Through the Cracks #1: New Words to an Old Song
Welcome to all the new subscribers to Subversive Light’s Through the Cracks. It seems fitting that this newsletter launches in the season of gratitude, because I’m really thankful that you are here.
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I’m glad you’ve found your way here. Truly.
And now, about that song…
It was somewhere between the stuffing and the turkey. The oven was busy, there was no more prep to do, and so I sat down and picked up my reader, turning to the book I had downloaded with curiosity much earlier in the morning. And the first words I read were these:
Serious, critical history tends to be hard on the living. It challenges us to see distortions embedded in the heroic national origin myths we have been taught since childhood. It takes enemies demonized by previous generations and treats them as worthy of understanding in their particular contexts. Ideological absolutes—civility and savagery, liberty and tyranny, and especially us and them—begin to blur. People from our own society who are not supposed to matter, and whose historical experiences show how the injustices of the past have shaped the injustices of the present, move from the shadows into the light. Because critical history challenges assumptions and authority, it often leaves us feeling uncomfortable. Yet it also has the capacity to help us become more humble and humane (Silverman, 1).
Those are the first words of David Silverman's book, This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, the Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (2019). Here, in one paragraph, the author has stated clearly everything that I have been trying to articulate about the world I have lived in these past few years -- a world of cleaning out and re-alignment, a world filled with hard questions and even harder answers, a world in which I have come to shift my view far from the conventional wisdom in which I was raised and educated to something, well, far less comfortable. In this one paragraph, Silverman gives me the words that I could not find, about the way I see events, automatically, because of my training as an historian, and the way that I am called to live by my faith.
Sometimes, studying history with open eyes and open hearts is the best that we can do to live into that truth.
And Silverman's words did indeed prop my eyes wide open -- again. Using the event of the first Day of Mourning protests (what many of us know as Thanksgiving Day) in 1970, Silverman moves like a fact-checker through the story ingrained in our education about the first "thanksgiving," painting a picture for us of the land and its people before that event, an event that was catastrophic to their way of life, their land, and their sense of identity as a people. Surprised to know that the descendants of the Wampanoag still live in Massachusetts today? Many would be, because our corporate mythology says that they were wiped out by disease and that the land was virtually empty when the passengers of the Mayflower arrived. And the truth? While there was a serious epidemic among the Wampanoag just before that fateful day, many survived and their numbers still surpassed those of the arriving English.
This is just one example of where myth has buried substance. What about this epidemic that pre-dated the Mayflower? If the arrival of these European refugees on Wampanoag shores was truly the first contact with the native peoples, why had there already been devastating epidemics of diseases unknown in the Americas? Simple: the first known actual contact date is 1524, when Europeans arrived seeking trade, causing war, and enslaving natives all along the coast with regularity. There is so much more to tell (that's why you should read the book), but most shattering of all is the clear line that Silverman draws from the evidence, a line that directly connects the incursion of the explorers and the growing worldwide slave trade. How many Wampanoag, and Iroquois, and others, disappeared from their homes into lives of enslavement in other places?
Silverman tells a difficult story, and that story and the questions he asks are carefully gathered from the few first-hand accounts left to us by those who were there, and from the storied history carried from generation to generation to the hands of the living Wampanoag in our time. As a good historian, Silverman is careful to put heavy qualifications around his sources. These sources, no matter how spare and unscientific (by modern standards) do not paint a merry picture of two just-met groups of people, praying and celebrating over turkey and sides that "thanksgiving" day.
Sometimes the best historiography is that which reminds us of the humanity of all involved, and which asks us to pause and stand as best we can in that humanity and look around. This is what Silverman asks of us as we read. He, as Marcus Borg often does, demands that we take a hard look at what has become the conventional wisdom of our culture and that we ask questions from an alternative viewpoint, the viewpoint of the other. Both Silverman and Borg call us to live in this place of discomfort, where the lessons of a lifetime are sometimes shattered and worlds turned upside down, and to stay there.
Today, the first day of the Advent season, this might indeed be the best practice of preparation that I can muster -- the continuing act of preparing my whole being by looking away from what I believed "was," first to the reality of that history and then to the uncertain meaning that knowledge brings to my present. There is no greater act of faith that living in this discomfort, because that is what our God calls us to do -- to look beyond what we are told is reality, to look beyond what we are told is truth, to look to the only real truth which is our common humanity.
I am sorry to say that despite my training and studies as an historian, and while I have long understood that the stories of my youth were the myth of our beginning, not fact, Silverman's work has placed me in yet a new place of such discomfort. These new words have forever made an old song unpalatable, if not unsingable, not because of the words themselves but because the way the song has been used to portray the doctrine of discovery over the years.
"Serious, critical historiography tends to be hard on the living," writes Silverman. This is also true of Christianity. As C. S. Lewis put it: "I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity." (C.S. Lewis, God In The Dock).
Discomfort, challenge, changing perspectives and openness -- this is the life I strive to lead now, my friends, in these, our times of disruption. But with disruption can come a different view of a more open horizon, even a chance to grow in our humane spirit and in our own humanity. May it be ever so. Amen.