Mom, was Pocahontas at the first Thanksgiving?

One of the joys of parenting is the stop-in-your-tracks moments that shake your world view.  For me, one of those moments came a couple of years ago when my then 8 year old asked “Hey Mom, was Pocahontas invited to the First Thanksgiving with all those men in black?”  “Wow,” I thought, “where do I go with that one.”  From the “distance and time don’t matter” perspective of a modern tween, it seems pretty obvious that Pocahontas should have been invited to that first Thanksgiving table. 

Ever since that conversation, I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving, digging into histories and hunting for the original thoughts and deeds of both the Founders of New England and the Founders of Virginia. And apparently I’m not alone.

On Thursday the 27th, Thanksgiving evening, PBS will broadcast a new documentary called Pocahontas Revealed.  While I doubt they will uncover evidence that she was at the first Thanksgiving the timing of the broadcast is part of the ongoing tug of war between the founding centers and mythologies of the United States.  The tussle over the right to be considered the colony that established American values, freedoms and political systems began in the 19th century and goes on today.  And so does the scholarly debunking of those competing mythologies.  Eminent archaeologists and historians have lined up on both sides.  And newly broadened access to published and digitized records from the earliest days of both colonies has made it possible to decide for yourself. 

 True discourse of the present estate of Virginia, and the successe of the affaires … till June 18, 1614, together with a relation of the severall English townes and fortes, the assured hopes of that country, etc, by Ralph Hamor, was published in 1615.  Seattle Public Library is very fortunate to own a copy of this slender volume.  It is a first hand account of the state of the Virginia Colony by a man who knew Pocahontas.   Hamor’s portrayal of Jamestown is somewhat at odds with that of Smith and others who decry the laziness and ill-preparedness of the Jamestown colonists.

Writings with other narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the first English settlements of America , by Captain John Smith is a 2007 selection of Smith’s Virginia letters, reports and other documents.  Many of these have been published before but taken together they give an unique picture of the early life in the Jamestown settlement.

The Virtual Jamestown website is a treasure trove for those interested in the truth behind the myths surrounding the founding of Jamestown. In addition to a 3-D recreation of a Native American village, the ambitious project has digitized numerous original writings, court cases, legislative, legal and religious documents as well as archeological reports and maps.   It’s a must visit site.

Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, in New England, published by the Massachusetts legislature in the 1850’s is a verbatim transcription of the legal and business records of the Colony.  It includes, births, marriages, deaths, court cases, accounting records and acts of the legislature.  Reading this material will certainly shake up your picture of the Pilgrims as a peaceful, dutiful, law-abiding group.

The Mayflower papers : selected writings of colonial New England / William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Church, and others, selected and arranged by Nathaniel and Thomas Philbrick is the Pilgrim equivalent of the Writings of Captain John Smith.  Letters, reports and journal entries gives a first hand look at the thoughts and struggles of the Plymouth colonists.

Plymouth Colony also has its amazing website, dedicated to explaining the colony’s history, philosophy and reality.  The Plymouth Colony Archive Project is collection of fully searchable texts, including: court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies.  The amount of material is almost overwhelming.

If you prefer to let others read the difficult handwriting and archaic terms of the original documents then there are plenty of great books to help you think about these competing myths of American history.

The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival myths of American origin, by Ann Uhry Abrams is one of the earliest books to discuss the creation, in the 19th century, of these two myths and their ongoing rivalry.  Abrams does a great job of putting things in context, with much original source material and great analysis.

A great and godly adventure: the Pilgrims & the myth of the first Thanksgiving, by Godfrey Hodgson, vividly tells the story of  the 17th-century Puritans  how they struggled to establish a religious refuge amid internal and external opposition.  He also provides a very  provocative account creation of the Thanksgiving mythology and its continued  exploitation for religious, political, and commercial purposes.

The times of their lives: life, love, and death in Plymouth Colony by James and Patricia Deetz was the original “shocking tale” of the true Pilgrims.  The Deetzes use court records, church records and other original documents and archeological finds to shake up the passive prim Pilgrim mythology and replace it with something much more human and interesting.

Savage kingdom : the true story of Jamestown, 1607, and the settlement of America by Benjamin Woolley.  Woolley’s book published in 2007 on the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding uses newly discovered archival material from around the world to tell the story of this “reckless, daring enterprise.”