by the Maple Dance 
which gave thanks to the Creator for the maple 
tree and its syrup. This ceremony occurred when 
the weather was warm enough for the sap to run in 
the maple trees, sometimes as early as February. 
Second was the planting feast, where the seeds 
were blessed. The strawberry festival was next, 
celebrating the first fruits of the season. 
Summer brought the green corn festival to give 
thanks for the ripening corn. In late fall, the 
harvest festival gave thanks for the food they 
had grown. Mid-winter was the last ceremony of 
the old year. When the Indians sat down to the 
first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, it was 
really the fifth thanksgiving of the year for them!

Captain Miles Standish, the leader of the 
Pilgrims, invited Squanto, Samoset, Massasoit 
(the leader of the Wampanoags), and their 
immediate families to join them for a 
celebration, but they had no idea how big Indian 
families could be. As the Thanksgiving feast 
began, the Pilgrims were overwhelmed at the large 
turnout of ninety relatives that Squanto and 
Samoset brought with them. The Pilgrims were not 
prepared to feed a gathering of people that large 
for three days. Seeing this, Massasoit gave 
orders to his men within the first hour of his 
arrival to go home and get more food. Thus it 
happened that the Indians supplied the majority 
of the food: Five deer, many wild turkeys, fish, 
beans, squash, corn soup, corn bread, and 
berries. Captain Standish sat at one end of a 
long table and the Clan Chief Massasoit sat at 
the other end. For the first time the Wampanoag 
people were sitting at a table to eat instead of 
on mats or furs spread on the ground. The Indian 
women sat together with the Indian men to eat. 
The Pilgrim women, however, stood quietly behind 
the table and waited until after their men had 
eaten, since that was their custom.

For three days the Wampanoags feasted with the 
Pilgrims. It was a special time of friendship 
between two very different groups of people. A 
peace and friendship agreement was made between 
Massasoit and Miles Standish giving the Pilgrims 
the clearing in the forest where the old Patuxet 
village once stood to build their new town of Plymouth.

It would be very good to say that this friendship 
lasted a long time; but, unfortunately, that was 
not to be. More English people came to America, 
and they were not in need of help from the 
Indians as were the original Pilgrims. Many of 
the newcomers forgot the help the Indians had 
given them. Mistrust started to grow and the 
friendship weakened. The Pilgrims started telling 
their Indian neighbors that their Indian religion 
and Indian customs were wrong. The Pilgrims 
displayed an intolerance toward the Indian 
religion similar to the intolerance displayed 
toward the less popular religions in Europe. The 
relationship deteriorated and within a few years 
the children of the people who ate together at 
the first Thanksgiving were killing one another 
in what came to be called King Phillips War.

It is sad to think that this happened, but it is 
important to understand all of the story and not 
just the happy part. Today the town of Plymouth 
Rock has a Thanksgiving ceremony each year in 
remembrance of the first Thanksgiving. There are 
still Wampanoag people living in Massachusetts. 
In 1970, they asked one of them to speak at the 
ceremony to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims arrival.

Here is part of what was said:  Frank James 
speech was written but was suppressed and he did not speak at the ceremony.

Today is a time of celebrating for you  a time 
of looking back to the first days of white people 
in America. But it is not a time of celebrating 
for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back 
upon what happened to my People. When the 
Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed 
them with open arms, little knowing that it was 
the beginning of the end. That before 50 years 
were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a 
tribe. That we and other Indians living near the 
settlers would be killed by their guns or dead 
from diseases that we caught from them. Let us 
always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people.

Although our way of life is almost gone, we, the 
Wampanoags, still walk the lands of 
Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be 
changed. But today we work toward a better 
America, a more Indian America where people and 
nature once again are important.
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'From South America, where payment must be made with subtlety, the 
Bormann organization has made a substantial contribution. It has 
drawn many of the brightest Jewish businessmen into a participatory 
role in the development of many of its corporations, and many of 
these Jews share their prosperity most generously with Israel. If 
their proposals are sound, they are even provided with a specially 
dispensed venture capital fund. I spoke with one Jewish businessmen 
in Hartford, Connecticut. He had arrived there quite unknown several 
years before our conversation, but with Bormann money as his 
leverage. Today he is more than a millionaire, a quiet leader in the 
community with a certain share of his profits earmarked as always for 
his venture capital benefactors. This has taken place in many other 
instances across America and demonstrates how Bormann's people 
operate in the contemporary commercial world, in contrast to the 
fanciful nonsense with which Nazis are described in so much "literature."

So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish participation in Bormann 
companies that when Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv 
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the Jewish and German 
communities of Buenos Aires. Jewish leaders informed the Israeli 
authorities in no uncertain terms that this must never happen again 
because a repetition would permanently rupture relations with the 
Germans of Latin America, as well as with the Bormann organization, 
and cut off the flow of Jewish money to Israel. It never happened 
again, and the pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of 
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an Argentinian safe haven, 
protected by the most efficient German infrastructure in history as 
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.'
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>http<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/ 

http://www.thisweek.org.uk
http://www.911forum.org.uk
http://www.bilderberg.org
http://www.tlio.org.uk

You can donate to support Tony's work here http://www.bilderberg.org/bcfm.htm

TG mobile +44 7786 952037  
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