Let us give thanks that in this difficult year of 2020, 400 years after European arrival on this peninsula, more of us than ever before, or so it seems, are inclined to be thoughtful about the ironies of that arrival and this very contradictory holiday.
Which is the real Thanksgiving story: stalwart Europeans celebrating their survival of their difficult journey and terrible first winter and first harvest, the first tiny spark in the development of the great civilization of which we are the beneficiaries? Or: Europeans arriving here as a beachhead in a conquest of this continent that was the beginning of the near-end for the people they encountered here?
Which is the real story? Both of course. Since history us written by the winners, as we say, it is the former story that has had a long run as our origin story. But we have been hearing a lot about the other story in recent years. . It’s hard to see it both ways, to be on both on the boat with the arriving Europeans and on the shore.with the unwitting hosts and soon-to-be victims.
An idea that arrived on the boat with the arriving Europeans was that Euro civilization was superior to what they found here, an advanced stage according to a well-established notion of cultural evolution, To the European eye, it didn’t look like the locals had done much with the place. The scattered villages and what would have looked like crude hovels (compared with thee Old World’s cathedrals , cities, art) looked less like civilization than raw material for a civilization.
In fact don’t we heirs to Euro culture still pretty much see it that way? In this advanced stage of our own civilization we have developed sympathy with those victimized in the process of getting us to this point. But who seriously suggests we undo what we have wrought, as ill-gotten gain, fruit from a poisoned business plan based on genocide and slavery?
Here’s a question we don’t hear asked: how would native culture have developed if it hadn’t been overrun by European culture? What other sort of destiny might native culture have had if not run over by Europeans’ Manifest Destiny? Would native culture have just toddled along in our footprints,as predicted by that Euro idea of natural evolution? .(Don’t we all, by some universal human drive, want to end with Facebook and gourmet pizza and our shot at a trophy house?) Or would it, given its start, have developed differently?
Only in recent decades have some heirs to Euro culture begun to take native culture seriously as maybe having something to offer modern descendants of the Euro conquest. Attitudes, spiritual values, a way of being on the earth that, in our time of unsustainable exploitation, we have come to admire, think about. Remember that old Keep America Beautiful ad with the sad old Indian (played , I just learned, by an Italian actor) shedding the tear for our disregard of the environment?
The Outer Cape is rife with ironic contradictions. The European conquest started here. But after a pause in Provincetown it passed us by in favor of Plymouth and never looked back. It kept going, doing most of its dirty work (from the native perspective) farther and farther to the west of us. As a result, by 1960, 340 years in, this peninsula that had been “discovered” first was still relatively undeveloped and the National Seashore was created by federal government to keep it that way, to preserve that stage of underdevelopment.
The thinking and feeling behind such preservation—a socialist oasis in a profit-oriented economy —has a lot in common with one of the ideas of native culture that we pick up in our early education: that land cannot be owned. That it exists not just to be exploited for profit, but it is of inherent value, even to human beings.
Is it not a glorious irony that one of the more enlightened features of advanced Euro culture is setting aside parks that embody the thinking and feeling of a way of life already widely practiced on this continent when we arrived?
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