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The Trust Frequency, First Thanksgiving, First Fifty Years and Indigenous Cosmology
2014
Letter to the Editor
Old Colony Memorial Newspaper, Plymouth MA “Thanksgiving: Past and Present”
A Time to Celebrate and a Time to Mourn
November 25, 2014
You are doing work no-one else has the insight,
perseverance and courage to undertake. Easan K. Author and William Brewster, Pilgrim Elder Descendant.
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America’s Origin Story brought to the table.
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Andrew Cameron Bailey and Connie Baxter Marlow, Mayflower Descendant, present their discoveries from over a decade of research into the events leading up to and following the harvest celebration in the fall of 1621 now know as The First Thanksgiving and its role in the transformation of consciousness.
Democracy, Separation of Church and State, Consent of the Governed, Self-Determination, Equal and Just Laws Serving the Common Good. The tenets of civil government that arose from the principles and ideals of the Mayflower Pilgrims and the Indians they lived amongst.
The Origin Story of America begins with a compact, a peace treaty and an inter-cultural feast, followed by a melding of cultures through 50 years of friendship between the Mayflower Pilgrims and the Pokanoket Wampanoag Indians at Plymouth Plantation 1621-1675.
Join Bailey and Marlow as they bring to light the untold story that has been shrouded in the mis-conception and mis-understanding of revisionist history.
Despite all the confusion and misinformation, there is good news about the 1621 harvest celebration now known as The First Thanksgiving. We Americans have much to celebrate: democracy, separation of church and state, consent of the governed, self-determination, equal and just laws serving the common good. These are the tenets of civil government that arose from the principles and ideals of the Mayflower Pilgrims and the Indians they lived amongst in peace and friendship for 54 years.
We can mourn the loss of potential of the relationship that developed there under the guidance of the two visionary leaders Pilgrim Governor William Bradford and the Massasoit, sachem of the Pokanoket Wampanoags. And we can mourn alongside our Native brothers and sisters who have suffered since that unique time in human history.
The origin story of the United States begins with the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrim/Wampanoag Peace Treaty and an inter-cultural feast, followed by a melding of cultures through more than half a century of friendship between the Mayflower Pilgrims and the Pokanoket Wampanoags at Plymouth Plantation from 1621 to 1675.
American democracy and the American mind and spirit are the fruits of the seeds planted at Plymouth. There’s an untold story waiting to be told, a story that has been out-of-balance since it the first telling of it. The telling of this story reflects the consciousness of the people who tell it. For centuries we glorified the Pilgrim and ignored the Indian except for the story of Squanto and the planting of corn that culminated in “The First Thanksgiving.” Now, for decades, in an effort to correct that imbalance, revisionist history has demonized the Pilgrims with tales of misdeeds that never occurred. We now have a confused and confusing story. We are enmeshed in blame, shame, guilt and anger, with no one knowing what or who to believe.
Signing of The Mayflower Compact. November 11, 1620 aboard the Mayflower.Mayflower PIlgrim/Wampanoag Peace Treaty Drafted March 22, 1621Stylized rendition of the harvest celebration of the fall of 1621 now known as The First Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims drafted “The Mayflower Compact” combining themselves into a “civil body politic to enact equal and just laws to serve the common good” in the cabin of the Mayflower before landing – a giant step forward from monarchy to democracy – American-style.
Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, separation of church and state – these are principles that drove the Mayflower Pilgrims. These are principles that lie at the foundation of indigenous cosmology. These are guiding principles of the yet-to-be realized American dream that came through the Pilgrims and the Indians they lived amongst.
George F. Willison states in his classic book “Saints and Strangers:”
“The Pilgrims played a vital part – and consciously so – in that great conflict of spiritual and material forces which so decisively shaped the world, as we know it today. That conflict centered on the fiercely contested right to freedom of conscience, merely one aspect of the still larger right to freedom of thought and speech. Stripped of theological trimmings, the issue as posed in the Pilgrims’ day was this:
Was it right for the State to demand uniformity of belief? Or were men entitled to independence of judgment in religious matters? Should all their beliefs be prescribed, or could they read the Bible for themselves and come to their own conclusions about its teachings?
Far from being humble and soft-spoken, they were quick in their own defense, fond of controversy, and sharp of tongue, engaging in many a high-pitched quarrel with friends and foes alike, even among themselves.”
Read on for more!
Excerpts from Saints and Strangers George F. Willison
Reynal & Hitchcock, New York 1945 pp. 7-9
“The Pilgrims were not nineteenth century pietists, or quietists. They were not pale plaster saints, hollow and bloodless. They were men – and women, too – of courage and conviction, strong and positive in their attitudes, prepared to sacrifice much for their principles, even their very lives. Far from being Victorians, they were children of another and a greater age, the Elizabethan, and in their lives reflected many of the qualities of that amazing age – its restlessness and impatience with old ways, its passionate enthusiasms, its eager curiosity and daring speculation in all fields, its boldness in action, its abounding and apparently inexhaustible energies.
Never did the Pilgrims quietly resign themselves to defeat, no matter what the odds against them. They launched themselves upon the most hazardous of ventures not once but many times, and no obstacle or untoward circumstance could stay them or divert them from their course. Far from being humble and soft-spoken, they were quick in their own defense, fond of controversy, and sharp of tongue, engaging in many a high-pitched quarrel with friends and foes alike, even among themselves. Given to speaking their minds plainly, they expressed themselves in the language of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in the torrential and often rafter-shaking rhetoric of Elizabethan England, with no slightest regard for the proprieties and polite circumlocutions of a later day. In denouncing the “whore at Rome” they meant just that.
Pilgrims were Elizabethan, too, in their acceptance of the simpler joys of life. The practiced no macerations of the flesh, no tortures of self-denial. They appreciated the pleasures of the table and of the bottle, liked both “strong waters” and beer, especially the latter, never complaining more loudly of their hardships than when necessity reduced them to drinking water, which they always regarded with suspicion as a prolific source of human ills. They were not monks or nuns in their intimate relations as their usually numerous families and more than occasional irregularities attest. Fond of the comforts of connubial bed and board, they married early and often and late, sometimes within a few weeks of losing a mate. Only on the Sabbath did they go about in funereal blacks and grays. Ordinarily they wore the russet browns and Lincoln green common among the English lower classes from which they sprang.
The Pilgrims played a vital part – and consciously so – in that great conflict of spiritual and material forces which so decisively shaped the world as we know it today. That conflict centered on the fiercely-contested right to freedom of conscience, merely one aspect of the still larger right to freedom of thought and speech. Stripped of theological trimmings, the issue as posed in the Pilgrims’ day was this:
Was it right for the State to demand uniformity of belief? Or were men entitled to independence of judgment in religious matters? Should all their beliefs be prescribed, or could they read the Bible for themselves and come to their own conclusions about its teachings?
In short, was the “true” church a democratic or an autocratic institution?
Men did not go unflinching to the stake or gallows – the Pilgrims did not willfully choose exile and years of almost incredible hardship – Cromwell and his Independents did not lightly court death as rebels-merely for words. They were valiantly engaged, all of them, in a desperate struggle for a better order of things, for a more generous measure of freedom for all men, for a higher and nobler conception of life based upon recognition of the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual. To understand the Pilgrims and the heroic part they played in that epic struggle, it is necessary to go back with Bradford – and even beyond him – to ‘begine at ye very roote & rise of the same.’ “
“THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS: Freedom and Friendship at Plymouth Plantation.” A Cameron/Baxter Films project. There’s still time to contribute to our Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign for our challenging new documentary film/book venture. Funding ends on January 19. Please follow this blog for information that will give you a new perspective on an old story that has been out of balance since we first started telling it. See our other links below for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
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