The Crisis Report - 55
Thanksgiving is an American Holiday
It should be an International Day of Remembrance
A day to think about what was lost.
Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday. Like the Fourth of July it is unique to America. Like the Fourth of July, it is built on a pastiche of fact, fantasy, historical revisionism, and a complete misunderstanding of the historical context that the actual event was embedded in.
The Pilgrims didn’t discover “America”, or North America, or New England. They didn’t discover anything. They weren’t explorers, they were a religious cult looking for a home.
Jamestown in Virginia was already thriving by this time. Tobacco was being grown to ship back to England. Slaves had been imported to work in the nascent plantations, with the first arriving in 1619. The poisonous legacy of that, shapes our nation to this day.
The Spanish had been in the Caribbean since 1500. In Mexico since 1520. Peru and South America since 1532. The French explorer Jacques Cartier had mapped the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in 1534. The French had outposts and small bases in Canada.
The Dutch traded along the Hudson River as early as 1611 and established Fort Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan island in 1625. Four decades later, New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherlands, had grown into a lively port of 1,500.
In 1630, the English started their own outpost further north and called it Boston. Where BTW, they were still hanging Quakers for their religious beliefs as late as 1650.
So, in 1620 the Pilgrims weren’t making a leap into the unknown.
Here’s something else that gets left out of the story. Perhaps the most important thing. The thing we almost never think about.
The Pilgrims settled at what is now known as Plymouth Massachusetts, on Cape Cod near the abandoned village of Pahtuksut. Three years earlier, the Wampanoag had left after a smallpox outbreak ravaged the tribe.
The Pilgrims moved into a preexisting village. They moved into a place the Indians had abandoned. After a “smallpox outbreak” probably killed 90% of the population in a single year.
They didn’t have to, “clear the land” or make fields. They found corn, beans, and squash growing in the fields and gardens of the people who had just been there before them.
The people whose population and culture was completely collapsing.
The America’s weren’t empty when the Europeans arrived.
I have a complicated relationship with Europe’s treatment of the Native American cultures they found in the “New World”. I have a direct family relationship to the Comanche in Texas.
My Father’s grandmother was a “full-blood” Native woman of the Comanche people. She married out of the reservation to a German immigrant she met in a missionary school for girls.
My paternal grandfather was a “half breed”.
In a racist society this was a significant strike against you. He apparently was often mistaken as being “Mexican”. My Grandmother’s German relatives did not like him, but she was over 30 and barren. He was regarded as “the best she could do”.
Except for his blue eyes and his height, my father took after his father. His hair was black and his skin tone was often described as “Spanish” by the family. His cheekbones and the cast of his face echoed the heritage of his Comanche grandmother.
Although she was estranged from her son (my grandfather) she made the arrangements for her grandson, my father, to visit her when he was a child. She took him to the Reservation to meet her family and to spend time with them.
From my father, I learned how to knapp stone. How to track animals. How to hunt with both the gun and the bow. How to be comfortable in the woods and in the desert.
He instilled in me a great interest in New World archeology and Native American culture. An interest that continues to this day.
Which is why I can confidently say, that most of what you think you know about Native Americans, their cultures, and the Conquest of the New World is probably outdated and incorrect.
Which is why I would argue, that the American holiday of Thanksgiving should become an International Day of Remembrance. For that which was lost in one of the greatest disasters in the history of human existence.
Scholars studying native cultures have often missed the forest for the trees.
So, New World archeology is not a very old field of study. It’s actually just over 100 years old. Right now, it’s in the process of a “paradigm shift”.
In the 50’s a “paradigm” of thought on Native American cultures in the America’s emerged that stated the Americas were “lightly populated”. It’s what was in my high school American History textbook. In the first chapter, which explained how the Indians got to America without boats.
The second chapter was all about Columbus, Cortes, and the Conquest of the Indians by the (obviously superior) Spanish. Followed by chapter three, the arrival of White people in New England and the “real” start of American History.
If you went to High School in the 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s that’s probably what you still think. Once a cultural paradigm emerges and is taught to the young it becomes extremely persistent in a society. Because that paradigm will be the view of that generation for the next 50–60 years.
Here’s the problem, it’s wrong. It was always based on nothing.
The Origin of the “Low Count” mythology.
One guy’s study shaped a whole generation’s views.
Northeast Bolivia, 1948.
Allan Holmberg, a young American anthropologist, has just arrived in the Beni, a vast savanna stretching from the Andes to the Amazon. Holmberg is there to study a local Indian group called the Sirionó.
He spent two years with them before publishing a book about their lives in 1950. His account painted a bleak picture.
As far as Holmberg could tell, they had neither art or religion. They didn’t count or farm. Constantly hungry and wet, they moved among makeshift camps and hunted game with crude longbows. Much like the Lacondon Maya hidden in the Chiapas highlands of Mexico.
He concludes that they’re living examples of humans in what he calls “the raw state of nature.” Like their ancestors, they eke out a tough existence in a hostile world that they lack the tools to change. Until the arrival of Europeans, he adds, life must have been like this across the Americas.
Holmberg’s book captures the minds of the public and academia. In a short time Holmberg’s verdict becomes the scholarly consensus.
The prevailing paradigm becomes, that except for a few “exceptional” cultures, the Americas were lightly populated by primitive tribal societies.
Holmberg misunderstood what he was seeing.
Holmberg believed that what he had seen was an unchanging and primitive people.
However, the wandering hunter/gatherers he encountered weren’t unchanged relics of a “Stone Age” way of life. They were the survivors of a recently shattered culture trying to evade an oppressive state.
It’s as if an anthropologist observed refugees from Nazi concentration camps and concluded that they came from a culture that had always been starving and shoe-less. In hindsight, it sounds absurd, but that’s exactly the mistake Holmberg made.
Holmberg wasn’t entirely wrong: the Sirionó really did lead extremely tough lives during the time that he spent with them. But things hadn’t always been that way.
In the early 1920’s, the Beni had been home to around 3,000 Sirionó Indians. They weren’t nomadic hunter/gatherers at that time. They lived in villages and grew crops. Holmberg wasn’t an archeologist, he missed that fact.
He also overlooked clues that the Sirionó were newcomers to the region.
They had migrated into the area just a few hundred years earlier. Replacing an earlier culture which had vanished shortly after the arrival of the Spanish in South America in the 1530's.
Two factors changed the Sirionó society and caused its total collapse.
The first was disease.
Over twenty years, smallpox and influenza epidemics reduced the Sirionó population from 3,000 to just 150. A 95% loss in one generation.
The second was state policy.
As disease ripped apart the Sirionó communities, the Bolivian government backed white farmers’ expansion into the Beni. The military hunted down Indians, who were sent to prison camps or forced into servitude on cattle ranches.
What Holmberg saw and described became “THE STORY” of the European colonization of the New World. It was a narrative of a small group of primitive people living in “the raw state of nature”. Who got “pushed aside” by the more numerous and more advanced European cultures.
A tragic but inevitable outcome.
In the 1950’s this narrative was very appealing to Americans and Europeans.
It provided support for long held cultural beliefs that the America’s had been “almost empty” when the Europeans arrived. Other than the “exceptional” civilizations destroyed by the Spanish. Who became the “vile colonizers” and sin-eaters for Europe in this narrative. The vast majority of the land was seen as being occupied by only a few primitive people.
This narrative felt “truthy” to WHITE America in the 50’s. It dissipated lingering cultural guilt felt at the treatment of the Native Americans in the 19th century.
It justified it in a way that felt dispassionate and inevitable.
If there were only 6–7 million Native Americans in 1500 and there were 70–80 million Europeans. Then the Native American cultures and peoples were always going to get swallowed up. They weren’t using the land and they were culturally stagnant.
It was inevitable. Tragic, yes. But, inevitable.
It also resonated with earlier Cultural Myths about Native Americans.
One where the ruins spread across the New World, weren’t Indian.
Joseph Smith built a religion around it.
Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith was fascinated by Native Americans from an early age. Scholars believe religious teachings of then deceased Handsome Lake relayed through his nephew Red Jacket near Smith’s hometown influenced the 16-year-old Smith.
As an adult, Smith became a professional “Tomb Raider”. This was not uncommon in the 19th century. There were “mounds” everywhere across the countryside.
Mounds are also a common feature of the English countryside and are often burial mounds containing grave goods. As settlers moved over the Appalachian mountains into the area once dominated by Mississippian Culture they were astonished at the number of these mounds and at their wide distribution.
Hopes that they might find precious metals or salable artifacts meant that almost all of these mounds were dug up and plowed over by the late 19th century. Only a handful of intact mounds remain.
Joseph Smith made a living for decades digging up burial mounds and selling the artifacts he found. He probably did 15–25 digs a year and, before he became a Prophet, he did this for decades.
He was one of hundreds of people ripping apart these mounds during this period. That’s how many of them there once were.
Smith preached that the Native Americans were one of the lost tribes of Israel. He called them the “Lamanites”.
In the Book of Mormon the Lamanites are described as one of the four ancient peoples (along with the Jaredites, the Mulekites, and the Nephites) who settled in the ancient Americas. In Smith’s narrative the Lamanites, while a tribe of Israel. Were “red” Son’s of Israel and inferior to the White Nephites.
In the Book of Mormon’s narrative. The Lamanites began as wicked rivals to the more righteous Nephites whom G-d favors. Over time, the Nephite civilization became decadent and loses G-ds favor. The Lamanites rise up and destroy the Nephites and the other tribes.
They build great cities and spread throughout the land. Then, two thousand years ago, Jesus comes to the New World and preaches the Gospels.
Many are converted and become Christian.
The ones that reject Christ, go to war with them and, in an apocalyptic series of battles, destroy their civilization.
To Smith, Native Americans were the degraded survivors of that “Great Apocalypse”. The remnants of a once great people, who rejected Christ, and now lived in the ruins of their former glory.
After Smith’s death, he was replaced as Prophet by Brigham Young. Young’s attitude towards Native Americans was less fanciful than Smith’s. He found himself in conflict with tribal groups in Utah.
During Young’s period of leadership violence broke out between Native Americans and the settlers. Small massacres of Native Americans by Mormon settlers were not uncommon.
Although Young stated, “towards so degraded and ignorant a race of people, it is manifestly more economical and less expensive, to feed and clothe, than fight them.”
Young also taught that the “cursed” racial lineages were in a three-tiered classification of redemption. With Lamanites (Native Americans) on top, Jewish people in the middle, and Cain’s descendants (Black people) on the bottom.
This corresponded to the time when they would each “receive the gospel” and be saved. So that they might enter into Heaven.
For Native Americans this might happen in the near future if they converted to Mormonism.
For the Jews, it would only happen after they were gathered for Jesus Christ’s Second Coming in Israel.
For Blacks, who were the most cursed of peoples. God would “save” them only in the afterlife, after the Second Coming and the Resurrection.
It’s worth noting that Mormonism is the fastest growing religious faith since Islam in the 7th century. There are now, more Mormons than Jews in the world.
If that seems like a “crazy” explanation for the extensive ruins and remains of ancient cultures found all over the Americas. Keep in mind, it was just one of many.
Many people thought the ruins and evidence of occupation was from Atlanteans. Outposts of the lost continent of Atlantis.
Others felt that the Americas had been home to a lost race of Giants. A race that had been slain by the Native Americans in ancient times.
Others proposed ancient links to the Phoneticians. Or to the Egyptians. Or to some other Ice Age European lost kingdom.
The common thread. Is that no one felt the Native Americans they saw in the 19th century, could possibly have constructed the ruins, or made the artifacts, they found everywhere. It had to have been done by “someone else”.
In the 19th century, that was the prevailing paradigm. That’s what everyone thought about Native Americans. They were “degenerate remnants” or “an unchanging and primitive people”.
By the 1950’s White America was willing to admit that there had been “exceptional” Native American Civilizations in Mesoamerica and in South America. However, the prevailing view of North America’s indigenous peoples was that they were still primitives.
Living hunter/gather lives like the Sirionó described by Holmberg.
In the 60’s the American Counter Culture Fetishized Native Americans.
In the anti-consumerist movement that became popular in the 60’s. The assumed low population of the Native Americans became a sign of their cultural superiority.
It was assumed that their numbers were low because they lived “in harmony and balance” with Nature. It was assumed that they lived in a pristine state of Nature.
White America once again projected its ideas and values onto Native Americans. This time making them “ecotopians” living sustainably in highly egalitarian, peaceful societies.
This narrative is as much a fantasy as the 19th century narrative created by Joseph Smith. Both are built on the idea that the Pre Columbian populations in the America’s were small. Much smaller than Europe's.
The latest study in 2019 puts the minimum population in the Americas in 1491 at roughly 60 million. Many archeologists put the number at around 110 million. My personal view is that the population was probably around 150 million counting North, South, and Central America.
For comparison, the population in Europe was roughly 75 million in 1492.
The Americas were densely inhabited and the ecology was being “managed” across both continents to make it more productive. The Native American populations had inhabited the land for thousands of years.
Like the late neolithic populations of Europe who built stone henges and monolithic monuments to mark their presence on the landscape. Native Americans sculpted and shaped the landscape to make it theirs.
What the Pilgrims saw in 1621 wasn’t a wilderness. It was the overgrown remains of a lost world. Inhabited by the recovering survivors of one of the greatest population disasters in human history.
How much “Cultural Continuity” do you think there was after a 95% population crash?
What we imagine is “native wisdom” and “timeless culture” is a hashed together pastiche of the bits and pieces that survived the Collapse. In the 60’s the Counter Culture projected their values onto Native American cultures. Most of what you think you “know” about Native American cultures is incorrect and outdated.
Almost Everything was Lost.
So, we just had Covid, a “novel” virus that NO ONE had immunity from. We all saw how that works.
Covid kills about 1% of the infected. Imagine a virus killing 90%-95% of the population. Because that’s what happened to the Native Americans after the Spanish arrived; 90%–95% population death rates.
EVERYWHERE.
Remember the Spanish explorer De Soto?
The one who got shipwrecked in Florida, and hiked back to Mexico along the coast. He kept a detailed log of what he encountered along the way.
In the Mississippi river valley he reported “towns” of thousands. Each with a central mound that a chief lived on. He said, that if you stood on one of these mounds you could see others, “as far as the eye could see, in every direction”.
That was 1540.
When the French fur traders started going through the area 50 years later they found no people and heaps of bones everywhere. Everyone had died.
In the Amazon, Francisco de Orellana Bejarano Pizarro y Torres de Altamirano traveled the length of the river from the Andes to the Atlantic coast in 1542. He also kept a detailed log of what he saw.
He described a thriving society with densely populated cities that packed the banks of the river. A river that was filled with massive canoes carrying goods and people in a lively trade.
His account was later dismissed as hugely exaggerated fantasy. Because when the next explorers went up the river 75 years later. There were no people, no cities, no throngs of canoes filling the river.
It was assumed that Altamirano lied about what he saw along the Amazon. Now we know he was correct.
It is believed that the civilization he witnessed was devastated by the spread of smallpox and other diseases from Europe like measles. The evidence to support this claim comes from the discovery of numerous geoglyphs dating from between 1 and 1250 AD, and terra preta (engineered soil) resulting from indigenous activities.
Some 15 million people may have lived in the Amazon region in 1500 in dense riverbank settlements such as that at Marajó. In a single generation it was gone.
This is the story that happened across the Americas. The native populations crashed by as much as 95%. EVERYWHERE, EXTREMELY QUICKLY.
The populations encountered by later Colonists were the “rebound” populations that were recovering from that crash. We mistakenly thought that population was “the population” that had always existed.
We didn’t realize what had happened. We didn’t realize that over a HUNDRED MILLION human beings died in about 50 years as plagues they had no resistance to, swept the Native American populations away.
European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled the Earth’s climate.
This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation.
The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cool the planet, with the average temperature dropping by 0.15C in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the study by scientists at University College London found.
“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the UCL team.
The drop in temperature during this period was the coldest of the “Little Ice Age”. During this period the River Thames in London would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal and disrupted agriculture caused famines in several European countries.
That’s how many people died in the America’s as a result of contact with the European’s. Just because the European’s breathed on them. Just because they had been isolated for tens of thousands of year’s and had no resistance to diseases that had become common in Eurasia.
It was an immense holocaust and a unique culture that had grown for over 15,000 years was lost in an instant. It is one of the greatest tragedies in all of our species existence.
Which is why I would argue, that the American holiday of Thanksgiving should become an International Day of Remembrance. For that which was lost in one of the greatest disasters in the history of human existence.
rc-
First pub 11/16/22 on Medium.
Addendum: From comments I received on this piece it’s clear there is some confusion about just how novel diseases can affect “virgin field” populations. Let me make it clear, IT’S NOT A ONE AND DONE PROCESS.
Imagine, you are a Mississippian Indian in 1540. De Soto comes through and somebody is a smallpox carrier. Nine out of ten people around die in 6 months.
You reform a village with survivors from other villages. Time passes, life goes on, the land is rich because so many died. You have a big family and most of your kids survive to adulthood.
Now, here’s the thing. Immunity isn’t genetic unless it’s “Natural Immunity”. If you got smallpox but lived, that’s “Antibody Immunity”. You don’t pass antibody immunity on to your kids.
Fifty years goes by, you’re dead and your grandchildren are in their prime. Suddenly another strange White guy shows up and trades for beaver furs.
He also was carrying smallpox (as an example). How many will die in the outbreak this time?
ROUGHLY 90% WILL.
Antibody immunity isn’t passed down genetically. Once all the antibody immunes age out of a population it’s “virgin field” again.
The Native American populations endured centuries of this kind of decimation. The surprise is that any survived at all.
That tells you how large the population was at the start.
rc-
Really a splendid article. You synthesize a narrative out of many different threads I have followed over the years, including Charles C. Mann's "1491." And you are right: Thanksgiving should be. an international day of remembrance. But most of us have no idea what has been lost. And others don't care.
This was a fascinating read. Thank you