THANKSGIVING DAY ANTHOLOGY #10,
NOVEMBER 28, 2024, NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING
AND ATONEMENT
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and
Ecology
What’s at
Stake: “In
less than three generations the settlers would turn all of New England into a
charnel house for Native Americans, and fire the economic engines of slavery
throughout English-speaking America. Plymouth Rock is the place where the
nightmare truly began. “ Glen Ford
Contents
National Day of Mourning #10
James
Loewen. “The Truth About the First Thanksgiving.”
Ruth
Hopkins. “The First Thanksgiving:
Separating Myth From Fact.”
Arlo
Guthrie. Alice’s Restaurant. (Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center).
Matt Taibbi and Jared Moore. “Thanksgiving is Awesome.”
Glen Ford. The
Black Agenda.
Kisha James. “My
Grandfather Founded The National Day Of Mourning.”
Vincent Schilling. “Six
Thanksgiving Myths And The Wampanoag Side Of The Story.”
Sophie Hirsh. “Thanksgiving Glorifies the Abhorrent Colonization of
Indigenous Peoples.”
Gerald. Horne. ‘U.S. Capitalism Born in Blood: From the First
Thanksgiving to Today’ w/ Dr. Gerald Horne.
Rashida Tlaib. “The Myth
of Thanksgiving.”
Randy Kritkausky, “After 400
Years, It’s Time To Take Down The Monumental Insult.”
John Kiriakou. On Pardoning
Turkeys.
TEXTS
“The Truth About the First Thanksgiving” by James W. Loewen. (Nov 01, 1992).
Topics: Education History Media Political Economy Places: Americas Europe United States In Memory of James W. Loewen
(1942–2021) from his comrades at Monthly Review.
—Eds. (August 24, 2021)
[This essay is revised from James W. Loewen’s analysis of
American history as presented for high school students in Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: The New Press,
1995). This version appeared earlier in the Radical Historians Newsletter. (Note: minor updates have been made to the original
introduction of this article as it first appeared in
the November 1992 issue of Monthly Review, vol. 44, no. 6: 12-25. —Eds.)]
Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college
students, “When was the country we now know as the United States first
settled?”
That is a generous way of putting the question. Surely “we now
know as” implies that the original settlement happened before the United
States. I had hoped that students would suggest 30,000 BC, or some other
pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was “1620. . . .” https://monthlyreview.org/author/jameswloewen/
.
. .What do we learn of all this in the twelve histories I studied? Three offer
some treatment of Indian disease as a factor in European colonization. Life and Liberty does quite a good job. America Past and Present supplies a fine analysis
of the general impact of Indian disease in American history, though it leaves
out the plague at Plymouth. The American Way is
the only text to draw the appropriate geopolitical inference about the
importance of the Plymouth outbreak, but it never discuses Indian plagues anywhere
else. Unfortunately, the remaining nine books offer almost nothing. Two totally
omit the subject. Each of the other seven furnishes only a fragment of a
paragraph that does not even make it into the index, let alone into students’
minds.13
Everyone
knew all about the plague in colonial America. Even before the Mayflower
sailed, King James of England gave thanks to “Almighty God in his great
goodness and bounty towards us,” for sending “this wonderful plague among the
salvages.”14Today
it is no surprise that not one in a hundred of my college students has ever
heard of the plague. Unless they read Life and Liberty or Past and Present, no student can come away from
these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact on North America,
who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled, in short, and were then
killed by disease or arms.
Errand Into The Wilderness
Instead
of the plague, our schoolbooks present the story of the Pilgrims as a heroic
myth. Referring to “the little party” in their “small, storm-battered English
vessel,” their story line follows Perry Miller’s use of a Puritan sermon
title, Errand Into the Wilderness. American Adventures even
titles its chapter about British settlement in North America “Opening the
Wilderness.” The imagery is right out of Star Trek: “to go boldly where none
dared go before.”
The
Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, where there already was a British
settlement, according to the texts, but “violent storms blew their ship off
course,” according to some texts, or else an “error in navigation” caused them
to end up hundreds of miles to the north. In fact, we are not sure where the
Pilgrims planned to go. According to George Willison, Pilgrim leaders never
intended to settle in Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana
versus Massachusetts precisely because they wanted to be far from Anglican
control in Virginia. They knew quite a bit about Massachusetts, from Cape Cod’s
fine fishing to that “wonderful plague.” They brought with them maps drawn by
Samuel Champlain when he toured the area in 1605 and a guidebook by John Smith,
who had named it “New England” when he visited in 1614.15 One
text, Land of Promise, follows Willison, pointing out
that Pilgrims numbered only about thirty-five of the 102 settlers aboard the
Mayflower. The rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new
Virginia colony. “The New England landing came as a rude surprise for the
bedraggled and tired [non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower,” says
Promise. “Rumors of mutiny spread quickly.” Promise then ties this unrest to
the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a uniquely fresh interpretation as to
why the colonists adopted it.
Each text offers just one of three reasons—storm, pilot error,
or managerial hijacking—to explain how the Pilgrims ended up in Massachusetts.
Neither here nor in any other historical controversy after 1620 can any of the
twelve bear to admit that it does not know the answer—that studying history is
not just learning answers—that history contains debates. Thus each book shuts
students out from the intellectual excitement of the discipline.
Instead,
textbooks parade ethnocentric assertions about the Pilgrims as a flawless
unprecedented band laying the foundations of our democracy. John Garraty
presents the Compact this way in American History:
“So far as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a
group of people consciously created a government where none had existed
before.”16 Such
accounts deny students the opportunity to see the Pilgrims as anything other
than pious stereotypes.
“lt Was With God’s Help…For How Else Could We Have Done lt?”
Settlement
proceeded, not with God’s help but with the Indians’. The Pilgrims chose
Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted in corn, “and a brook
of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor,” in the words of Triumph of the American Nation. It was a lovely
site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in
the hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native
populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New England,
colonists appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why so many town
names—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield—end in “field.”
Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims’ second
full day in Massachusetts. A colonist’s journal tells us:
We
marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At
another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three
baskets full, and a bag of beans.
…In all we had about ten bushels,
which will be enough for seed. It was with God’s help that we found this corn,
for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might
trouble us.
…The next morning, we found a
place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under
that a fine bow…. We also found bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We
took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the
body up again.
A place “like a grave!”. . . .
”Truth Should be Held Sacred, At Whatever Cost”
Should
we teach these truths about Thanksgiving? Or, like our textbooks, should we
look the other way? Again quoting Land of Promise: “By
the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast
and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).”
Throughout the nation, elementary school children still reenact Thanksgiving
every fall as our national origin myth, complete with Pilgrim hats made of
construction paper and Indian braves with feathers in their hair. An early
Massachusetts colonist, Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, advises us not to settle for
this whitewash of feel-good history. “It is painful to advert to these things.
But our forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in
respect to Christian charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held
sacred, at whatever cost.”
Thanksgiving
is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the Native
Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest
celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863; not
until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even
called them “Pilgrims” until the 1870s.19 Plymouth
Rock achieved ichnographic status only in the nineteenth century, when some
enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so its
significance as the “holy soil” the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible.
The Rock has become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a sacred text, and our
textbooks play the same function as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, teaching us the rudiments
of the civil religion of Thanksgiving.
Indians
are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of the first
Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in
their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian guests. Thanksgiving
silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the handouts that school children have
carried home for decades, with captions like, “They served pumpkins and turkeys
and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!” When his son
brought home this “information” from his New Hampshire elementary school,
Native American novelist Michael Dorris pointed out “the Pilgrims had literally
never seen ‘such a feast,’ since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous
to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.”20
I
do not read Aspinwall as suggesting a “bash the Pilgrims” interpretation,
emphasizing only the bad parts. I have emphasized untoward details only because
our histories have suppressed everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims’
courage in setting forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new
to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year, like the Indians, they
suffered from diseases. Half of them died. The Pilgrims did not cause the
plague and were as baffled as to its true origin as the stricken Indian
villagers. Pilgrim-Indian relations began reasonably positively. Thus the
antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history, but honest and inclusive
history. “Knowing the truth about Thanksgiving, both its proud and its shameful
motivations and history, might well benefit contemporary children,” suggests
Dorris. “But the glib retelling of an ethnocentric and self-serving falsehood
does no one any good.”21 Because
Thanksgiving has roots in both Anglo and Native cultures, and because of the
interracial cooperation the first celebration enshrines, Thanksgiving might yet
develop into a holiday that promotes tolerance and understanding. Its emphasis
on Native foods provides a teach able moment, for natives of the Americas first
developed half of the world’s food crops. Texts could tell this-only three even
mention Indian foods-and could also relate other contributions from Indian
societies, from sports to political ideas. The original Thanksgiving itself
provides an interesting example: the Natives and newcomers spent the better
part of three days showing each other their various recreations.22
Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is
dangerous. The genial omissions and false details our texts use to retail the
Pilgrim legend promote Anglocentrism, which only handicaps us when dealing with
all those whose culture is not Anglo. Surely, in history, “truth
should be held sacred, at whatever cost.”. . . . MORE
Notes. . . .https://monthlyreview.org/author/jameswloewen/
1992, Volume 44, Issue 06 (November
1992)
Ruth Hopkins. “The
First Thanksgiving: Separating Myth From Fact.”
Teen
Vogue. November 11, 2020.
Ruth Hopkins, a Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer, biologist, attorney, and former
tribal judge, breaks down the myths and facts about Thanksgiving and early encounters
between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag.
Arlo
Guthrie. Alice’s Restaurant.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow. The Shalom
Center, The Shalom Report.
“Giving Thanks, Arlo Guthrie, & My
1st Yarmulke: A Ritual of Joyful, Thankful Resistance.” http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/rabbi-arthur-waskow-thanksgiving-my.html
Here is the conclusion, on Alice’s Restaurant, a song to sing at
Giving Thanks.
The
Arlo Guthrie story speaks today in a stronger voice than it has for decades. So I invite you to celebrate Thanksgiving
(or if you are too busy today, tomorrow — on the “second day of the Festival”)
by thanking the Spirit that calls us to resist those who wound our world and to
celebrate those who work to heal it; by lifting your own spirit and encouraging
your own commitment to freedom, peace, laughter, and nonviolence.
For Arlo’s recording of “Alice’s Restaurant” for our own generation with an
audience joining in, click to:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=B_tMzSxvoeA
|
Thanks!
And blessings of a joyful Giving Thanks not only today, but as we keep
moving, building a multifaceted movement to create a new and deeper, fuller,
democratic America. — Arthur |
Listen to This Article: “Thanksgiving is Awesome.”
Narrated Version by Matt Taibbi and Jared Moore
Nov 25
Listen in podcast app
In reply to the haters.
Happy holiday, everyone. Read by Jared
Moore. Find us on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you get your podcasts). Original text version: TK News by Matt
Taibbi.
Thanksgiving is Awesome
Thanksgiving Day is here, and as is the fashion, it’s taking a beating. “What
is Thanksgiving to Indigenous People? ‘A Day of Mourning,’” writes the onetime
daily Bible of American mass culture, USA
Today. The Washington Post fused
a clickhole headline format with white guilt to create, … Read more
“Thanksgiving
is Dangerous.” OR Books. Popular
Resistance.org (11-26-21). OR Books info@orbooks.com via gmail.mcsv.net Nov 25, 2021. Thanksgiving is quite dangerous – as were the
Pilgrims.
An extract from Glen
Ford’s new book The Black Agenda,
now available from OR Books.
The
English settlers, their ostensibly religious venture backed by a trading
company, were glad to discover that they had landed in a virtual cemetery in
1620. Corn still sprouted in the abandoned fields of the Wampanoags,
but only a remnant of the local population remained around the fabled Rock. In
a letter to England, Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop
wrote, "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."
Ever diligent to claim their own advantages as God’s will, the Pilgrims thanked
their deity for having “pursued” the Indians to mass death. However, it was not
divine intervention that wiped out most of the natives around the village of
Patuxet but, most likely, smallpox-embedded blankets planted during an
English visit or slave raid. Six years before the Pilgrim landing, a ship
sailed into Patuxet’s harbor, captained by none other than the famous seaman
and mercenary soldier John Smith, former leader of the first
successful English colony in the New World, at Jamestown, Virginia.
Epidemic and slavery followed in his wake, as Debra Glidden described
in IMDiversity.com:
In 1614 the Plymouth Company of England, a joint stock company, hired Captain
John Smith to explore land in its behalf. Along what is now the coast of
Massachusetts in the territory of the Wampanoag, Smith visited the town of
Patuxet according to The Colonial Horizon, a 1969 book edited by William
Goetzinan. Smith renamed the town Plymouth in honor of his employers, but the
Wampanoag who inhabited the town continued to call it Patuxet.
The following year Captain Hunt, an English slave trader, arrived at Patuxet.
It was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe
and sell them into slavery for 220 shillings apiece. That practice was
described in a 1622 account of happenings entitled "A Declaration of the
State of the Colony and Affairs in Virginia," written by Edward
Waterhouse. True to the explorer tradition, Hunt kidnapped a number of
Wampanoags to sell into slavery.
Another common practice among European explorers was to give "smallpox
blankets" to the Indians. Since smallpox was unknown on this
continent prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Native Americans did not have
any natural immunity to the disease so smallpox would effectively wipe out
entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans. William
Fenton describes how Europeans decimated Native American villages in his
1957 work American Indian and White Relations to 1830. From
1615 to 1619 smallpox ran rampant among the Wampanoags and their neighbors to
the north. The Wampanoag lost 70 percent of their population to the epidemic
and the Massachusetts lost 90 percent.
Most of the Wampanoag had died from the smallpox epidemic so when the Pilgrims
arrived they found well-cleared fields, which they claimed for their own. A
Puritan colonist, quoted by Harvard University's Perry Miller, praised the
plague that had wiped out the Indians for it was "the wonderful
preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ, by his providence for his people's abode
in the Western world."
Historians have since speculated endlessly on why the woods in the region
resembled a park to the disembarking Pilgrims in 1620. The reason should have
been obvious: hundreds, if not thousands, of people had lived there just five
years before.
In less than three generations the settlers would
turn all of New England into a charnel house for Native Americans, and fire the
economic engines of slavery throughout English-speaking America. Plymouth Rock
is the place where the nightmare truly began.
***
[THE FIRST
THANKSGIVING?]
It is not at all clear what happened at the first – and only
– “integrated” Thanksgiving feast. Only two written accounts of the
three-day event exist, and one of them, by Governor William Bradford, was
written 20 years after the fact. Was Chief Massasoit invited to bring 90
Indians with him to dine with 52 colonists, most of them women and children?
This seems unlikely. A good harvest had provided the settlers with plenty of
food, according to their accounts, so the whites didn’t really need the Wampanoag’s
offering of five deer. What we do know is that there had been lots of tension
between the two groups that fall. John Two-Hawks, who runs
the Native Circle website, gives a sketch of the facts:
“Thanksgiving'
did not begin as a great loving relationship between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag,
Pequot and Narragansett people. In fact, in October of 1621 when the
pilgrim survivors of their first winter in Turtle Island sat down to share the
first unofficial 'Thanksgiving' meal, the Indians who were there were not even
invited! There was no turkey, squash, cranberry sauce or pumpkin
pie. A few days before this alleged feast took place, a company of
'pilgrims' led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian
chief, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth settlement
for the very purpose of keeping Indians out!”. . . . MORE
What is certain is that the first feast was
not called a “Thanksgiving” at the time; no further integrated dining occasions
were scheduled; and the first, official all-Pilgrim “Thanksgiving” had to wait
until 1637, when the whites of New England celebrated the massacre of the
Wampanoag’s southern neighbors, the Pequots.
My Grandfather Founded The National Day Of Mourning
By Kisha
James, The Lily. Popular Resistance.org (11-26-21). On Thursday, millions of families across the
United States will celebrate Thanksgiving without giving much thought to the
truth behind the heavily mythologized and sanitized story taught in schools and
promulgated by institutions. According to this myth, 400 years ago, the
Pilgrims were warmly welcomed by the “Indians,” and the two groups came
together in friendship to break bread. The “Indians” taught the Pilgrims how to
live in the “New World,” setting the stage for the eventual establishment of a
great land of liberty and opportunity. In the usual narrative, no further
mention is made of the Native people... -more-
Six Thanksgiving Myths And The Wampanoag Side Of The Story” By Vincent Schilling, Indian
Country Today. Popular Resistance.org (11-26-21). In 1621, though Pilgrims celebrated a feast,
it was not repeated in the years to follow. In 1636, a murdered white man was
found in his boat and the Pequot were blamed. In retaliation, settlers burned
Pequot villages. Additionally, English Major John Mason rallied his troops to
further burn Pequot wigwams and then attacked and killed hundreds more men,
women and children. According to Mason’s reports of
the massacre, “We must burn them! Such a dreadful terror let the Almighty fall
upon their spirits that they would flee from us and run into the very
flames. -more-
Genocides Reformulated as Holidays
Sophie Hirsh. “Thanksgiving Glorifies the
Abhorrent Colonization of Indigenous Peoples.” Editor,
mronline.org (11-26-21).
“From Columbus Day to Independence Day to
Thanksgiving, the U.S. pretty much specializes in taking dates that celebrate
genocide and discrimination, and repackaging them as family-friendly holidays. So as Thanksgiving
2021–the 400th anniversary of the supposed first Thanksgiving–approaches, you
may be wondering exactly why Thanksgiving
is bad.
“
Originally published: Green Matters by Sophie Hirsh (November 22,
2021 ). Posted Nov 25,
2021. Culture, Globalization, History, InequalityUnited StatesNewswireAmerican Holiday, Thanksgiving, Turkey
‘U.S.
Capitalism Born in Blood: From the First Thanksgiving to Today’ w/ Dr. Gerald
Horne.
Editor. Mronline.org (11-28-21).
The
Thanksgiving holiday is built around an insidious and false creation myth–that
the so-called “settling” of North America was a peaceful and amicable process.
Originally published: BreakThrough News on November 23, 2021 by Breakthrough News
with Dr. Gerald Horne (more by BreakThrough News) | (Posted Nov
27, 2021)
Capitalism,
Empire,
Inequality,
StrategyUnited
StatesInterview
Karl Marx
wrote in Capital that capitalism came into the world “dripping from head
to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The Thanksgiving holiday is
built around an insidious and false creation myth–that the so-called “settling”
of North America was a peaceful and amicable process. But in reality, the
genocidal expansion of colonialism across the continent led to unspeakable
suffering and death for Indigenous peoples. What is the real story of the birth
of U.S. capitalism?
Dr. Gerald Horne holds
the Moore Professorship of History and African American Studies at the
University of Houston and is the author of many books, including “The Dawning of the
Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and
Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century”.
Rashida Tlaib. “The myth of Thanksgiving.” 11-28-21.
Dick,
This Thanksgiving weekend is an
excellent time to fight colonialism by supporting Indigenous-led organizations. I’m asking you to chip in to American Indian Health & Family Services, which integrates traditional Native American healing and
spiritual practices with contemporary western medicine to enhance Indigenous
people’s well-being. The non-profit
organization makes sure not to turn anyone away, including uninsured people.
They make holistic healthcare accessible by providing discounts and sliding
scale fees based on income, and by offering transportation as needed to bring
people to programs and appointments.
After
centuries of colonialist and racist policies have led to disparities in mental
and physical health for Indigenous people in the U.S., experts have found that
culturally competent healthcare makes a huge difference. And that’s what American Indian Health & Family Services
provides. (You can check out more about their crucial work in the email we sent
a yesterday.)
Thank
you, Rashida Date: Sat, Nov 27, 2021
https://rashidaforcongress.com/ Rashida
Tlaib for Congress PO Box 32777 Detroit,
MI
After 400 Years, It’s Time To Take Down The Monumental Insult” By Randy Kritkausky, Indian Country Today. Popuar
Resistance.org (11-28-21). I am
sending a gift, a box of “Indian corn,” to the Wall Street Journal editorial
board as a reminder of what really happened in colonial North America and is
commemorated by the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. On this 400th anniversary of
what we believe to be the first Thanksgiving, the Wall Street Journal is
poised to print its insulting Pilgrim Journal version of early colonial history
for the 60th time. Not only is the account suffused with the racist sentiment,
but it is also factually incorrect to a grotesque degree. The newspaper is
impugning its own credibility and not just its core values. -more-
By John Kiriakou, Consortium News. Popular
Resistance.org (11-28-21). The
White House on Friday revealed the names of the recipients of two
pardons President Biden plans to issue—Peanut Butter and Jelly. The
pardons are, of course, for two Thanksgiving turkeys, part of a stupid annual
tradition where the president saves two turkeys from the Thanksgiving table.
The tradition began in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln pardoned a turkey,
an act that apparently wasn’t even reported in the media until 1865. By the
early 20th century, it was common practice to give friends and family
members live poultry as an early Christmas gift and to have them “pardon” the
turkey or... -more-
CONTENTS
NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING #9, 2021
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/11/omni-national-day-of-mourning-9.html
James W. Loewen, Truth
about First Thanksgiving
Cole’s
Hill, Frank James, Massasoit
Matt
Taibbi, the Pilgrims and the Taliban
4
essays from Popular Resistance.org
Kisha James, 52nd Day of Mourning
in Plymouth
Thanksgiving March to Free Indigenous Kids
Racism and Human Rights
Protest of Arresting Journalists of
Wet’suwet’en
Day of
Mourning #8, 2020 and others
Buy
Nothing Day: OMNI’s 3 Newsletters
END NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING #10, 2024
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