We learned how the Pilgrims were refugees, escaping from a tyrannical English king. And how they got on the first ship that promised to take them away to safety. And how they were set down in the wrong place, without much warning, hundreds of miles from where the ship captain had originally agreed to take them. And how they tried hard to keep doing the right thing, even though they were terrified and cold and starving and sick. And how the local Native Americans had thought at first that the Pilgrims were a pirate band that had come periodically to loot and kill, had engaged them in battle, and then realized, even though one Native American had been killed in this battle, that the Pilgrims were not reacting the same way the Pirates always had. And how the Native Americans had then cautiously watched the Pilgrims wandering about, obviously confused and in shock, and had realized that the Pilgrims did not really know what they were doing and possibly had been victimized by somebody. And how these Native Americans had opened their hearts and helped the Pilgrims.
We learned that the Pilgrims had decided, a year later, to give a Thank-you picnic for their friends: the first Thanksgiving. The Pilgrim journal told how the Chief and his people arrived and realized that, once again, the Pilgrims had failed to plan adequately for an event, and so several Native American men had gone out hunting to supply enough food for everyone. We can speculate where the strange stories came from that turned this into a white supremacist festival. I read this Pilgrim journal long ago. They were not really like the Puritans. They really were just simple folk caught in a historical squeeze-play.
The journal written by Pilgrims did not glorify the Pilgrims. They were honest about their own fitful decisions and confusion and ignorance and helplessness. They tried to do the right thing as they read it in the Bible, but they were out of their minds with terror and hunger. Some of them found the tribe's seed cache and stole it and brought it all back to their starving friends. After eating a few mouthfuls, they came to their senses and told each other, this is wrong. And they brought the rest of it back. I read later, elsewhere, that it was this pitiful effort to maintain some semblance of honorable conduct that made the Chief decide that the Pilgrims were worth saving. The Native Americans were the real heroes in this original Thanksgiving story.
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