Alex Levine’s Reviews > Squanto: A Native Odyssey > Status Update

“No new political history was made” on the day of the first Thanksgiving. Rather, the event reflected treaty relations/obligations previously developed between the Massasoit and pilgrims, coming after the latter had grown into a stronger, regional force, as illustrated by their strong defense of Squanto, leading the native sachem to reaffirm their relationship.

Cool! Plymouth was “not an isolated settlement,” but rather “more like the English neighborhood in the recently revived indigenous village of Pawtuxet.”

Pawtuxet settlements were itinerant, moving between different sites in summer and winter. This seasonality incentivized/made practice the gifting of meals to visitors. They practiced a similar reciprocity with the pilgrims, so that teaching them to better farm (once allied, post-treaty) served to grow the “common pot”. In effect, Thanksgiving appears not as exceptional, but regular, sustaining both communities.

Jamestown in the 1610s: a “site of colliding worlds…mixed up, messy settlement” that merged English and Native Americans’ (and a plethora of different, distinct, and not necessarily mutually intelligible East Coast peoples) structures, styles of farming and land management, and even people.

Interesting that Lipman uses the term “hot Protestants” to describe the brand of non-conformism practiced by the pilgrims, as opposed to the more performative “puritan,” which even at the time was somewhat derogatory. The former is both how these groups - many of which sprang up after the 1580s - characterized themselves, and captures a long overlooked dynamism of thought/levity. They weren’t all dour.

Cool point on early 17th century Spain as characterized by a “multicultural ethnoscape,” including Jews, Berbers, Turks, sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans, alongside a host of European peoples. This meant a variety of forms of indenture and freedom/unfreedom regulated by the state. On several occasions, Magrebi “faith slaves” presented themselves as Native Americans to gain freedom in court.

We should therefore “never see the meetings between ships and canoes as flat, two-sided affairs. There were always hidden dimensions. Just as Christian nations jousted among each other for access to America’s coastal market in furs and goods, so did native powers.”

Super interesting, the Wampanoag welcomed English shops peacefully, because they saw them as a means to directly access European weapons (and iron supplies) and cut out native middlemen. This was particularly a response to the Mi’kmaq’s “creative approach to new technologies.” They adopted European sailing ships and violently raided the northern Dawn Lands.

By the 1560s, the combined tonnage of European ships traveling to the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland to fish equaled that of those going to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South and Central America.

“Indigenous people regularly made overland voyages of 1000 miles or more, propelled by just their feet and canoes. Lakota from the Plains turned up at treaties held at Montreal. Shawnees from the Ohio Valley followed the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico,” etc.