Greg Hartnett

While shopping at Whole Foods, I struck up a conversation with a college-aged girl about Thanksgiving. She expressed her love of the holiday, saying that it was one holiday that brought all Americans together, regardless of religion or sex. To which I replied, “How do you think the Native Americans feel about Thanksgiving?” She shrugged her shoulders, and said “They probably don’t get as excited about it as we do - just another day for them.”

Somehow I doubt it. I find it hard to believe that such a proud and strong people simply forgot about the atrocities committed upon their people in the name of advancing civilization. So below I present (courtesy of Howard Zinn) some history of the Iroquois, just a portion of the 25 million Native Americans killed so that we could have shopping malls from sea to shining sea.

In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned in common and worked in common. Hunting was done together, and the catch was divided among the members of the village. Houses were considered common property and were shared by several families. The concept of private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 1650’s wrote: “No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers… Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common.”

Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. If a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outside the door. Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clans might make up a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were off hunting and fishing. Gary B. Nash notes in his comprehensive study of early America, Red, White, and Black: “Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in the Iroquois society”.

Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were taught equality in status and the sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children; they did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn self-care.

Gary Nash describes Iroquois culture:

No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts and jails - the apparatus of authority in European societies - were to be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Though priding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong…. He who stole another’s food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed” by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself.

So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places were as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.

They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.

Some things to think about while we celebrate the awesomeness that is America.