Meanwhile, In Virginia…
The history of Jamestown is wild, y’all. Wild. Since the kids don’t read this blog I’ll give you the R-rated summary of this place. The English had tried to set up their first permanent settlement in the land they called the “Virginia Colony” (it was already named Tsenacommacah by the Powhatan people who lived there) in Roanoke Island in 1585. There were about 120 colonists living there, but when a supply ship returned five years later, the place was completely abandoned. What became of these people remains a mystery to this day. The English tried to get another colony off the ground in 1607- Jamestown. A bunch of English guys looking to make money (they came in search of gold, not with the plan to make this place their new permanent home) got on some ships, sailed around, and picked the land at Jamestown because it was on a peninsula, so they could see if Spanish ships were coming from all sides and prepare to fight them, and they only had one line of land to defend if the Powhatans attacked. James Loewen writes that these English people were really really awful. They took the Powhatans prisoner and forced them to teach them how to farm, they bickered with each other and were lazy, spending time “digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon they were digging up putrid Native corpses to eat…” So, pretty gruesome stuff. The English were starving and had to eat their dogs, horses, and eventually, each other. One guy killed his wife and ate her. It’s no wonder our history books skim over this story of the first permanent English colony in the land that would become the US in favor of the Pilgrims. I will say that I read this article from the Smithsonian which says that recent evidence shows that the colonists built their fort at Jamestown at the start of a terrible four year drought, the worst in that area in an 800 year period. So maybe it’s not their fault crops didn’t grow- maybe they weren’t as lazy as some historians claim. But either way, Jamestown had a very very rough start. We shared a PG version of this history with the kids and then shared this video with them:
This is one in a whole series of Khan Academy videos about Jamestown and they’re all really good and worth watching- the one about John Smith and Pocahontas is enlightening if you only really know about the Disney movie version. Anyway, we wanted to talk about this today because the year 1619 is an important one, and we didn’t want to skip it in our march through our historical timeline. If you haven’t already explored the essays in the 1619 Project, or listened to the podcast, I highly highly recommend doing so. This is a date all Americans should know, because it was the year the first enslaved Africans were sold in the English colonies that would become the United States. I will add that this article about The Fallacy of 1619 is important reading too. That article states that starting the story in 1619 leaves out a lot of important information that is also part of America’s origin story, like the Indigenous people who lived on this land and the 500,000 Africans who had already been kidnapped and forced into slavery in the Caribbean and Spanish colonies before 1619. We have told these stories, of the Indigenous societies of North America before (and after) European contact, of how Columbus and the Spanish started the Transatlantic slave trade, because they are crucial to understanding how the United States began. But 1619 is a crucial moment in our history as well. It is the start of the spread and acceptance of race-based slavery in the British colonies and also the beginning of the plantation-based south. This video explains how these 20 enslaved Africans were captured off the coast of Mexico by two pirate ships, The Treasurer and The White Lion:
We talked about this with the kids, and whether they thought it made sense that we know so much about The Mayflower, and so little about this ship, The White Lion. We thought it was important to remember this moment in our history too.
Finally, we watched this truly terrible video with the kids:
These kids seem to really love having the opportunity to critique bad children’s media, and this certainly qualifies. We asked the kids to think about what the people who made this video thought it was important for kids to learn and what they chose to leave out of the video, and why.
Action Items
We took some time at the beginning of class to celebrate that Biden and Harris have won the presidency. This win will bring some of the changes we have been advocating for in previous action items, including reinstating the Roadless Rule in the Tongass National Forest, cancelling the Dakota Access Pipeline, protecting Native lands and tribal sovereignty, and taking a much stronger stand in the fight against climate change. To help encourage more of the types of changes we’d like to see, our action item this week (and continuing for future weeks) is to work to help elect Rev. Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Having Mitch McConnell overseeing the Senate is going to limit how much we’re able to accomplish, so winning these races in Georgia is the most important thing we can do to help. If you agree, here are some suggested action items:
Donate money through GAsenate.com. This site will evenly split your contribution between Ossoff, Warnock, and Fair Fight Georgia.
Sign up to write postcards to Georgia voters. Your kids can help!
Sign up to write letters to Georgia voters. Your kids can help!
Support the Black Voters Matter fund.
