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WAR,
WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
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Remember
“PSNA” (Puritan State of North America)
Most of us have
mixed feelings about Thanksgiving. On the one hand, it has become the family
holiday par excellence, 
when adult children
return home and relatives we don’t often see are invited to the feast, On the
other hand, most readers of the Update are well aware of the dual nature of the
holiday. While Thanksgiving celebrates what we are grateful for in our family
life, it also marks the historical process that concluded with genocide and
expropriation of indigenous lives and lands. For Native people, the
Thanksgiving has long been marked as a day of mourning.
But there is
another aspect of the history which we generally ignore – and that is highly
relevant when we are flooded with propaganda about the religion-fueled
atrocities of groups like ISIS in the Middle East, now spilling over into “our”
cities like Paris. The Plymouth Plantation, site of the supposed first
Thanksgiving and later Puritan Boston were also communities motivated by
religious fanaticism and were the spiritual ancestors of the Christian
fundamentalism that motivates a substantial portion of our population,
especially at the base of the Republican Party.
The Puritan
“Pilgrims” may themselves have been refugees from religious persecution, but
that did not stop them from 
imposing their own
brand of intolerance in their New England colonies and toward the native
peoples. They saw themselves as modelled on the Exodus and subjugation of “the
Promised Land” and they imposed, along with the conquest, their own brand of
religious fundamentalism. The Puritan movement was imbued with biblical
imagery, especially from the Hebrew scriptures (“Old Testament”). If John
Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” was morally related to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,
the other “hill” of Zion was not far from their minds. That’s why there are
towns of Salem (a variant of Jerusalem) in most New England states, along with
Canaan, Bethel/Bethlehem, Goshen, Lebanon.
imposing their own
brand of intolerance in their New England colonies and toward the native
peoples. They saw themselves as modelled on the Exodus and subjugation of “the
Promised Land” and they imposed, along with the conquest, their own brand of
religious fundamentalism. The Puritan movement was imbued with biblical
imagery, especially from the Hebrew scriptures (“Old Testament”). If John
Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” was morally related to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,
the other “hill” of Zion was not far from their minds. That’s why there are
towns of Salem (a variant of Jerusalem) in most New England states, along with
Canaan, Bethel/Bethlehem, Goshen, Lebanon. 
They also imposed
their own strict version of biblical law (Shari’a!) to regulate all manner of
public and private life. The capital crimes in the colonies – led by
“blasphemy” – were given biblical footnotes in the first and subsequent printed
law codes. Long before the famous “witch trials” of 1692-3 four members of the
colony were hanged for the crime of being Quakers.
Indigenous
resistance, meanwhile, was met with open terror from the earliest days of the
colony. When the last revolt against the invaders was defeated in 1975-6 the
colonists displayed the head of native leader Metacomet (“King Philip”) on a
stake in Plymouth. Other native settlements – even Christian ones -- were
destroyed and the inhabitants held in a kind of concentration camp on Deer
Island and later sold as slaves in the British West Indies.
These measures
highlighted the irony on the first Great Seal of the colony, which pictured a
stereotypical native voicing the plea “Come over and help us.”
It is still the
model of the contemporary seal of our state, which includes the Latin motto:
“By the sword we
pursue a calm repose under liberty.”
First Great Seal of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630
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Contemporary State
Seal of Massachusetts
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