The Feast in the Wilderness of the Integration of the Other

The Thanksgiving Feast at Plymouth Plantation in 1621 was a harvest
celebration. These kinds of feasts were important
observances to both English and Wampanoags.

The Pilgrims/Roundheads (as the partisans of Oliver Cromwell were
known as) had lost half their population during their first winter in
the wilderness. But in the spring Indians appeared.

One of them, Squanto, spoke English, and had traveled extensively in
Europe (he had been invited on to an English ship and was Shanghaied
to London, where he became a carnival exhibit).

The Wampanoags taught the Roundheads the cultivation of native crops.
They taught them how to survive in Southern New England. This was the
celebration of that first harvest.

There were about 50 English men, women, and children. There were about
90 Wampanoag warriors with the Great Chief Massasoit.

Massasoit's people had been decimated by smallpox. He knew of the
treachery of English and Dutch ship captains who had murdered,
kidnapped, extorted, raped, enslaved and robbed Indians.

He watched the Roundheads die during their first winter. He hoped winter
would solve his illegal immigrant problem. There were Wampanoags who
really wanted to nip the problem in the bud.

But Massasoit took pity on the starving white people. So many had died
from the plagues and pestilences. He told his people there had been
enough death.

That Spring he sent Squanto and the others to help the white strangers.

The people he was breaking bread with during the first Plymouth
Thanksgiving, and those people's children would so oppress the
Wampanoags that in 1672, (51 years later) Massasoit's oldest son, King
Phillip (a.k.a Metacomet) would lead an uprising that would spread
throughout New England. Although Metacoment's uprising had initial
success, he was ambushed and killed by the English and their Indian
allies in 1677. The people Massasoit was breaking bread with and their
children would cut off his oldest son's head, impale it on a stake,
and leave it in front of Plymouth Plantation for 30 years.

The second Thanksgiving Celebration at Plymouth in 1637 (16 years
latter) celebrated the slaughter of as many as 700 men, women and
children on Pequot Hill in Mystic, CT., and the end of the 'Pequot
War'. That Thanksgiving was the beginning of an annual tradition of
Thanksgiving Celebrations.

But during that first Plymouth Thanksgiving Feast all those horrors
were in the future.

That Thanksgiving feast anticipated the present moment, this
multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic reality, of the integration
of the Other, that has become the reality of these United States.

It anticipates the moment that will soon come when people of color
will again be the majority.

Everyone feasted and celebrated their shared humanity as
equals in that vast wildness, that vast dynamic uncertainty.

There were three days to feast. There were three days to celebrate the
integration of the Shadow, the radically different Other.

Music is the greatest force for this multi-cultural, multi-racial integration.

In the only account of the celebration, written by Edward Winslow it
is noted there was music,
singing and dancing.

There were similarities, universalities, parallels in the music of the
English and the Wampanoags.

The Wampanoags had flutes. They had large
drums made from hollowed out stumps, that were communally played by
societies of drummers. They had small hand drums. They had frame
drums. They had rattles, rasps, conch shell trumpets, whistles, striking
sticks.

The songs the Wampanoags sang had intricate harmony, were
rhythmically complex.

There was much call and response in their songs. The Wampanoags were
doing intricate choral, church-music-like, complex harmonizing long
before the European ships appeared.

During harvest celebrations Wampanoag leaders would give ritual
speeches that were perceived to be music by Europeans because they had
rhythm and melody.

The English had fifes, hornpipes (similar to an oboe), frame drums,
perhaps a fiddle, perhaps other string instruments that were the
ancestors of the modern guitar. And the Roundheads had a very
developed, extensive repertoire of church music.

Being the Puritans that they were the Roundheads disapproved of the
Wampanoags' dancing, and the music that accompanied the dancing.

And yet the Roundheads church music was strangely familiar to the
Wampanoags, as was the Wampanoags community choral songs strangely
familiar to the Roundheads.

There is a Narragansett (the Wampanoags' neighbors and historical
adversaries who became allies during King Phillip's War) legend that
some years before the first European ships arrived, Narragansetts, and
other tribes including the Wampanoags heard music, a song. The tune
was heard "in the air" by many Indian people who lived on the Atlantic
coast.

Because the song was beautiful, it was learned, it was sung, it was
included in the music of many tribes.

When the Wampanoags first visited the Roundheads' Congregational
Meeting House (the feast also celebrated the completion of seven
homes, the meeting house, and three buildings for the storage of food)
during that first 1621 Plymouth Thanksgiving they heard that
same song during the thanksgiving service, the song which had been heard "in the
air". And, according to the Narragansett legend, the Indians joined in
the singing of the song. And knew it at least as well as the
Roundheads.

The song is known as 'Old Indian Hymn', and is still sung at the
Narragansett Church on the tribe's reservation in Rhode Island. The
hymn's last verse goes: "There is a stream that issues forth, From
God's eternal throne, And from the Lamb, a living stream, Clear as a
crystal stone.

To the Narragansetts the song speaks to their survival as a people, as
a unique tradition, as a culture which like the stream in the song,
issues forth from God's eternal throne.

This sharing of music was a beginning of what becomes known as
American Music. Songs such as 'Amazing Grace', Dixie, Jambalaya, Sugar
Time, familiar lullabies come from the fusion of European and American Indian
precedents.

The first Plymouth Thanksgiving was preceded by a thanksgiving feast
in the Jamestown, Virginia Colony. That first Thanksgiving occurred
when Captain John Woodlief led newly-arrived English colonists to a
grassy slope along the James River and instructed them to drop to
their knees and pray in thanks for a safe arrival to the New World. It
was December 4, 1619, and 38 men from Berkeley Parish in England
vowed:

"Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrivall at the place assigned
for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually
keept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God."on December 4,
1619.

That thanksgiving did not in any way involve anyone beside the English.

The Virginia thanksgiving was preceded by the thanksgivings of Spanish
Colonists.

Spanish Explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles arrived at what is now St.
Augustine, Fla with 800 Spanish settlers on September 8, 1565. The
Seloy Tribe were invited to a Catholic Mass of Thanksgiving, followed
by a meal.

The Seloy were outnumbered.

The Spanish shared their
cocido, a stew/soup made from garbanzo beans, salt pork, laced with
garlic, as well as hard tack (sea biscuits), and red wine. But there's no
evidence that the Indians were allowed to participate in the religious
festivities as equals, were able to celebrate their shared humanity,
or their music, as equals in that vast wildness, that vast dynamic
uncertainty.

The Spanish came in overwhelming force with a much more deadly
military technology. They didn't have to seek out the good will of the
native people.

The feast in the wilderness of the integration of the radical Other
may have happened when Don Juan de Onate celebrated a Catholic Mass of
Thanksgiving on the banks of the Rio Grande (then called the Rio
Bravo) near present day El Paso, on April 20, 1582. But if it
happened, it happened in an unlikely way.

Onate, who was of Basque ancestry, had made one of the great fortunes
in New Spain/Mexico from the
slave labor of Indians at his silver mines in Ciudad de Zacatecas.
Using his private fortune, he brutally reconquered and oppressed the
Pueblo Indians. He arrived in New Mexico with a four-mile caravan with
over 80 wagons, 10,000 head of livestock, 560 colonists.

Many of the colonists were secretly, defiantly Jews who were trying to
escape the Inquisition that had just arrived in Mexico City.

No local Indians were invited to the celebration.

Boulder was founded by a party of gold seekers who stopped off here in
October 1858 on their way to the Cherry Creek diggings. Liking the
look of the mountains to the west (they knew enough geology to know
those mountains were a likely spot for gold, and silver), they began
prospecting and struck paydirt in January 1859.

And of course that strike which made every one of the gold seekers
stinking rich, was accompanied by a thanksgiving celebration.
Only the white prospectors and their families were included in that celebration.

The Fur Trappers/Mountain Men Rendezvouses
marked the resumption of the feast in the wilderness of the integration of the
Other.

And what grand, drunken, musical, Dionysian feasts they were.

While there were many free trappers, most mountain men were employed
by major fur companies. The life of a company man was almost
militarized. The men had mess groups, hunted and trapped in brigades
and always reported to the head of the trapping party. This man was
called a "boosway", a bastardization of the French term bourgeoisie.
He was the leader of the brigade, the head trader and overall CEO.

The North West Company, held a rendezvous in the Boise Valley in 1819.
The system was later implemented by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company,
whose agents would haul supplies to specific mountain locations in the
spring, engage in trading with trappers, and bring pelts back to
communities on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the fall. This
system continued when other firms, particularly the American Fur
Company owned by John Jacob Astor, entered the field.

The annual rendezvous was often held at Horse Creek on the Green
River, now called the Upper Green River Rendezvous Site, near
present-day Pinedale, Wyoming. By the mid-1830s it attracted 450-500
men, essentially all the American trappers and traders working in the
Rockies, as well as numerous Native Americans.

The Rendezvouses were the grand pay day. It was the pinnacle of a
mountain man's year. It was an event redolent with alcohol, a wide
variety and vast quantity of food, women, sport, music and dancing.

And mountain men/fur trappers were grateful and gave thanks.

It was a whole new level of multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic
contact. The Rendezvouses were attended by American Indians from many
nations. Anglo-Americans, French Canadians, Cajuns, Afro-American who
played on the instruments of the frontier. They sang, danced, shouted,
moaned and played fiddles, banjos, harmonicas, mandolins, guitars,
wash-boards, base buckets in sheer exhilaration in the vast wild ness
of the Rocky Mountains.

True the beaver pelt industry was the spearhead of the toxic,
non-sustainable "development", the rape and exploitation of the North
American continent and its native people by greedy corporations. True
it introduced that horrible gateway drug, the scourge of alcohol, to
many American Indian people. And yet the rendezvouses more completely
anticipate the present moment, this
multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic reality, of the integration
of the Other, that has become the reality of these United States.

Everyone feasted and celebrated their shared humanity as
equals in that vast wildness, that vast dynamic uncertainty.

And from this came the multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic
integration of the Other that we know and recognize to be - American
Music.