The Attentive Ghosts of Native Americans

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition November 28-30, 2014

Hymns of the Pilgrim Conquest

The Attentive Ghosts of Native Americans

by DAVID YEARSLEY


Edward Winslow’s Good Newes from New-England published in 1624 in London begins its account in November of 1621. There is no word of the first Thanksgiving. That didn’t happen until 1623 and was a day of devout prayer and penance rather than one of festive celebration and culinary surfeit.

The Good Newes begins not with happy feasting by natives and newcomers, but with the threat of war: “the Great people of Nanohigganset, which are reported to be many thousands strong, began to breath forth many threats against us; the common talke of our neighbour Indians on all sides was of the preparation they made to come against us.” Rather than bringing gifts of “Indian Corne,” oysters, turkey, and venison, the natives are filling their quivers with new arrows.

Squanto, whom Winslow calls Tisquantum, figures prominently in the account.

Winslow doesn’t mention that Squanto had been taken back to England in 1605 by Captain George Weymouth. In London he was cultivated as an interpreter and guide for the exploration and exploitation of New England by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, owner of the Plymouth Company. After several crossings of the Atlantic, Squanto had come back to what would become Massachusetts only in 1619, the year before the Pilgrim’s arrival on his native shores.

Winslow, who would go on to serve several terms as Governor of the Plymouth Colony in the 1630s before returning permanently to England to join Oliver Cromwell’s puritanical government, refers to Squanto merely as an “Interpreter” and doesn’t trust him at all, seeing the native’s main motive as self-aggrandizement—“to make himself great in the eyes of his Country men, by meanes of his neerenesse and favour with us.” Tisquantum was not a sower of corn but of dissent and intrigue, a spreader of rumor not organic fertilizer: “So that he might possesse his Countrymen with the greater feare of us, and so consequently of himself, (Tisquantum) told (the Indians) wee had the plague buried in our store-house, which at our pleasure wee could send forth to what place or people wee should, and desstroy them therewith, though wee stirred not from home.” In fact, Tisquantum’s intelligence was top quality: the illegal immigrants from across the big water were indeed in possession of biological weapons of mass destruction. Winslow’s Good Newes is very bad news for the locals and for people across the continent.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/28/the-attentive-ghosts-of-native-americans/

[jwirr]

1. Squanto was very prophetic. It did not come true immediately but before the wars agains the

natives ended many of his countrymen had been destroyed. I have read "Saints and Strangers" and it gives some interesting accounts of the attitudes of the illegal immigrants.