What really is Thanksgiving?

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 5:22pm

We celebrate Thanksgiving to express thanks for the many blessings the Creator has bestowed upon us, gathering with family and friends and sharing a meal. Thanksgiving offers an opportunity to reflect on what we’re grateful for each year. Whether it's for something we often take for granted, like good health, or for a new blessing in our lives, the act of thanksgiving grounds us, reassures us, and reminds us and our loved ones how much there truly is to celebrate. The most important thing is to be surrounded by the ones we love most; it’s a monumental time to know what is truly important in our lives. Thanksgiving is also a time for learning to be kind to your fellow man and those less fortunate and be thankful for the little things in life that we have been blessed with—thankful for just being alive.

However, we Americans need to acknowledge the true origin of this holiday, and remember the pain, loss, and agony of the Indigenous people who suffered at the hands of the so-called “pilgrims.” We need to face the truths of the past, and give thanks that we are learning to love one another for the rich human diversity we share. November 26 will be Thanksgiving Day. This national holiday was not initially created in the way most Americans have come to know it. Many people blindly celebrate holidays and have no clue of their history. To many Americans, their sole historical source of celebrating Thanksgiving is about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. The portrait is painted of the friendly Indians and the openhearted pilgrims coming together to feast after a long winter is accepted by many Americans. But the truth is often stranger than fiction. It is a holiday which history had set aside to actually celebrate the genocide of the Indigenous people of North America (Turtle Island). The Native American Indian community calls this day—The National Day of Mourning. They have their reasons just as the Jews had theirs for the Holocaust. The survival of early settlers in a European invasion culminated in the death of an estimated 30 million native people. The Native people died so that the colony could flourish. For the Native community, it’s a day of sorrow and shame—sorrow for the fallen and shame for living in a country where people used religion and self-righteousness to condone murder, treachery and slavery. Thanksgiving serves as a remembrance of how their ancestors were mistreated, annihilated, ousted from their land and consigned to reservations, eradicating every trace of their pre-existing life.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane and piecemeal the untold version to know our root at the tree of knowledge. Prior to European settlers, North America consisted of over 10 million Native Americans. These natives, who used to live in a harmonious society, had harvest celebrations for centuries to give respect to “Mother Earth” for the abundance she provided for them—bountiful crops, the bounties of the land, the oceans, the streams, and those things that make life wonderful—peace and health. What many of us eat today comes from the harvest crop initially cultivated by the Natives. Nearly 70 percent of all crop, including corn, potatoes, tomatoes, come from Native Americans. The tomato and potato are native to Peru, growing wild in the Andes Mountains. What did Europeans eat prior to conquering the “New World”: Spaghetti without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? Indigenous people all over the planet have given thanks for bountiful harvests for thousands of years. The native inhabitants of “Turtle Island” were no different than other cultures. While the tributary ceremonies differed, a common thread weaves all mankind together—a belief that some superior force exists that is responsible for satisfying the need for sustenance and the perpetuation of the cyclical order of nature. This spiritual force or being had blessed them with life and longevity.

In December of 1620, a splinter group of England’s Puritan movement set anchor on the North American coast near the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet, a land already inhabited by the Wampanoag natives. The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there. When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of the plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely. The Wampanoag already had a long history with the white man—European fishermen and slave traders. They had witnessed communities being raided and their people stolen to be sold into slavery. Needless to say, they did not trust the newcomers. These Pilgrims were not simple refugees from England fighting against oppression and religious discrimination. They were political revolutionaries who were considered objectionable and subversives by the King of the Church of England because they had plotted to take over the government. They were outcasts in their own country and some were fugitives. These Puritan Pilgrims saw themselves as the “chosen elect,” from the Bible’s Book of Revelations and traveled to America to build “the Kingdom of God. They were Calvinists who believed that the vast majority of humanity was predestined to damnation. To the exiled Pilgrims, and most European peoples, the Wampanoags were unkempt heathens, and of the Devil. The Pilgrims saw the Natives as wild savages requiring the civilized salvation of Christianity. The Natives’ spiritual nature and their bond with the gods of nature were viewed as paganism or animism, something that needed to be eradicated.

When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock in 1620, they were poor and starving—half of the 102 settlers died within a few months that first winter from disease and hunger. They were unprepared for the bitter cold weather and arrived too late to grow an adequate food supply. They survived eating from abandoned cornfields grown wild. The Pilgrims were not adept at farming in their new homeland. Prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival, the natives in the eastern shore of the North American continent had encountered other English and Spanish explorers and slave traders raiding their villages. The European visitors inadvertently introduced smallpox which came from the domesticated animals that were imported to the new land. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox which decimated nearly half of the Native Americans succumbing to the virulent disease. The natives did not trust the whites and they were not “friendly” as the myth perpetuates. Nonetheless, they were wary of their new neighbors' intentions. However, the Natives did take pity on the settlers. It was a custom of their culture and religion to help those who were in need. It was their way to give freely to those who had nothing. It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all—the exact opposite of the system we live in now, which is based on selling, not giving. The day following Turkey Day, the day of self-indulgent feasting, is Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.

On March 16, 1621, a native named Samoset and Squanto, who served as an interpreter because he spoke excellent English, met the English settlers for the first time. Squanto had previously been captured and sold as a slave on an earlier sailing vessel. A British explorer named John Weymouth treated him like a son and taught him the language and the culture. Squanto had a deep fondness for the Europeans living abroad. He eventually got Christian-baptized. It was Squanto who moved to the English colony and taught them to hunt, trap, fish and to cultivate their own crops. He educated them on natural medicine and living off the land. If it wasn’t for him, the Pilgrims would not have survived. Several months later, after learning the native knowledge, the Pilgrims decided to meet again with the Wampanoags to discuss land rights—the settlers wanted to negotiate a land treaty hoping to secure land to build the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. As part of the Wampanoag custom, out of a sense of charity towards the host, the Native community agreed to bring most of the food for the event—like a potluck. The peace and land negotiations were successful and the Pilgrims acquired the rights of land for their people. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the settlers not only survived their first year but had an alliance with the Wampanoags that would give them almost two decades of peace. The first Virginia settlement had been wiped out before they could establish themselves. The Pilgrims were very fortunate to establish their roots.

One generation later, what once few in number, the Pilgrims had grown to well over 40,000 while the Native strength had weakened to less than 3,000. The settlers wanted more land for their expansion of colonization, forcing the Natives farther and farther west—expelled “out into the wilderness.” The Puritans and other religious sects discussed “who legally owns all this land.” They had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon traditions, but because their particular way of farming was based on individual—not communal or tribal-ownership. The real truth was that the colonies were fundamentally controlled by the most powerful merchants. The new ideas of the Puritans served the needs of merchant capitalist accumulation. This meant that while they were firm in fighting for their own capitalist right to accumulate and prosper. In short, the Puritan movement developed as an early revolutionary challenge to the old feudal order in England. They were the soul of primitive capitalist accumulation. And transferred to the shores of North America, they immediately revealed how heartless and oppressive that capitalist soul is. The slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant capitalism. The descendants of these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the Azures, Algiers, Bermuda, Spain and England.

The Native American leaders, proud men of their word, became angered by the rudeness and the act of bad faith of the Pilgrims to fulfill their side of the bargain—broken promises. (It’s interesting to know that the American Government signed 370 treaties with the Native Indians but violated provisions in every one of these treaties.) Tempers flared over infringement of colonists on Native lands and the violation the Natives’ sacred beliefs and burial sites, and, in time, open hostilities broke out—massacres, seizure of lands, relocations, formation of reservations. All resulted from the heart of generosity that gave the early settlers a kickstart. The colonists bit the very hand that fed them. They even erected an 11 foot high wall around the entire Plymouth settlement for the very purpose of keeping the natives out.

Officially, the holiday we know as “Thanksgiving” actually came into existence in the year 1637. Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony proclaimed this first official day of Thanksgiving and feasting to celebrate the return of the colony's men who had arrived safely from what is now Mystic, Connecticut. They had gone there to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot men, women and children, and Mr. Winthrop decided to dedicate an official day of thanksgiving complete with a feast to “give thanks” for their great “victory.” He encouraged other colonies to do likewise—in other words, every autumn the crops are in, go kill Indians and celebrate your murders with a feast. The Pilgrims stuffed themselves and drank all they could and went on murderous raids of the Indigenous villages. They raped, scalped and cut Native peoples' heads off. He also considered this wave of illness and death to smallpox to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a friend in England, “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.” He declared the Indians had not “subdued” the land, and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common Law, be considered “public domain.” This meant they belonged to the king. In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the representative of the crown (meaning the local governor). A few years later, the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword. A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and friendship.

Certain people have a way of taking one thing and changing it to suit their own purpose rewriting history to censor truth and plant propaganda in the American psyche. As we know, the victors write history to their flavor of propagation—racism, deceit, slaughter and imperialism. The roots of intolerance. The Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the “bounty of the American way of life,” while covering up the brutal nature of this society in its ruthless ways of capitalism. The Thanksgiving story is an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently human. History must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful. History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it.

This reflection of truth is not to inflame hostility over what had happened or sulk in the past that can’t be changed, but it is designed to bring the light of truth to the darkness of misinformation—the reluctance to acknowledge our original sin, the genocide of indigenous people. America was stolen by force. The Native Americans have been fighting terrorism since 1492. What are the U.S. intentions in colonizing Iraq?

The truth won't set us free, but the telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom. As we gobble our feast this Thursday, take a moment to chew the truth—it is always blood and tears that bring the freedom we come to take for granted. There is native intelligence in every one of us. It's the freedom of the unbound spirit. Know your rights and never lose heart to fear and any terror tactic of misapplied power. Thank God, Love is blind.