Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/11/thanksgiving-day-anthology-10-november.html
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