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November 25, 2005
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Shiny Happy Pilgrims Holding Hands

     In honor of Thanksgiving, I gave my students a surprise quiz.

     I got the idea after reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, a book by James Loewen that debunks popular and persistent myths about the American tradition. How would Native young people fare on questions about the Pilgrims, Plymouth and plague?

     After they took the quiz, a class of seniors pointed out accurately that the first settlers in America were indigenous people around 30,000 BC. In this case, the high schoolers where more alert than Loewen’s college students whose “consensus answer was ‘1620.’” Many also correctly circled the highest death rate (90-95 percent) when asked how many Indians were killed by disease between 1617 and 1620.

     Yet they were just as duped on other questions as perhaps most of America’s college freshmen would be, thanks to years of biased textbooks and ignorant teachers.

     • Which European nation occupied as much as a third of the United States in the 16th and 17th centuries (France, England, Spain, or Denmark)?

     • What was the major cause of death for most Native Americans in those centuries (war, plague, poor technology, all of the above)?

     • What did English Separatists mostly blame for the disease (poor sanitation, lack of medicine, God, or all of the above)?

     • How did the Pilgrims survive (by robbing Indian houses, gravesites, and fields; by working hard as they were “servants of God;” they had help from Indian villages; they engaged in cannibalism).

     “No, but close,” I replied, when a student, laughing, said he circled “cannibalism” for the last question. “It was the first, starving people in what is today Virginia who went so far as to dig up the corpses of the dead. Instead of digging holes to plant corn, they dug random holes to find gold.”

     (Now that I think about it, the story of those first monomaniacal Europeans serves as an apt analogy for Ted Stevens’ and Don Young’s present hole digging.)

     “Try again,” I offered.

     “The Pilgrims had help from Indian villages?” a student said.

     “C’mon, how could they get help if 95 percent of them died from the plague?” I asked. “Remember, Squanto came back from Spain alone to find he was the only survivor from his village.”

     “Then... by robbing the Indians?” another student said with bemused disbelief.

     “The story of America, I’m afraid.”

     In the next class, I distributed the same quiz. After we discussed the answers, a few students complained: “Aw, you’re not going to now tell us that Thanksgiving is bad.”

     “If the truth isn’t a happy story, is it not worth knowing?” I asked rhetorically.

     I think my students thought I would be a buzz kill, the wolf that made away with the bird. “OK, then I won’t talk about it.” I returned to my desk.

     “But we should rightly call it Thankstealing,” I said before sitting down.

     “Oh man,” a student said with a sigh, “Are you going to tell us the real story of Christmas too?”

     “Ho ... ho .... ho.”


     For the record, Spain occupied a third of the U.S., plague caused the most death (many Indians defeated the invaders in battle), and the Pilgrims praised God for bringing diseases that “cleared title” for their land grab (Loewen, 76-81).






Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
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