Reflections on the National Day of Mourning

I'm starting a bit of a tradition this Thanksgiving week by re-publishing a blog entry I wrote for my Mass. Global Action blog four years ago as an Open Media Boston editorial for the second year running in these pages. I figure that our audience has grown quite a bit since last Thanksgiving, and that I'd like more people to hear a different perspective about the holiday - if only that they may learn about how Native Americans lost New England in a vicious war instigated by expansionist English colonists over 330 years ago. And then reflect on why it might be that descendants of the local native tribes generally don't see Thanksgiving so much as a harmless fun holiday then as a day for remembrance of an ugly history that descendants of the victorious colonists did their level best to bury.

**************

**************



I had occasion to spend this year's National Day of Mourning (Thanksgiving) at my cousin's house inN. Attleborough, MA. And while it was pleasant enough - food plentiful and tasty, light conversation, cute kids running about - anytime spent south of Boston always makes me think of one of the nastier episodes in American history. King Philip's War. Participating, even half-heartedly, in a holiday glorifying the start of the European conquest of North America, in the same region where many of the war's most intense battles were fought sends a chill through the very core of my being.

My people, the Greeks, weren't in this country in the 1670s of course - although one might imagine a seriously off-course Greek fishing vessel accidentally making the Atlantic passage one fine summer 330 years ago. Our ancestors were not involved in the various depredations that led to the founding of this nation (though they were involved in all kinds of other depredations that shaped the world we know today). We came here mostly in the last 100 years to work in then-bustling factories and restaurants to escape tyranny, poverty and war. The same as people from other countries do to this day.

But, by coming here, we took advantage of a land that was, in many essential ways, stolen from others. In 1675, a Wampanaog sachem named Metacomet (or King Philip to the English) launched - somewhat reluctantly - a war against English colonists that came closer than any other war launched by America's native peoples to ending European domination in at least one corner of the "New World." It was the last colonial war in which the two sides had relatively equal numbers, and used basically equivalent technology.

Had not disease already decimated the native population of the area decades before, the English never could have won.

The grievances of the faction of the Wampanoags that began the war - and the other nations that joined them including the Narragansetts, Pocumtucks, and Nipmucks - were fairly straightforward. The English unceasingly attempted by foul means and fair to convert the native nations to Christianity. And they continually overstepped the bounds of various treaties and contracts with native peoples in taking land that wasn't theirs for their own exclusive use.

Two years later, roughly 800 colonists and 6000 Native Americans were dead. Dozens of towns and settlements on both sides were wholly or substantially destroyed. Atrocities were committed by all parties to the conflict - though the English outdid their opposition in that respect, unsurprisingly.

Most of the fighting took place in what are now Plymouth and Bristol Counties in southeastern Massachusetts, in much of Rhode Island, and in the Connecticut River Valley in both western Massahcusetts and Connecticut - but it raged throughout modern day New England, and smouldered on for over 100 years with no official end date marked. No treaty, broken or otherwise, was ever signed by either side.

A number of Native American nations were for all intents and purposes destroyed - at least as political entities. The rest were assimilated or marginalized.

The war forever cast Native Americans into the role of "savages" - a subhuman status fit only for subjugation or extermination. For three hundred years after the war, most American historians gave short shrift to native justifications for the conflict, and exulted in the glory of a holy war won against the forces of darkness.

Books have been written about it - at least a couple in the last five years - that use modern historiographical techniques to give more even handed interpretations of the conflict. I own one, "The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity" by Jill Lepore, and skimmed through it again before writing this blog.

I have no snappy ending to this essay. No quip or anecdote or suggestion for public action that ties it up neatly with a bow like a birthday present. The war, its causes, and actors were complex and multidimensional, as the actions of human beings ultimately are. The one thing I can say is that by the standards of the Christian "Just War" Theory of the time, the Native Americans were within their rights to start the war, and the English were wrong to end it the way they did - executing many prisoners of war and enslaving many more, including some that had been active allies as Christianized so-called "Praying Indians."

Was it the best action Metacomet and his people could have taken? The only one? The right one? Who knows? Though many Native Americans had learned to read and write English in the few short decades the colonists had been present in their lands, few were in a position to use that knowledge to write history from their perspective by war's end. And very few colonists indeed ever bothered to learn major native languages - although by the standards of conquests to come, the lifeways of colonist and natives were startingly intertwined up until the war. Most major English settlements were built right near major Native American settlements.

I will end these musings with two holiday admonitions: take a little time to learn about King Philip's War sometime soon (especially if you live in New England), and reflect on how that long ago war against colonialism relates to the Iraqi people's war against American colonialism today. If indeed it does. I think so. But you will have to decide for yourselves.

This editorial was originally published as a Mass. Global Action blog entry on November 25, 2005.