This Land Is Their Land Quotes

“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.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Surviving as a people in the face of a society that wanted to dispossess them and deny who they were was their great contest. It is a struggle—a fundamentally colonial one—that has lasted to this very day.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“If how we tell history is one of the ways we shape our present and future, we can do no better than to rethink the myth of the First Thanksgiving and its role in the Thanksgiving holiday.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Failing to come to terms with the hubris and destructiveness of that process—or, worse, seeing it as a glorious part of America’s supposed greatness—conditions the people of the United States to perpetuate those evils in new forms.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Most of us who are not Wampanoag or American Indian will never fully grasp the raw emotions indigenous people associate with Thanksgiving.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“They have mourned how capitalism and Christianity have promoted individualism, acquisitiveness, and selfishness at the expense of traditional values such as community, giving, and modesty.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“If the Wampanoags are as much our fellow Americans as the descendants of the Pilgrims, and if their history can be as instructional and inspirational as that of the English, then why continue to tell a Thanksgiving myth that focuses exclusively on the colonists’ struggles rather than theirs?”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“the Mayflower landed not in a virgin land but a widowed land. Epidemic disease had already nearly emptied a long stretch of coastline that once thronged with people.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Throughout the 1680s, Plymouth ordered Wampanoags “out of the country” for crimes like theft, assault, and rape to which colonists would normally receive corporal punishment and fines.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Wampanoags did not lose their land any more than Indians elsewhere on the continent. No, colonists and their successors took it through every means at their disposal.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Their triumphant histories portrayed the sachem as having almost single-handedly led his people into a misguided rebellion by virtue of his supposedly savage pride and susceptibility to the devil, only to be crushed by a superior, civilized people favored by God.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“In Providence, one of the officers who distributed Indian slaves was the elderly Roger Williams, to whom Ousamequin had provided refuge when he fled the religious persecution of Massachusetts puritans in the winter of 1635–36.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Without any shame, the colonies asked for assistance from the same Christian Indians they had persecuted during the first nine months of the war and received a positive response. The praying Indians, whatever their trepidation, saw this as an invaluable opportunity for their men to prove their worth to the English and secure compensation to ease the suffering of kin still held on Deer and Clark’s Islands.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Part of the English strategy was to starve the warring Indians into submission by driving them away from the planting fields and fishing places of their home communities”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Getting beyond the sanitized Thanksgiving myth to tell a more accurate history of that encounter involves reckoning with a point made by many Wampanoags today: that their storied welcome to the English was a terrible mistake, born out of the horror of a disease without a name.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“The early history of the Wampanoags and Plymouth took place against this dark background of mourning, suspicion, desperation, and fear. It is the most basic element missing from the Thanksgiving myth.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“The Thanksgiving myth casts the Wampanoags in 1620 as naive primitives, awestruck by the appearance of the Mayflower and its strange passengers. They were nothing of the sort. Their every step was informed by the legacy of the many European ships that had visited their shores and left behind a wave of enslavement, murder, theft, and mourning.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“white identity politics has always—always—centered on oppressing others.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“woodland, cranberry bogs, hunting grounds, fishing spots, clay deposits, berry bushes, and medicinal plants were available to everyone. The people sometimes gathered as a community to harvest and sell these resources in bulk to fund public services like poor relief. One Massachusetts official, assuming that jealousy and selfishness were naturally the dominant features of all human societies, marveled that these places were “almost realizing the wildest dreams of the communists.”48”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

“Wampanoag history did not begin with the Mayflower. Imagine it instead as a rushing, primordial river into which the English entered as a fresh stream.”
― David J. Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving