Pilgrams By James Loewen Summary

“ We give food to starving settlers so that they can survive the winter, settlers end up taking all the good land and let the natives starve to death.” Two hundred years before the Puritans arrived in America the European settlers came over to America accidently. Christopher Columbus was trying to find a new route to India, but landed on an Island we now know as America. When Christopher Columbus landed on the island, strange, unknown, people came up to him. He called them Indians because he thought he had landed in India. While getting to learn more about Columbus the Indians learn they have different values than the European settlers and the Puritans, once they arrive two hundred years later. Getting to know the European settlers and the Puritans, the Indians realized their outlooks on Faith, Loyalty, And Laws are vastly different and similar.

Many of the Indians that left with the missionaries were gone for many years and did not know how much had changed back at home. In the story The Soft-Hearted Sioux a young man comes back home after receiving an education from the missionaries. He had left before he was taught how to survive out in the wild. He came back to dying and starving parents. He was brainwashed by the missionaries because he went against his family’s customs and told the medicine man never to come back and that God will save his father. He started preaching God’s words to his people and they left the community. His father was growing sicker and sicker and he needed food. His son went out everyday trying to get something but had no skills in hunting. His father had told him to go two hills over and he could find meat. With no concept of ownership, the son went and killed a cow that belonged to an American. Upon leaving with the meat he was chased down and attacked by the “owner” of the cattle. The son accidentally killed the man and fled back to his father’s teepee only to realize that he was too late and that his father had died. He was so conditioned by the white man that he had forgotten his ancestors’ ways of survival.

Native Americans have existed in the different regions-the plains, mountains, marshes- of the North American continent- long before the United States existed. Yet, most were not treated with the respect and dignity that the white American settlers were given. Viewed as outlandish and savage by white settlers, series of negotiations to “correct” the Indian way of life were implemented- through forced relocation, war, and assimilation into white culture. Those who stood up against the American government were viewed as beacons of hope by their fellow Native Americans. Many Native American traditions still exist today, but unfortunately most of them have been lost along with their people.

The long history between Native American and Europeans are a strained and bloody one. For the time of Columbus’s subsequent visits to the new world, native culture has

From the beginning the Pilgrims did not understand what they were getting into. They didn’t know prior to their arrival there was an epidemic that killed off most of the Native American population. The Pilgrims did not come to the New World empty handed either, but as they were running low on food they realized they didn’t know how to live off the land. If it wasn’t for Squanto, the Pilgrims would have never learned how to look for proper planting ground, or how to harvest their plantation. As it was, the Pilgrims were unbarring graves and taking whatever, whether they thought they needed it or they wanted it. The Pilgrims also stole the Native Americans food, without knowing they did. An eye witness wrote “We marched to a place we called Cornhill, where we found corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, tow or three baskets full,

Europeans tore through America in the 1700s and destroyed the lives of Native Americans, and yet their culture remained principled with a high level of respect and honor. This is shown in a meeting that was held by the six nations of the Iroquois, where Chief Red Jacket gave a speech on the Native Americans view on missionary stations that the Europeans wanted to set up. Red Jacket explained their past with the first settlers, “We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return” (1). These first Europeans set the tone for how these new colonist treated the natives. They took what they wanted and left a trail of death and destruction in their path. However, the natives acted in return with upstanding respect and treated these missionaries

This shows how little European settlers thought of Native Americans. Even their dead were given no consideration and they were stolen from even as they were being forced from their land. This was just adding to the numerous amounts of ways Native Americans were oppressed as they were stripped of even basic rights in death and their plight ignored due to greed.This making their already dangerous trip worse as they lost valuable sources of food and transportation without their cattle and horses.

Within this novel, there’s certain environmental, political, environmental, and cultural relationships developed between Natives and Pilgrims. Philbrick wrote that the pilgrims first landed at the New World in 1620. “For sixty-five

Have you ever celebrated Christmas? Remember the feast, tree, friends, gifts, and prayers. These are all similar events or activities that occur in a potlach, the word potlach means'' gift giving ''. This tradition is derived from the Tlingit and American Indians, in fact, the potlach is a festival that is about '' giving more than taking ''. Located in the Alaskan coastal islands and Dakota, the Chilkat Tlingit's and Sioux Indians compare and contrast in characteristics such as religion, celebrations, and daily life.

When the first European colonists arrived in 1620 on land in the New World, a disaster was forming. Arriving in what is known today as Massachusetts on The Mayflower, the settlers didn’t have enough experience surviving cold, harsh winters causing almost half of the settlers to die that had arrived on The Mayflower. This had changed in 1621 with the help of the Native people. The American Indians had started teaching the English people how to do many things including harvesting and growing crops. This help from the Native’s had led to the first Thanksgiving between the two groups. These two societies, however, didn’t remain friends. The English settlers had kicked off the American Indians of their own land and tried to make them convert to Christianity. The English settlers had also brought diseases from Europe causing many Indians to get very sick and even some die.

This book adds a different take on the colonial period in America that I was never taught in school. I was always taught that the settlers in America were the ones that killed and berated the Indians. I never learned that the Indians in Canada had attacked the colonial settlers and brought them to Canada. The French and the English fighting is not a surprise, as everyone wants the best land they can find and will fight over it. I would not have thought that the French would go so far as to captivate New England citizens and ransom them off. With this piece of information it makes much more sense that the colonists would be mean to the Indians, as the Indians had caused their families to die and they had to pay large amounts of money to get their family back. Some may not have been able to get family members back, or even see them. If you were to be kidnapped, your family taken, and ransomed off

Thus, the second generation began to lose sight of the morals and ways of their parents. The previous generation of English maintained peace by treating the Natives with fairness and respect. The second generation of English began to see the Indians as getting in the way of acquiring wealth and no longer felt that they needed the help of the Pokanokets for survival. Therefore, the English began treating the Pokanokets with less respect “But as was becoming increasingly apparent, the children of Pilgrims had very short memories. Now that their daily lives no longer involved an arduous and terrifying struggle for survival, they had begun to take the Indians for granted.” (Philbrick 215). In other words, as the English began to believe that they did not need the Pokanokets as much for survival, they lost respect for the boundaries of the Pokanokets. Nevertheless, instead of treating the Pokanokets fairly and with respect the English did the opposite. By the 1630’s, the ideas of land ownership had changed in ways that would have great effects on the relationship between the Pokanoket Indians and the second generation of English settlers. The English proposed

At the start of the film After the Mayflower: We Shall Remain, the English and the Native Americans celebrated the first Thanksgiving together in 1621. Both groups of people seemed trusting of each other and showed personal respect. At this time the Wampanoag Indians had the power and chose to use it to form a treaty with the weak English Pilgrims. The two groups shared everything and traded their assets with each other. As the film continued there was an obvious change in power to the English with more and more Puritan immigrants from Europe arriving. By the end of the movie the English decided to use their power to control all lands instead of keeping the treaty with the native people. The English “thanksgiving” at

The truth of the matter is, when the Pilgrims arrived, they found an abandoned Wampanoag village and moved right in. In 1618, a massive epidemic of an unknown disease left by English explorers swept across Wampanoag country and decimated many of the villages. This epidemic caused the death of ten to thirty percent of the total population and all but a few of the 2,000 people of the village of Patuxet. When the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, they landed at Patuxet with no idea of what had occurred. At this point, there were only about 2,000 members left in the Wampanoag tribe, down from 12,000 in 1600. Despite the incredible losses to his people, Wampanoag leader Massasoit and 90 of his men sat down for a harvest celebration offered by the white men. For three days the Wampanoag and Pilgrims feasted on deer, wild turkey, fish, beans, squash, corn and other foods native to North America. Although the celebration was good-natured, this event truly signifies the beginning of a drastic decline of native culture and Thanksgiving would be more fittingly observed as a day of mourning rather than a celebration. In the years that followed, skirmishes occurred and more Native Americans were killed. In 1637, English soldiers massacred 700 Pequot men, women and children as an example of the English way of war, yet we still celebrate Thanksgiving as a joyful event. So, as we sit down for our Thanksgiving dinner,

Between 1790 and 1920 it was a tough time for the Indians. During that period Native Americans were forced to convert to the European-American Culture. Their whole life changed, the way of living, religion, and especially their children’s future. It was wrong of Americans to convert natives into a different society that they saw fit and not letting them express their own culture and treating them as an unworthy society.