A
Tribute to the Victims of Pilgrim’s Progress
7/24/9
We as a Christian nation pride
ourselves in the progress we’ve made in establishing ourselves as a sovereign
people in foreign territories. In fact,
what we call “pilgrim’s pride” could be seen as an invasion and tremendous
destruction to those whose rights we’ve violated for the sake of
territorialism.
Beginning with the Puritan
migration of the 16th and 17th century where it is
estimated that about 80,000 Puritans fled from England because of so-called
“religious persecution.” But was it
truly religious persecution that they were fleeing or religious piety seeking
to establish itself in a New World?
Puritans did not originally use this term for themselves. It was an antagonistic term that first
surfaced in the 1560’s describing a sect of strictly legalistic Christians who
prided themselves for their purity of worship and doctrine, as well as personal
and group piety. Puritans felt that the
English Reformation had not gone far enough and that the Church of England was
tolerant of practices which they associated with the Church of Rome. It led them to pursue both moral purity down
to the smallest detail as well as ecclesiastical purity to the highest
level. Puritans referred to themselves
as “the godly” as they considered the words of the Bible (as they interpreted
them) the final authority especially regarding the roles of men and women in
the community. While both sexes carried
the stain of original sin, for a female, original sin suggested more than the
roster of Puritan character flaws. Eve’s
corruption, in Puritan eyes, extended to all women, and justified marginalizing
them within their churches’ hierarchical structures. Women were not permitted to speak in church
and were placed at the heart of the family to sustain domestic life. The Pilgrims (the separatist,
Congregationalist Puritans who fled to North America) are famous for banning
from their New England colonies many secular entertainments such as singing,
dancing, dramas, maypoles, drinking and fraternizing with the Natives which
were perceived as pagan and immoral.
Case
in point: The “Pagan Pilgrim,” Thomas Morton of Merrymount. Thomas Morton, a poet and lawyer, founded a
colony that, had it survived Puritan persecution, might have spawned a far more
Earth-friendly and egalitarian history of America than the one that’s come down
to us. Morton had no qualms about making
friends and trading with the Indians which he soon came to admire as far more
civilized and humanitarian than that of his intolerant, brutal Puritan
neighbors. His prosperous easygoing
colony attracted escapees from the harsh, hunger-ridden regime of the Plymouth
plantation and it didn’t take long for the free-thinking Morton to draw the ire
of his neighbors.
The Puritans viewed the Native
Americans as hostile savages and resented Morton’s intellectual scorn for their
fundamentalist pieties, which he thought simply masked their stupidity and
greed. (Morton made up mocking names for
the Puritan leaders—the diminutive soldier Miles Standish he called “Captain
Shrimpe,” and the pompous John Endicott he dismissed as “that great swelling
fellow, Captain Littleworth.”) The
Puritans condemned Morton as an impious, drunken libertine who—worst sin of
all—consorted with the native women and encouraged his men to do so, too.
The final straw for the
Puritans came when Morton erected a huge Maypole and threw a merry old pagan
May Day party to help woo Indian wives for his young bachelor colonists. As Puritan Governor William Bradford wrote
with horror in his History of Plymouth
Plantation: “They…set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing
about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts,
dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and
worse practices. As if they had anew
revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly
practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.”
Miles Standish and his troops
invaded Merrymount, seized Morton without a shot fired in defense and hauled
him in chains before the governor for his supposed crimes. Morton was exiled; and his Puritan neighbors
cut down the Maypole, disbanded his colony and burned down all of their
homes. What could have been an earthly
paradise which Morton called “Glory Here,” ended up a historical elegy of
tyrannical religious persecution.
Second
case in point: The Salem Witch Trials. In the Essex, Suffolk and Middlesex counties
of colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693, over 150 people
were arrested and imprisoned, with even more accused but not formally pursued
by the authorities for witchcraft. The
local magistrates followed by county court trials convicted twenty-nine people
of this capital felony; nineteen of the accused (fourteen women and five men)
were hanged. At least five more of the
accused died in prison.
The Puritans had established a
type of theocracy, in which the church ruled in all civil matters, including
that of administering capital punishment for violations of a spiritual
nature. They believed in the existence
of an invisible world inhabited by God and the angels including the Devil (who
was seen as a fallen angel) and his fellow demons. To the Puritans, this invisible world was as
real as the visible one around them.
Women, they believed, by nature were more likely to enlist in the
Devil’s service than men as they were considered lustful by nature. In accordance with Puritan beliefs, the
majority of accused “witches” were unmarried or recently widowed land-owning
women. According to the law of the time,
upon the owner’s death, title to the land would revert to the previous owner,
or (if no previous owner could be determined) to the Church. This made witch-hunting an easy, yet
exceptionally cruel, method of regaining a profitable piece of arable land.
Third
case in point: Forced Migration of the Native Americans. The long series of land usurpations that
would gradually erode Native American territory began with the signing of
“mutual land treaties.” Though the
United States would employ the resources of its vast military in an effort to
enforce its policy of containing the numerous tribes, each land seizure was
made “legal” by a simple piece of paper—a treaty. This was the weapon employed by a growing
nation as it sought the most expedient means of securing its swelling boarders.
The American government offered
recompense, resettlement, and even trade to the states with which it was
dealing in exchange for the land it intended to occupy. To most Native Americans, however, selling
the land was an alien concept as it was part of Mother Earth which couldn’t be
owned by anyone. To agree to a certain
percentage of the land seemed as absurd as selling a percentage of the air or
water. Nevertheless, most native tribes
kept to the treaties which they signed in order to keep peace with the
never-ending flow of immigrants from the east.
It was the U.S. Government
which broke nearly every treaty they signed and finally resorted to military
force to reduce nearly every Native American nation to a reservation. By far one of the most brutal abuses of
military force began in 1870 and became known as the Great Buffalo
Massacre. Sadly, this was so successful
that by 1889, a population of some 75 million buffalo was reduced to a mere
540, a horrendous situation that led to the prairies being littered with the
bones of the slaughtered buffalo. By the
turn of the century, these few pitiful survivors were reduced to a mere few
dozen.
In 1902, realizing the enormity
of the crime that had been committed in the name of progress, Congress set
aside $50,000 for the protection of the country’s last herd in Yellowstone
National Park. Since then buffalo herds
are continuing to be re-established in other areas of the country on preserves. Unfortunately, the Native Americans haven’t
been so lucky as to have their sacred Nations revitalized by Congress. Today, suicide rates among teenage Native
Americans are the highest in the nation.
So is alcohol and drug abuse as we have taken a proud, spiritual nation
of peace-keepers and reduced them to infidels.
In the spirit of the White Buffalo Calf Woman who brought the
peace pipe (which they signed all of their treaties over) and all of
their sacred ceremonies, I pray that the Indian Nations will be restored if not
in land territory but in spiritual determination.
Fourth
case in point: Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon—another
insult to the Indian Nation. Depending
on whom you ask Joseph Smith was either a prophet of God or a charlatan. He was considered both a man chosen by
Jehovah as a modern-day oracle who would lead humanity back to the One True
Church and bring about God’s Kingdom on earth, and a philandering con man who
abused the trust of his gullible followers by taking a second-rate novel and
using it as the basis for his cult of personality. Either way, Joseph Smith was a charismatic
leader who, in a few short years, managed to spread a new brand of Christianity
around the world. Living in upstate New
York, Smith was one of the youngest of nine children in a lazy, indolent,
ignorant and superstitious family. (From
History of Utah (1889) by Hubert
Bancroft, which was compiled with the assistance—if not approval—of the Mormon
Church.)
The Smith family’s
superstitions included belief in dowsing for gold and money digging; they
believed that large deposits of gold had been buried either by pirates or
Spanish explorers in easily accessible troves.
The family actively searched for these treasures and managed to convince
others to invest in their digging schemes.
Over the course of several years, Joseph Smith claims that God’s
messengers appeared to him and eventually led him to recover a number of holy
artifacts, including the “Golden Plates” or the Book of Mormon; two mystical
stones (the Urim and Thummim) by which he could translate the plates; and a
sword and armor belonging to Laban (a Book of Mormon character).
Ten years after his first
exposure to the Golden Bible, Smith and five others incorporated what would
eventually become The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They published the Book of Mormon, which
included statements of eleven witnesses who claimed to have seen the golden
plates and, in eight cases, to have actually hefted them. The plates themselves, however, were no
longer available for examination as after Joseph had finished translating the
plates, Moroni took them back to heaven.
The Book of Mormon is
supposedly an authentic history of the Native American migration from Israel to
the Americas. After decades of
scientific and cultural examination, there is little or no evidence that
anything in the Book of Mormon is true.
From the detailed description of the geographical land mass that the
Nephites and Lamanites (the supposed warring tribes) occupied, to actual DNA
studies of all Native American tribes linking them to Asiatic descent, any
student of science must conclude that the Book of Mormon is a fictitious novel
stolen from the home of a Baptist preacher named Solomon Spaulding. (See No
Man Knows My History by Fawn McKay Brodie, pages 442-457) Nevertheless, millions of gullible, misguided
folks (myself included) have bought into this story that the Native Americans
were a war-mongering people cursed with a “dark skin” and it is the duty of the
Mormon Church to convert them from their pagan ways to a new form of Christianity. Nothing is further from the truth.
The Native Americans
historically were a peace-keeping race living in tribal communities who
practiced many spiritual ceremonies given to them by an angelic messenger
naming herself “The White Buffalo Calf Woman.”
She introduced the seven sacred purification rites which included the
Sweat Lodge Ceremony, Vision Questing, the Give-away Ceremony, the Pipe
Ceremony, etc. which are still time-honored practices for many tribes
today. Ask any Native American and they
will tell you the true history of their people.
Final
case in point: The Mountain Meadows Massacre. The Mountain Meadows massacre was a mass
slaughter of the Fancher-Baker emigrant wagon train at Mountain Meadows, Utah
(near St. George) by the Mormon militia on September 11, 1857.
It began as an attack, quickly
turned into a siege, and eventually culminated in the execution of the unarmed
emigrants after their surrender. All of
the party except for seventeen children under eight years old—about 120 men,
women, and children—were killed. After
the massacre, the corpses of the victims were left decomposing for two years on
the open plain, their children were distributed to local Mormon families, and
many of their possessions auctioned off at the Latter Day Saint Cedar City
tithing office.
The Arkansas emigrants were
traveling to California shortly before the Utah War started. Mormon leaders had been mustering militia
throughout the Utah Territory to fight the United States Army, which was sent
to Utah to restore US authority in the territory. The emigrants stopped to rest and regroup
their approximately 800 head of cattle at Mountain Meadows, a valley with the
Iron County Military District of the Nauvoo Legion (the popular designation for
the Mormon militia of the Utah Territory).
Initially intending to orchestrate an Indian massacre, local militia
leaders including Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee conspired to lead militiamen
disguised as Native Americans along with a contingent of Paiute tribesmen in an
attack.
The emigrants fought back and a
siege ensued. When the Mormons
discovered that they had been identified as the attacking force by the
emigrants, Col. William H. Dame, head of the Iron County Brigade of the Utah
militia, ordered their annihilation.
Intending to leave no witness of Mormon complicity in the siege and also
intending to prevent reprisals that would complicate the Utah War, militiamen
induced the emigrants to surrender and give up their weapons. After escorting the emigrants out of their
hasty fortification, the militiamen and their tribesmen auxiliaries executed
the emigrants.
Investigations, interrupted by the U.S. Civil
War, resulted in nine indictments in 1874.
Only John D. Lee was tried in a court of law, and after two trials, he
was convicted. On March 23, 1877 a
firing squad executed Lee at the massacre site.
(Excerpts taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Today, July 24, we celebrate
Pioneer Day and the founding of Utah’s statehood. Let’s pause for a moment to remember and pay
tribute to some of the victims of our pioneer heritage and pilgrim’s
progress. Perhaps we can learn from the
disasters and casualties of the past and use this wisdom to forge a future
filled with love, kindness and forgiveness.
This is my prayer for Pioneer Day, 2009.
Blessings to all—Janae aka Jesse aka White Buffalo Woman (in spirit)
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