Before this week, I knew both the kind of mainstream American interpretation of these Pocahontas and the First Thanksgiving, and the more historically accurate version that I learned when I was older. However, many of these figures and events were things that I’d never heard of before, like King Phillip and the Pequot Massacre. I think that knowledge of the events marked by Indigenous/colonial violence is helping me to fill in some gaps in my general knowledge of American history, since my baseline understanding of Native American history at this time was that colonists mistreated Native communities and that this mistreatment turned into forced violence, conversions (forced and free), forced relocations, and various other oppressive policies. With these details, I’m able to more easily visualize the historical context of this time. I was also really happy to learn about Cranberry Day, because I so rarely hear about Indigenous traditions that have survived until today. It was also just nice to see families celebrating together and appreciating their history in the midst of all of these violent stories. I was also really interested in the boxes that the people in the video were using to harvest the cranberries. I am from Wisconsin, which has a lot of cranberry bogs (apparently it is the state with the most cranberry production, almost twice as much as the state in second place, which is Massachusetts), so I am used to seeing cranberries being harvested. However, I’ve never seen cranberries being harvested in the way that they were being harvested in the video, only with big machines.
The idea of grappling with the complexity of history makes me think specifically of the images of Pocahontas/Amonute/Matoaka, and how the painting made her look more Eurocentric than the engraving of her that was actually based on her real-life image. I think this is a reflection and an example of the whitewashing (literally) that America has done to her story. The source talked about her descendants, and I wonder how they, specifically, deal with the complexity of having this ancestor who is so famous yet whose real story is pretty unknown.