Noreen LaTour raises several interesting points, some of which I'll try to answer. A careful reading of Winslow's description (in Mourt's Relation) would also bring out the mixture of responses among the Pilgrims in the initial explorations - the intention to leave symbolic gifts in exchange for the removal of objects thought to be curiosities, and Winslow's regret that in their haste they forgot to leave the symbols. Then as a recurrent theme through the reports of the next several months we find that the Pilgrims, at every meeting with the Indians, attempted and finally succeeded at making restitution for the corn that had been removed from storage pits. It took some time to identify and meet the owner but eventually they did. (How it was possible to estimate value and provide appropriate restitution remains unanswerable.) One may assume fairly that some form of recompense was also made for objects removed. The reason one may assume that is that the Pilgrims were intent on establishing relations with the Indians in which neither side stole from the other! - that's an essential part of their treaty. They had taken corn and curiosities. The Indians took tools that had apparently been abandoned in the fields, although in the Pilgrims' thought it was obvious that the Pilgrims were going to come back for them, just as it was clear to the Indians that the Indians would return to their houses expecting their objects still to be there. Incidentally, it's unlikely that the houses had been vacated for the season. The Indians probably cleared out shortly before the Pilgrims approached, to avoid contact. Otherwise it is difficult to imagine why there were objects of furniture that could be taken. Plimoth Plantation is a wonderful museum where one can see close approximations of the physical circumstances of life in 1627 Plymouth Colony. The interpretation varies from time to time, sometimes quite good, but not always very good. For the last several years they have had odd and unsupported notions about Thanksgiving, the Mayflower Compact, and relations with the Indians. I have reviewed some of them as they appear in a couple of Plymouth Plantation books for schools that were published by the National Geographic Society some years ago. (See my article "1621, A Historian Looks Anew at Thanksgiving" on the site www.sail1620.org - which is a review of their book "1621, A New Look at Thanksgiving.") When people comment that the movie (and things like it) present the views of the Pilgrims and the views of the Natives equally, quite often an essential anachronism is ignored. It's this: the views of the Pilgrims are known from their 17th-century writings. But the Native views are what has been invented in the last twenty-five years or so by people trying to imagine what their ancestors should have thought. They have been making it up. There is no traditional knowledge that goes back to the 17th century. What we have instead is 20th-century recollections of what had been recently passed down (perhaps stories told by grandparents or their contemporaries). And the people who provided the oral history of the 20th century were themselves representatives of a tribe that has a longer tradition of literacy than any other in North America. In other words, the stories came from people whose "memories" were inspired by their own or their ancestors' reading and re-interpretation of th! e very colonists' writings against which they want to set up an alternative that tells it the way they'd like it to have been described. The first published version of this re-telling is Ebenezer Peirce's re-telling of Winslow and Bradford, at the request of Zerviah Gould Mitchell (1878). His anti-Pilgrim sneers have been considered to represent a 17th-century Native view, even though Peirce was not an Indian and his attitude is that of a moralizing Victorian castigating the hypocrisy of his own contemporaries who were in the 19th century oppressing Indians. The same style of revising Winslow was fairly well done by Anthony Pollard (who used the name Nanepashemet), in prose that adopts a quasi-Native stiltification of grammar and point of view. It goes on in the comments of Linda Coombs and others of the Wampanoag program at Plimoth Plantation. And some of them obviously make things up, like Nanepashemet's romantic notions concerning land use. When Thomas Morton's diatribe against the Pilgrims (1637) is added to the mix, it's often overlooked that his view of Native life was polemically intended, which makes it difficult to judge how much of it is accurate and how much of it was written as a confirmation of preconceptions about the ideal Savage uncorrupted by European society. I could go on, but I think that's enough for the moment. Some aspects of this historiographical problem are discussed in my book "Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691). The last section of the 225-page introduction discusses the prejudices of Francis Jennings' book "The Invasion of America" (1975). Jennings' book is a major source for the assumption that all colonists were vile and duplicitous in their relations with the aggrieved Natives. - Jeremy Bangs "Noreen LaTour" <[email protected]> wrote: >Overall I thought the writers of the Mayflower movie "Desperate Crossing" did an excellent and accurate job of telling the story from both the Pilgrims prospective and that of the Native tribes. >However,I would have liked to have seen more than what was given on the Native peoples point of view and background. Speaking of the native peoples,one small detail in the film I found that was probably inaccurate was some of the Native men were shown bare chested in the middle of winter! Why did the writers of the movie not show them wearing animal furs as they would have been wearing in the frigid tempatures of a New England winter? Was it to perpetuate the stereotype of the rugged savage? If the Natives ran around in the dead of winter bare chested they would have died from exposure long before the Eurpeans brought diseases to them! (I'm a native of Vermont so I know personally how brutally cold New England winters are.)While I'm on the subject of attire I was pleased to see the Pilgrims not wearing the black and white clothing that they were always portrayed wearing back in my school days (1960's and 70's). > >I have done much reading and research on the Pilgrims since discovering that I descended from 4 who were on the Mayflower (Francis Cooke & his son John,George Soule and Richard Warren) and several persons who came to Plymouth shortly afterwards (Hester Cooke,daughter of Francis and her husband Richard Wright.and Rebecca Symonson/Simmons daughter of Moses Symonson/Simmons. I've also been to Plimouth Plantation and aboard the Maflower II which stirred up many emotions in me including admiration for all that my ancestors went through and the courage that it took to bring them across the Atlantic. This movie brought back the same feelings to me. I also have Mohican ancestry. ( The Mohicans were originally from New York state and up into the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont.By the Revolutionary War my Mohican ancestors were living in western Massachusetts in Stockbridge. Eventually they were sent to Michigan to live on a reservation with another tribe where many still reside ! t! > oday. My ancestor however,moved from Stockbridge to northern Vermont after the Revolutionary War. So much for the myth of another movie "The Last of the Mohicans".) > >But back to the Pilgrims and the Wampanopg (spelling?) tirbe....I noticed several people mentioned about the Pilgrims digging up native graves and robbing them. I had read about their having taken some corn they'd dug up and about their uncovering the graves of some natives and of a European man.I'd read they took things from the European man's grave but not from the native graves out of respect. However I also vaguely recall reading somewhere that they did take goods from Native houses because they thought the natives had abandoned these goods when in fact the Natives had only left them in their summer homes and gone to their winter lodgings. They had not abandoned these things but wee planning on returning in the spring.What a shock to them upon their return to find their homes had been ransacked and their supply of corn stolen! I can't find the source I read this in at the moment but I know it was taken from one of the Pilgrims own accounts. Does anyone know which Pilgri! m! > wrote this? > >Noreen Maloney LaTour >Burlington,Vermont > >------------------------------- >To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >