New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Effort to set historical record straight
Lawmaker eyes Native American history curriculum
A plan to require the teaching of Native American history, which failed in Connecticut’s 2019 General Assembly, is reemerging in 2020’s Black Lives Matter era and proponents say it would finally replace the misinformed lessons taught for generations.
State Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, who introduced the 2019 bill, said the proposal is part of a range of cultural improvements that includes better septic sanitation for the Eastern Pequot Tribe, and removing the statue of Capt. John Mason, who led the Mystic Massacre, from third-floor niche on the northern exterior of the state Capitol.
In the underground walkway connecting the Capitol to the Legislative Office Building, along a wall containing framed pictures of iconic Connecticut people, including author Mark Twain, is a picture of a Native American from Pennsylvania, which Osten would like to see replaced, possibly with a period photo of the late Gov. Ella T. Grasso with leaders from the state’s tribal nations.
“Part of my initiative is to take care of some of the ills that have happened over the years,” said Osten, who has established relationships with all the states’ tribes, including the Schaghticoke (pronounced SCAT-a-coke), who have been attempting to deal with the decades-old flooding of a historic tribal cemetery.
Osten’s eastern Connecticut district includes the Mohegan Reservation in Uncasville and the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation in Ledyard.
Osten’s 2019 proposal, which was dropped from a bill that passed that year to require Black and Latino history to be taught, would require local and regional school boards to include the study of Northeastern woodland tribes into social study curricula. “This year I introduced it again and thought it might get through, but the session ended with nothing being done in the pandemic,” she said.
Even as they were being forced away from the New England lands they inhabited for most of the 10,000 years since the Ice Age, the First Peoples celebrated seasonal thanksgivings, commemorating their relationship with nature, from maple syrup in the late winter, to strawberry picking in the spring, and summer and fall festivals celebrating corn.
Their concept of being part of the land was barely construed by the Europeans who pushed tribes away from the East Coast, as succeeding generations of whites forced the First Peoples farther, with the Pequot War of 1637, culminating in a slaughter of Native Americans in Mystic, and the enslavement of Pequots, then finally King Philip’s War in the 1670s.
As for the 1621 feast in Plymouth, Mass., it occurred more as a fluke, with Pilgrims marking their survival of that first year in North America, and 90 members of the nearby Wampanoag tribe, which responded with interest — and hesitancy — to the seemingly random celebratory gunfire in the Massachusetts woods. There is no proof that the pilgrims ever actually shared a meal with their indigenous neighbors.
“This holiday was something fabricated and made up,” said Darlene Kascak, a member of the Kent-based Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, who is director of educational programming at The Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, Conn. “It never originated from the Pilgrims and Indians.”
Native Americans were never mentioned when President George Washington suggested a day of national prayer and thanksgiving in 1789, said Kascak, adding that the holiday became more widespread in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln set it for the last Thursday in November. Finally, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the date to the second to last Thursday of the month.
“To me it’s not a big blame game, making people feel bad because of their ancestors,” said Kascak, who growing up in the 1960s and ’70s would be chastised by teachers for asking tough questions about the sanitized history she was taught. “But maybe we can change future attitudes. In Connecticut alone, about 80 percent of indigenous people died from diseases. The communities were then in a weakened state, and they were not as strong in numbers as they used to be and were pushed around. The English had their ‘manifest destiny,’ God-given right to take the land. So our villages were raided and Indians were brought back to England as slaves.”
For the last 50 years, Native Americans have considered Thanksgiving a national day of mourning, with protest gatherings in Plymouth at a heights called Cole’s Hill.
“It’s a day of sadness, recalling the genocide, the theft of lands, the relentless assault on our culture, the oppression,” Kascak said. “Thanksgiving means different things for different people. What we do with this information is we share it truthfully and if we share opinions, the point is to talk about what’s right and wrong. There is a great feeling about what needs to happen in our country.”
Rodney Butler, chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, said in an interview that the history of Connecticut’s First Peoples is stark, but needs telling.
“It’s about the loss of land, genocide and the continued marginalization of people,” Butler said. “After Mystic, at the Treaty of Hartford, they officially sold our land and sold us into slavery. That has to be taught. The history of Native Americans is the history of this. It doesn’t take anything away from Thanksgiving. That’s our story for the last century. Smoking the peace pipe is not our reality. From a cultural perspective, we are always thankful for the gifts of the land, which provides for us every day. We’ve done that for centuries.”