Thanksgiving is on us.
Wednesday Addams
So, I thought a post would be cool.
(Earlier video was replaced due to well-argued objection)
delux_vivens linked me to Deconstructing the Myth of Thanksgiving
Myth #1: “The First Thanksgiving” occurred in 1621.
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Fact: No one knows when the “first” thanksgiving occurred. People have been giving thanks for as long as people have existed. Indigenous nations all over the world have celebrations of the harvest that come from very old traditions; for Native peoples, thanksgiving comes not once a year, but every day, for all the gifts of life. To refer to the harvest feast of 1621 as “The First Thanksgiving” disappears Indian peoples in the eyes of non-Native children.
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Myth #7: The Pilgrims invited the Indians to celebrate the First Thanksgiving.
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Fact: According to oral accounts from the Wampanoag people, when the Native people nearby first heard the gunshots of the hunting colonists, they thought that the colonists were preparing for war and that Massasoit needed to be informed. When Massasoit showed up with 90 men and no women or children, it can be assumed that he was being cautious. When he saw there was a party going on, his men then went out and brought back five deer and lots of turkeys. (8)
In addition, both the Wampanoag and the English settlers were long familiar with harvest celebrations. Long before the Europeans set foot on these shores, Native peoples gave thanks every day for all the gifts of life, and held thanksgiving celebrations and giveaways at certain times of the year. The Europeans also had days of thanksgiving, marked by religious services. So the coming together of two peoples to share food and company was not entirely a foreign thing for either. But the visit that by all accounts lasted three days was most likely one of a series of political meetings to discuss and secure a military alliance. Neither side totally trusted the other: The Europeans considered the Wampanoag soulless heathens and instruments of the devil, and the Wampanoag had seen the Europeans steal their seed corn and rob their graves. In any event, neither the Wampanoag nor the Europeans referred to this feast/meeting as “Thanksgiving.” (9)me here fully intending to take the land away from its Native inhabitants and establish a new nation, their “Holy Kingdom.” The Plimoth colonists were never concerned with “freedom of religion” for anyone but themselves. (2)
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Myth #10: The Pilgrims and Indians became great friends.
Fact: A mere generation later, the balance of power had shifted so enormously and the theft of land by the European settlers had become so egregious that the Wampanoag were forced into battle. In 1637, English soldiers massacred some 700 Pequot men, women and children at Mystic Fort, burning many of them alive in their homes and shooting those who fled. The colony of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay Colony observed a day of thanksgiving commemorating the massacre. By 1675, there were some 50,000 colonists in the place they had named “New England.” That year, Metacom, a son of Massasoit, one of the first whose generosity had saved the lives of the starving settlers, led a rebellion against them. By the end of the conflict known as “King Philip’s War,” most of the Indian peoples of the Northeast region had been either completely wiped out, sold into slavery, or had fled for safety into Canada. Shortly after Metacom’s death, Plimoth Colony declared a day of thanksgiving for the English victory over the Indians. (13)MORE
Myth 10 leads us right into: The Massacre For Which Thanksgiving Is Named Part 1.
Pometacom
By Douglas Watts
I was born on soil soaked with blood
Where the head of King Philip was ground in the mud
By the Pilgrims of Plymouth, and their first born sons.
They put his head on a spike and let it rot in the sun.
Shackled his children and family.
Shipped them to Barbados and sold them into slavery.
Now they taught me in grade school
About the first Thanksgiving
How Massasoit and Squanto kept the Pilgrims living.
But the teachers never told us what happened next.
How the head of King Philip was chopped off at the neck.
The teachers never told us what happened next.
How the head of Pometacom was sawed off at the neck.
The teachers never told us what the Pilgrims did
To Massasoit’s second son.
They put his head on a spike and let it rot in the sun.
The teachers never told us what they did
To kids who swam in the same brooks as me.
They put their legs in iron chains and sold them into slavery. Here's what happenedThe Massacre for which Thanksgiving is Named Part 2Rethinking Thanksgiving offers suggestions to teachers on how to deal with the holiday.
I challenge my students’ knowledge about Pilgrims, Indians, and Thanksgiving through a series of exploratory activities using elementary-appropriate materials. I designed activities meant to model how they might introduce a critique of Thanksgiving to their own elementary students that also identifies stereotypes about Native Americans and explores the events surrounding 1621. The activities require my students to work first within and then across small groups to compare and contrast the histories of the “Indians” and “Pilgrims,” separate fact from fiction about the Thanksgiving story, and uncover new information concerning Native Americans past and present.
For one activity, I divide a set of students into “Indians” and “Pilgrims.” Both groups visit www.plimoth.org/education/olc/index_js2.html#, a website elementary teachers and students could use that offers an interactive timeline with key dates in the history of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. I send the students to the “path to 1621” for their respective group’s story. The “Indians” follow the Wampanoag ancestor Ahsaupwis’ story and the “Pilgrims” follow English ancestor Remember Allerton. In the penultimate phase of the activity, I combine the “Indians” and “Pilgrims” and tell them to create a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting what they learned.
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Charlie commented, “I remember making the feather headdress for Thanksgiving. I had no idea it could be inaccurate, let alone inappropriate.” Students often remark on the cultural disrespect implicit in illustrating Thanksgiving stories with clothing that the Wampanoag didn’t wear.
By the end of our re-examination of Thanksgiving, students grow anxious and begin to consider if and how they might integrate a more critical perspective of Thanksgiving with their own students. As Iris later wrote:
So, how do we go about talking about Thanksgiving now that we have all of this new information? How should we treat it with our students? Truly, it is not a day of Thanksgiving for all people in this country. I am at a loss now. I think that we could approach it with the new information that Ms. Stenhouse gave us and debunk some of these myths for our students, but I’m beginning to question what the bigger message should be. Is the holiday real? Is there really something to celebrate? I mean, sure, I’m glad to be here, and I’m thankful for the blessings in my life, but am I celebrating at the expense of others? If I do teach my children that the coming of the settlers was at the indigenous people’s expense, will they want to continue celebrating this day? Will their parents thank me if I do? I am not sure how to proceed.MORE
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
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How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.
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But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
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At this point in history, anyone who wants to know this reality of U.S. history -- that the extermination of indigenous peoples was, both in a technical, legal sense and in common usage, genocide -- can easily find the resources to know. If this idea is new, I would recommend two books, David E. Stannard's American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World and Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide. While the concept of genocide, which is defined as the deliberate attempt "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," came into existence after World War II, it accurately describes the program that Europeans and their descendants pursued to acquire the territory that would become the United States of America.
Once we know that, what do we do? The moral response -- that is, the response that would be consistent with the moral values around justice and equality that most of us claim to hold -- would be a truth-and-reconciliation process that would not only correct the historical record but also redistribute land and wealth. In the white-supremacist and patriarchal society in which we live, operating within the parameters set by a greed-based capitalist system, such a process is hard to imagine in the short term. So, the question for left/radical people is: What political activity can we engage in to keep alive this kind of critique until a time when social conditions might make a truly progressive politics possible?
In short: Once we know, what do we do in a world that is not yet ready to know, or knows but will not deal with the consequences of that knowledge?MORE
In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.
Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.
Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.
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The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others? MORE
Everyone knows that the United States was first settled in 1620. Everyone is wrong.
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With Thanksgiving approaching, I decided that it would be good medicine to re-read the chapter on Thanksgiving in James Loewen’s iconoclastic classic, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). It was well worth the effort.
The first “settlers,” of course, were the indigenous Americans, “Indians,” who settled the North American continent at least 9000 years ago, perhaps much longer. To suggest that anyone other than Native Americans first “settled” this land is a silly proposition with racist overtones.
Setting aside the fact that Native Americans were here first, we shouldn’t forget that African slaves still preceded the Pilgrims by almost 100 years. Those first African slaves arrived in present day United States as part of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina, founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón in 1526. As indicated in the above Wikipedia article, the ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans, where they remained.
And that’s just the earliest pre-Pilgrim settlers. MORE
The history of Thanksgiving is hallowed ground for antiquarians, popular writers, and even an occasional anthropologist.(9) The story begins with the Pilgrims who held a feast for themselves and their Wampanoag neighbors in October of 1621. [Remember kids, we have just spent most of the preceding links debunking this. Moving on...] Prior to Lincoln, three presidents, George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison, issued ad hoc proclamations of a national day of thanksgiving. Nonetheless, Thanksgiving in the early nineteenth century was mainly popular in New England and to a lesser extent the mid-Atlantic states. As of the 1850s, Thanksgiving was a legal holiday only in these states and in Texas.
Prior to Abraham Lincoln's proclamation in 1863 of an annual national holiday in November, Thanksgiving was a regional day, both secular and religious. In early nineteenth century New England Thanksgiving day might begin with a morning church service, followed by the large meal in the afternoon. Before or after attending church, men, musket in hand, might take aim at a wild turkey in the fields, or at paper targets. The winner usually won a turkey as his prize for good marksmanship. The food at the feast was bountiful but the setting was relatively modest. Most families did not own a long wooden dining table. They might have had a smaller one, which was set up in a sitting room, parlor, or the bedroom - any room that could be kept warm in winter. There were probably only two courses to the meal, the food for the main meal spread on the table, and the desserts served later.(10) Because the roads were poor, muddy or snow-covered, many relatives, eager to return home for the holidays, were unable to do so.
Hale, Lincoln, and the Tolerance of Misrule
Through the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, and later Abraham Lincoln, Thanksgiving became a holiday of the Union, with limited acceptance in the Southern states.(11) The editor of Godey's magazine, Sarah Josepha Hale, issued yearly editorials beginning in 1846 encouraging the "Great American Festival" of Thanksgiving. Hale wrote letters to governors of states and territories, overseas missionaries, and navy commanders urging them to celebrate Thanksgiving and in the case of the governors, to make Thanksgiving a legal holiday. Hale hoped that a unifying holiday would help avert the prospect of a civil war. Instead, the victory at Gettysburg as well as Hale's entreaties encouraged Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to declare a national day of thanksgiving in November.MORE
Australia Day has had a concurrent Invasion Day protest since 1988, but pretty much everyone’s still going with the barbecues, drunkeness and occasional ironic immigrant bashings by white thugs. The phrase used here for “history the dominant political/racial groups don’t like” is “a black armband view of history” – as if truth in history is gloomy and inappropriate. And just like the US, when history supports that dominant narrative, we are honouring the past instead.
I would have thought that Australia Day was easier to overturn than Thanksgiving – it doesn’t have the family gathering connotations – and yet that’s absolutely not true.
So what’s the point? I should be embarrassed about things my ancestors did, and so shouldn’t have Thanksgiving this year? Or what?
With the exception of a few islands in the Pacific Ocean that were never inhabited by human beings before being genuinely discovered by various Polynesians and Europeans, in historical times every piece of land on the earth is soaked in the blood of its “original” inhabitants and inhabited by people who stole it from someone else – and the Polynesians and the Europeans soon soaked their innocent islands in one another’s blood, and in their own.
It’s right to teach the truth about colonial times and the oppressive subjugation of conquered peoples – but we need to teach the whole truth. There is nobody who can point to the sterling record of their ancestors in the humanitarian department; all any of us can legitimately do is point to our own good record, if we have one.
And once the whole truth is known, the idea of lifting a turkey leg in thanks for things we have doesn’t seem amiss.
@Robert: Your argument is actually addressed and answered in the linkspam. Start from the part with Robert Jensen.
@lilacsigil: *sigh* The phrase used here for “history the dominant political/racial groups don’t like” is “a black armband view of history” – as if truth in history is gloomy and inappropriate. And just like the US, when history supports that dominant narrative, we are honouring the past instead.People never do like to acknowledge that they did wrong.
Thanks for linking to my blog. The “dust up” you refer to was the result of guest post I ran. I missed that the guest blogger used the word “trannie” (a word I do not use or condone) in the post. I also failed to read and consider the post carefully enough in my haste to prepare to leave town. The post was inflammatory on many levels and when the blog-storm began, I was away from comments for several days. I do not use these guest posters anymore and I regret my own editorial mistakes. I hope you will consider following me once again…
“@Robert: Your argument is actually addressed and answered in the linkspam. Start from the part with Robert Jensen.”
Where? I read all of Jensen’s stuff and I didn’t see it. I am not perfect and I do make lots of mistakes, so if you could link that argument directly I would appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you for posting this. While I was having supper (just a regular one, I’m in Canada) with my father yesterday, I thanked him for teaching me about history from the start, in age-appropriate ways.
“It’s history,” he said “people show know it, and parents should teach their kids. Even if it’s not very nice.”
I’m trying to be open-minded about the post and the meaning, but the implications of taking away Thanksgiving as suggested by some of the links I don’t agree with. It doesn’t mean a massacre of Native Americans to the majority anymore; few people can even tell you anything about Thanksgiving beyond it being either the day you get to eat a lot and give thanks for what you’ve got or the old “Native Americans and Pilgrims were brothers” story. Perhaps I’m being insensitive – and that may very well be the case – but I sincerely doubt that taking away the one day in our self-obsessed materialistic society where we’re supposed to think about what it is that we DO have and be grateful for it would be helpful. Please note that the previous statement is the sentiment I’ve always heard behind Thanksgiving – not “Dang, I’m sure glad we killed us some Indians.” The true meaning of it as you point out above seems to have been discarded. Unfortunate, of course, and marginalizing to Native American’s history and people, but everything evolves. It does not mean the same thing to the majority anymore, and to retrograde it would not be doing America a favor, in my opinion.
This being said, I do appreciate this post and the knowledge of real events vs. made up fiction is always preferrable. I just disagree with getting rid of Thanksgiving or turning it into a day of mourning, probably mostly because it’s one of the few holidays that I don’t get inundated with Jesus in big healthy heapings.
I get what you’re coming from, but I think you’re being pretty myopic.
few people can even tell you anything about Thanksgiving beyond it being either the day you get to eat a lot and give thanks for what you’ve got or the old “Native Americans and Pilgrims were brothers” story.
Do you see the problem with this from the point of view of the descendents of the Native American survivors?
Do you see the problem with this from the point of view of the descendents of the Native American survivors?
We also should be mindful of over-simplifying or stereotyping the Native American view of Thanksgiving. The people who have a problem with it tend to be a lot more vocal. That’s fine. They have every right to put their views out their and argue for their position. But there also are Native Americans who celebrate Thanksgiving without much more thought than the average white American puts into it. And Native Americans who have an outlook on that should be familiar to the Jews among us: “They tried to kill us. We’re still here. Let’s eat.”
It’s not as black-and-white as “Native Americans find this a horrible affront, but white people just don’t give a damn.”
Chingona — I was actually trying to get at a slightly different point. Simple Truth’s comment, IMO, wrote about the genocide as if it had occurred to a group of people without descendents at all. I was hoping to get her to look at Native Americans as a modern group instead of just a historical one.
And even if some of us do treat the holiday just like your ‘average white american’ shouldn’t be treated as a gesture for historical erasure or sleight-of-hand when peeling away from oversimplification.
And even if some may believe that ‘the story of thanksgiving’ & ‘true meaning of thanksgiving’ muckity-muck is falling out of the public mind–we’re still teaching kids it in the elementary schools/at the elementary level. I know that much at least. Not sure about any higher, I just work in the elementary arena.
And even if some of us do treat the holiday just like your �average white american� shouldn�t be treated as a gesture for historical erasure or sleight-of-hand when peeling away from oversimplification.
Agreed.
And even if some may believe that �the story of thanksgiving� & �true meaning of thanksgiving� muckity-muck is falling out of the public mind�we�re still teaching kids it in the elementary schools/at the elementary level. I know that much at least.
And agreed.
Where I think people get hung up is when they feel like they’re being told they need to stop having Thanksgiving dinner. Which some people think we should.
For what it’s worth, here’s what I remember learning in school:
1. Is it fair to say that the “Pilgrims” were not interested in freedom of religion for anyone but themselves?
Uh … yeah; I suspect they would have acknowledged that fact. Recall that religious persecution did not drive the Pilgrims to flee to the New World. Rather, religions persecution drove the Pilgrims to flee to Holland. And there they found religious freedom, from what I recall.
And they didn’t like it. Specifically, they discovered what immigrants often discover: their kids were growing up adopting the manners, tastes and mores of their adopted homeland, rather than the manners, tastes and mores of their original homeland. Thus, the Pilgrims fled to the New World not to seek freedom, but the opposite: they sought to deprive their children of the freedom to adopt the religion, manner, tastes and mores of the Dutch.
The Pilgrims were the original “social engineers”: they believed that environment influenced behavior, and that by controlling the environment you could control behavior in ways you found to your liking. Consequently the Pilgrims sought a land untainted by a seductive alien culture. Sure, Native Americans may have a culture. But the Pilgrims expected that it would not be too attractive to their kids, and that they’d be able to keep their distance. And to a large extent, the Pilgrims were right.
2. Was the lifestyle and livelihood of Native Americans destroyed by oppression by the Pilgrims?
To some extent, I guess. But the lifestyle and livelihood of Native Americans had already been devastated by smallpox that had swept up from South and Central America. The Pilgrims could hardly be blamed for this phenomenon; as other have remarked, the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to settle in North America. In striking up a relationship with Tisquantum/Squanto, the Pilgrims discover that 1) the guy has already had so much interaction with Europeans that he speaks English, and 2) he is nearly the only remaining member of this village, which was wiped out before the Pilgrims arrived.
Thus, I feel some sympathy for European seafarers that characterized North America in the 1600 as virtually a virgin wilderness. They accurately observed that the population density they encountered was vastly less than the density of the European shipping towns they had left.
(In the list of disruptive European influences on Native American cultures, recall that Europeans introduced the horse to the New World. Thus I find some irony when people bemoan how European Americans led to the demise of the horse-centric cultures of the Comanche and other Plains Indians. But I’m getting ahead of myself….)
3. Did the Pilgrims (and their decedents) seek to exclude Native Americans?
Absolutely. They envisioned creating a “New England” largely modeled on the old one, and Native Americans really didn’t have a role in that vision.
This was in marked contrast to the conquistadores in South and Central America, who actively sought out Native Americans to exploit. They wanted to find the native’s gold and silver, and they wanted the native’s labor to work on plantations and in mines. Thus the Pilgrim’s dream – depopulated land – was the conquistadores’s nightmare.
4. Do depictions of the “First Thanksgiving” misrepresent the style of clothes worn by the Wampanoag at this time?
Sure. As do the depictions of the style of clothes worn by the Pilgrims.
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In short, a lot of shitty things had happened to Native Americans prior to 1621, and a lot of shitty things would happen to Native Americans after 1621 – regardless of the Pilgrims. I can use the Pilgrims as a symbol of all that is good or all that is bad in the European migration to the New World. In the grand scheme of things, I suspect the Pilgrims were not that consequential to the fate of Native Americans generally.
I appreciate the comments – I don’t want to be myopic. I do realize that there are descendants who are Native Americans who still have the culture and traditions that have survived the times. I sometimes also suspect as Chinoga writes that many of them either don’t remember or don’t care either. 400 years is a long time to hold a grudge. Granted, it’s not my place to say they can’t, or won’t, or don’t. I could be speaking from the most entitled of positions on this. However, I also feel that my point is valid, not in an overruling sort of way. Just a “Hey let’s have a holiday where we can be grateful for everybody and everything we have” like I’ve experienced in my family traditions instead of the Hallmark/Jesus combo we get decked with on all other occasions.
In short, yes it would make me sad to see a chance for gratitude go. (*edited because of bad math*)
In 1856, California offered a bounty of 25 cents for Indian scalps. In 1860, they increased that bounty to $5 per scalp.
As of 1975, one third of native american women of child-bearing age had been sterilized, many against their wills or as a result of coercive measures, such as doctors instructing women to sign consent forms while they were under anasthetic for childbirth, or telling them just after giving birth that if they refused to agree to be sterlized then their just-born baby and their other children would be taken away.
Argh, not even to mention the water access and infrastructure problems on many modern reservations… but yeah, I mean, everything happened 400 years ago and has no impact on the modern world.
Personally, I don’t really care whether people celebrate Thanksgiving or not, but there are strong arguments that oppose your position, and I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit. It’s not that I think your main point is bad. One can certainly argue that it’s a good thing for Americans to have a non-religious festival of harvest and gratitude, and that this festival should be divorced from its racist history as much as possible. So I don’t mean to argue with you on that, just some of the rhetoric that surrounds it.
Ha, I originally put 200 years…turns out my edit was probably more offensive than my mistake.
Thanks for pointing out those events. Many of them (especially the water crisis) I didn’t tend to think of as primarily Native American issues, but it certainly affects them. Sterilization was also a problem for other race groups in the US (I’m thinking blacks, but I don’t have a citation.) Certainly the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment counts in the same vein.
I was falling into the mindset that the controversy that caused the uproar about Thanksgiving was originated (and ended) with the Manifest Destiny stuff. I wasn’t linking the things you mention up with that controversy. I see it definitely in the same racist vein as far as treatment of Native Americans, but I’m still not quite sure it links so directly to Thanksgiving. Again, I don’t feel in a position to judge – it’s not me who its affecting.
How can American racism against blacks be separated from slavery? How can American racism against Native Americans be separated from colonialism? How does that make historical or sociological sense?
I sometimes also suspect as Chinoga writes that many of them either don’t remember or don’t care either. 400 years is a long time to hold a grudge.
Uh. Feeling a very strong need to clarify my position.
It’s not that people “don’t remember” or “don’t care” about genocide/colonialism/etc. It’s that for some American Indian people Thanksgiving is more associated with getting family together for a big meal than it is with history or white/Indian relations – sanitized or otherwise.
See, I was more focused on the “It’s okay to keep Thanksgiving because it’s disassociated with genocide” aspect of your first point, and thought that Mandolin was saying “How do you think it makes Native Americans feel that you want to celebrate Thanksgiving?” and all I really was trying to say is that I’m not at all sure that “replace Thanksgiving with a day of mourning” is the consensus Indian position or that there is a consensus Indian position on it.
But Mandolin was picking up on something in your original comment that I didn’t really pick up on and it’s becoming more apparent with each subsequent comment.
So … you really need to educate yourself a bit more about American history and, frankly, current events. It’s got nothing to do with holding a grudge for 400 years. This stuff is still going on. Indian children were being forcibly removed from their families and sent to boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their languages within the last 50 years. Indian women suffer much higher rates of rape than any other group of American women, and unlike most other American women, the majority of the perpetrators come from outside their community. Tribal police cannot arrest non-tribal members and have to refer all cases to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who couldn’t care less about crimes of personal violence and just about never lift a finger on these cases. Indians don’t own the land on their “sovereign” reservations. It’s held “in trust” for them by the U.S. government because the law still treats them as incompetent actors. This is going on right now.
I’m not really seeing how you can separate thankgiving and (Native) Americans. Well, maybe if someone tries to erase or reduce us to erasure–but that, in my eyes, seems very difficult to do and immensely skeevy if someone could/did. As Mandolin points out the holiday exists both within the past and present spheres of Native American and colonial histories & politics.
Even if we continued to try and sanitize and pretty it up to a commercial holiday & non-religious holiday of thanks can’t fully erase the history as without it the holiday would have never existed.
@comment 16
I didn’t really ever learn about that in school until late highschool/early college.
Many of them (especially the water crisis) I didn’t tend to think of as primarily Native American issues, but it certainly affects them.
Oh, and I’m not sure what you mean by the water crisis not primarily affecting Native Americans, but that’s simply wrong. I’m not an expert on water law (and really, very few people are – it’s complicated as fuck) but I’ve done some reporting on water issues in the West, and I can tell you this: The Indians got the worst raw deal on water of anybody, and it continues to affect them to this day. There’s a general principle that whoever got there first, has the first claim to the water, that their water rights supersede later comers. Except they start the clock when Anglo ranchers come into the area, and completely ignore that there were people using that water for agriculture centuries before the ranchers showed up. Ranchers pumped the water for their cattle, Indian crops withered, and Indians were reduced to begging for government handouts or starving. Now, in modern times, tribes have had to basically get in the back of the line for water rights that already are oversubscribed throughout the West. In Arizona (and maybe other states) we just now, like two or three years ago, settled a major lawsuit over Indian water rights that was first filed decades ago. And the tribes STILL don’t actually have the water. They’ve been promised Colorado River water and treated effluent, but there’s no infrastructure to take it to the reservations. It’s paper water. As things continue to get drier and drier, what do you think the chances are the tribes ever see that water?
Even if we continued to try and sanitize and pretty it up to a commercial holiday & non-religious holiday of thanks can’t fully erase the history as without it the holiday would have never existed.
The last bit, I’m not sure of. The “without it, the holiday would never have existed.” I mean, I can’t prove a counter-factual, but people have been holding fall harvest festivals for as long as people have engaged in agriculture. The difference is that ours is national, instead of religious. A lot of the religious ones have stories behind them. Ours has a story behind it, and it’s the sanitized myth some would like to believe about the founding of what would become our country. I suspect some reverse-engineering in the linking of it to the declaration by the Pilgrims of a feast of thanksgiving. I mean, there have been thousands and thousands of massacres of native peoples by Europeans and white Americans, but our calendar isn’t dotted with celebrations of all the most important ones.
The crops are very important! But I was thinking about access to clean, safe drinking water…
I actually thought that was what you meant. No, really. In fact, I meant to have a line in there that I thought that’s what you meant, not the broader “water crisis” of the western United States that it seemed like Simple Truth was referring to. But I also wanted to dispute what I thought Simple Truth was saying. (And I may have misinterpreted that, too.)
Even if we continued to try and sanitize and pretty it up to a commercial holiday & non-religious holiday of thanks can’t fully erase the history as without it the holiday would have never existed.
The last bit, I’m not sure of. The “without it, the holiday would never have existed.” I mean, I can’t prove a counter-factual, but people have been holding fall harvest festivals for as long as people have engaged in agriculture.
I find irony in the Christian bumper sticker: “Christmas: Remember the Reason for the Season.” There is, of course, no evidence regarding the date of Jesus’s birth. It is my understanding that early Christians chose to have a celebration on December 25 to have an alternative to the Roman’s Saturnalia (Celebration of Saturn). Saturnalia, in turn, was scheduled to coincide with the winter solstice. And in Mediterranean/Mideastern cultures (where the growing season is longer than in N. America), winter solstice celebrations often coincide with harvest celebrations. (So honest, this discussion is on topic, kinda.)
After the harvest is the time of abundance: If there is any time of year that a society might have more food than it can store, this would be it. Many cultures also slaughter livestock and cure/preserve meat at this time to save labor during the winter months; in these cultures, the fall represents the last time to eat fresh meat. Finally, after the harvest, there is relatively little work to do. The combination of these dynamics leads many cultures to develop traditions around feasting, gift-giving, leisure and even social inversion (where servants are released from their duties and take on airs of their masters) at this time.
So, what really is the “reason for the season” of Christmas? Christ’s birth? The Roman god Saturn? The winter solstice? I say it’s a harvest festival established according to a Mediterranean calendar. So the next time you hear someone saying that Christmas has become excessively focused on material things, feel free to remind them that it is “the reason for the season”!
I want to apologize for my lack of clarity, and the fact that at this point I am not really going to be able to make it more clear due to an intense lack of sleep.
Many of you are far more aware of the issues involving NA than I am. I defer to your wisdom.
I did not ever intend to degrade NA or say that their issues are 400 years past. My position (in the ignorance of all that has been brought up) was that Thanksgiving and the massacre were not related in my mind.
This is me checking my privilege now.
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I love that Caterpillar boots were among the returned items, and in this photo an Amazon worker took, you can clearly see the "CAT" logo near the cat. Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away wapo.st/3JJ3vqT
A new cartoon for May Day! This has been an incredible year for unions in the USA - may next year be even better. Unions Have Always Done The Impossible! #PoliCartoon #Union #LaborDay2024 #MayDay2024 #May1st #UBI #LivingWage
People on reddit are fighting about a cartoon I did about why the US health care system sucks and I am enjoying this too too much. https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1ch0l0r/why_us_health_care_is_such_a_terrible_system/?sort=old
I just posted a new cartoon! It's patreon supporters only for now, but in a week or so I'll make it public. :-) https://www.patreon.com/posts/deus-ex-machina-103359912?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
Nothing against Brian, who of course needs and should make a living. But I'm increasingly frustrated by the Substackization of blogging/news writing. To read Brian's work I have to subscribe, which at the lowest price level is $75 a year. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
Cartoonists and illustrators: Watch out for this scam (it's been going around for a while, but I only heard about it recently). Person emails you wanting to commission a bunch of illustrations to go with a presentation. Pretty high offer. At the end, they mention they want to pay you by check.
Australia Day has had a concurrent Invasion Day protest since 1988, but pretty much everyone’s still going with the barbecues, drunkeness and occasional ironic immigrant bashings by white thugs. The phrase used here for “history the dominant political/racial groups don’t like” is “a black armband view of history” – as if truth in history is gloomy and inappropriate. And just like the US, when history supports that dominant narrative, we are honouring the past instead.
I would have thought that Australia Day was easier to overturn than Thanksgiving – it doesn’t have the family gathering connotations – and yet that’s absolutely not true.
So what’s the point? I should be embarrassed about things my ancestors did, and so shouldn’t have Thanksgiving this year? Or what?
With the exception of a few islands in the Pacific Ocean that were never inhabited by human beings before being genuinely discovered by various Polynesians and Europeans, in historical times every piece of land on the earth is soaked in the blood of its “original” inhabitants and inhabited by people who stole it from someone else – and the Polynesians and the Europeans soon soaked their innocent islands in one another’s blood, and in their own.
It’s right to teach the truth about colonial times and the oppressive subjugation of conquered peoples – but we need to teach the whole truth. There is nobody who can point to the sterling record of their ancestors in the humanitarian department; all any of us can legitimately do is point to our own good record, if we have one.
And once the whole truth is known, the idea of lifting a turkey leg in thanks for things we have doesn’t seem amiss.
@Robert: Your argument is actually addressed and answered in the linkspam. Start from the part with Robert Jensen.
@lilacsigil: *sigh* The phrase used here for “history the dominant political/racial groups don’t like” is “a black armband view of history” – as if truth in history is gloomy and inappropriate. And just like the US, when history supports that dominant narrative, we are honouring the past instead.People never do like to acknowledge that they did wrong.
Thanks for linking to my blog. The “dust up” you refer to was the result of guest post I ran. I missed that the guest blogger used the word “trannie” (a word I do not use or condone) in the post. I also failed to read and consider the post carefully enough in my haste to prepare to leave town. The post was inflammatory on many levels and when the blog-storm began, I was away from comments for several days. I do not use these guest posters anymore and I regret my own editorial mistakes. I hope you will consider following me once again…
I kind of like this link:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wa/thanksgiving_prayer/
Isn’t it more traditional to make this complaint on Columbus Day instead? ;)
“@Robert: Your argument is actually addressed and answered in the linkspam. Start from the part with Robert Jensen.”
Where? I read all of Jensen’s stuff and I didn’t see it. I am not perfect and I do make lots of mistakes, so if you could link that argument directly I would appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you for posting this. While I was having supper (just a regular one, I’m in Canada) with my father yesterday, I thanked him for teaching me about history from the start, in age-appropriate ways.
“It’s history,” he said “people show know it, and parents should teach their kids. Even if it’s not very nice.”
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I’m trying to be open-minded about the post and the meaning, but the implications of taking away Thanksgiving as suggested by some of the links I don’t agree with. It doesn’t mean a massacre of Native Americans to the majority anymore; few people can even tell you anything about Thanksgiving beyond it being either the day you get to eat a lot and give thanks for what you’ve got or the old “Native Americans and Pilgrims were brothers” story. Perhaps I’m being insensitive – and that may very well be the case – but I sincerely doubt that taking away the one day in our self-obsessed materialistic society where we’re supposed to think about what it is that we DO have and be grateful for it would be helpful. Please note that the previous statement is the sentiment I’ve always heard behind Thanksgiving – not “Dang, I’m sure glad we killed us some Indians.” The true meaning of it as you point out above seems to have been discarded. Unfortunate, of course, and marginalizing to Native American’s history and people, but everything evolves. It does not mean the same thing to the majority anymore, and to retrograde it would not be doing America a favor, in my opinion.
This being said, I do appreciate this post and the knowledge of real events vs. made up fiction is always preferrable. I just disagree with getting rid of Thanksgiving or turning it into a day of mourning, probably mostly because it’s one of the few holidays that I don’t get inundated with Jesus in big healthy heapings.
Simple Truth,
I get what you’re coming from, but I think you’re being pretty myopic.
Do you see the problem with this from the point of view of the descendents of the Native American survivors?
Do you see the problem with this from the point of view of the descendents of the Native American survivors?
We also should be mindful of over-simplifying or stereotyping the Native American view of Thanksgiving. The people who have a problem with it tend to be a lot more vocal. That’s fine. They have every right to put their views out their and argue for their position. But there also are Native Americans who celebrate Thanksgiving without much more thought than the average white American puts into it. And Native Americans who have an outlook on that should be familiar to the Jews among us: “They tried to kill us. We’re still here. Let’s eat.”
It’s not as black-and-white as “Native Americans find this a horrible affront, but white people just don’t give a damn.”
Chingona — I was actually trying to get at a slightly different point. Simple Truth’s comment, IMO, wrote about the genocide as if it had occurred to a group of people without descendents at all. I was hoping to get her to look at Native Americans as a modern group instead of just a historical one.
And even if some of us do treat the holiday just like your ‘average white american’ shouldn’t be treated as a gesture for historical erasure or sleight-of-hand when peeling away from oversimplification.
And even if some may believe that ‘the story of thanksgiving’ & ‘true meaning of thanksgiving’ muckity-muck is falling out of the public mind–we’re still teaching kids it in the elementary schools/at the elementary level. I know that much at least. Not sure about any higher, I just work in the elementary arena.
And even if some of us do treat the holiday just like your �average white american� shouldn�t be treated as a gesture for historical erasure or sleight-of-hand when peeling away from oversimplification.
Agreed.
And even if some may believe that �the story of thanksgiving� & �true meaning of thanksgiving� muckity-muck is falling out of the public mind�we�re still teaching kids it in the elementary schools/at the elementary level. I know that much at least.
And agreed.
Where I think people get hung up is when they feel like they’re being told they need to stop having Thanksgiving dinner. Which some people think we should.
For what it’s worth, here’s what I remember learning in school:
1. Is it fair to say that the “Pilgrims” were not interested in freedom of religion for anyone but themselves?
Uh … yeah; I suspect they would have acknowledged that fact. Recall that religious persecution did not drive the Pilgrims to flee to the New World. Rather, religions persecution drove the Pilgrims to flee to Holland. And there they found religious freedom, from what I recall.
And they didn’t like it. Specifically, they discovered what immigrants often discover: their kids were growing up adopting the manners, tastes and mores of their adopted homeland, rather than the manners, tastes and mores of their original homeland. Thus, the Pilgrims fled to the New World not to seek freedom, but the opposite: they sought to deprive their children of the freedom to adopt the religion, manner, tastes and mores of the Dutch.
The Pilgrims were the original “social engineers”: they believed that environment influenced behavior, and that by controlling the environment you could control behavior in ways you found to your liking. Consequently the Pilgrims sought a land untainted by a seductive alien culture. Sure, Native Americans may have a culture. But the Pilgrims expected that it would not be too attractive to their kids, and that they’d be able to keep their distance. And to a large extent, the Pilgrims were right.
2. Was the lifestyle and livelihood of Native Americans destroyed by oppression by the Pilgrims?
To some extent, I guess. But the lifestyle and livelihood of Native Americans had already been devastated by smallpox that had swept up from South and Central America. The Pilgrims could hardly be blamed for this phenomenon; as other have remarked, the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to settle in North America. In striking up a relationship with Tisquantum/Squanto, the Pilgrims discover that 1) the guy has already had so much interaction with Europeans that he speaks English, and 2) he is nearly the only remaining member of this village, which was wiped out before the Pilgrims arrived.
Thus, I feel some sympathy for European seafarers that characterized North America in the 1600 as virtually a virgin wilderness. They accurately observed that the population density they encountered was vastly less than the density of the European shipping towns they had left.
(In the list of disruptive European influences on Native American cultures, recall that Europeans introduced the horse to the New World. Thus I find some irony when people bemoan how European Americans led to the demise of the horse-centric cultures of the Comanche and other Plains Indians. But I’m getting ahead of myself….)
3. Did the Pilgrims (and their decedents) seek to exclude Native Americans?
Absolutely. They envisioned creating a “New England” largely modeled on the old one, and Native Americans really didn’t have a role in that vision.
This was in marked contrast to the conquistadores in South and Central America, who actively sought out Native Americans to exploit. They wanted to find the native’s gold and silver, and they wanted the native’s labor to work on plantations and in mines. Thus the Pilgrim’s dream – depopulated land – was the conquistadores’s nightmare.
4. Do depictions of the “First Thanksgiving” misrepresent the style of clothes worn by the Wampanoag at this time?
Sure. As do the depictions of the style of clothes worn by the Pilgrims.
____
In short, a lot of shitty things had happened to Native Americans prior to 1621, and a lot of shitty things would happen to Native Americans after 1621 – regardless of the Pilgrims. I can use the Pilgrims as a symbol of all that is good or all that is bad in the European migration to the New World. In the grand scheme of things, I suspect the Pilgrims were not that consequential to the fate of Native Americans generally.
I appreciate the comments – I don’t want to be myopic. I do realize that there are descendants who are Native Americans who still have the culture and traditions that have survived the times. I sometimes also suspect as Chinoga writes that many of them either don’t remember or don’t care either. 400 years is a long time to hold a grudge. Granted, it’s not my place to say they can’t, or won’t, or don’t. I could be speaking from the most entitled of positions on this. However, I also feel that my point is valid, not in an overruling sort of way. Just a “Hey let’s have a holiday where we can be grateful for everybody and everything we have” like I’ve experienced in my family traditions instead of the Hallmark/Jesus combo we get decked with on all other occasions.
In short, yes it would make me sad to see a chance for gratitude go. (*edited because of bad math*)
In 1856, California offered a bounty of 25 cents for Indian scalps. In 1860, they increased that bounty to $5 per scalp.
As of 1975, one third of native american women of child-bearing age had been sterilized, many against their wills or as a result of coercive measures, such as doctors instructing women to sign consent forms while they were under anasthetic for childbirth, or telling them just after giving birth that if they refused to agree to be sterlized then their just-born baby and their other children would be taken away.
I could catalog more. Perhaps someone will.
400 years?
Argh, not even to mention the water access and infrastructure problems on many modern reservations… but yeah, I mean, everything happened 400 years ago and has no impact on the modern world.
Personally, I don’t really care whether people celebrate Thanksgiving or not, but there are strong arguments that oppose your position, and I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit. It’s not that I think your main point is bad. One can certainly argue that it’s a good thing for Americans to have a non-religious festival of harvest and gratitude, and that this festival should be divorced from its racist history as much as possible. So I don’t mean to argue with you on that, just some of the rhetoric that surrounds it.
@Mandolin:
Ha, I originally put 200 years…turns out my edit was probably more offensive than my mistake.
Thanks for pointing out those events. Many of them (especially the water crisis) I didn’t tend to think of as primarily Native American issues, but it certainly affects them. Sterilization was also a problem for other race groups in the US (I’m thinking blacks, but I don’t have a citation.) Certainly the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment counts in the same vein.
I was falling into the mindset that the controversy that caused the uproar about Thanksgiving was originated (and ended) with the Manifest Destiny stuff. I wasn’t linking the things you mention up with that controversy. I see it definitely in the same racist vein as far as treatment of Native Americans, but I’m still not quite sure it links so directly to Thanksgiving. Again, I don’t feel in a position to judge – it’s not me who its affecting.
How can American racism against blacks be separated from slavery? How can American racism against Native Americans be separated from colonialism? How does that make historical or sociological sense?
I sometimes also suspect as Chinoga writes that many of them either don’t remember or don’t care either. 400 years is a long time to hold a grudge.
Uh. Feeling a very strong need to clarify my position.
It’s not that people “don’t remember” or “don’t care” about genocide/colonialism/etc. It’s that for some American Indian people Thanksgiving is more associated with getting family together for a big meal than it is with history or white/Indian relations – sanitized or otherwise.
See, I was more focused on the “It’s okay to keep Thanksgiving because it’s disassociated with genocide” aspect of your first point, and thought that Mandolin was saying “How do you think it makes Native Americans feel that you want to celebrate Thanksgiving?” and all I really was trying to say is that I’m not at all sure that “replace Thanksgiving with a day of mourning” is the consensus Indian position or that there is a consensus Indian position on it.
But Mandolin was picking up on something in your original comment that I didn’t really pick up on and it’s becoming more apparent with each subsequent comment.
So … you really need to educate yourself a bit more about American history and, frankly, current events. It’s got nothing to do with holding a grudge for 400 years. This stuff is still going on. Indian children were being forcibly removed from their families and sent to boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their languages within the last 50 years. Indian women suffer much higher rates of rape than any other group of American women, and unlike most other American women, the majority of the perpetrators come from outside their community. Tribal police cannot arrest non-tribal members and have to refer all cases to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who couldn’t care less about crimes of personal violence and just about never lift a finger on these cases. Indians don’t own the land on their “sovereign” reservations. It’s held “in trust” for them by the U.S. government because the law still treats them as incompetent actors. This is going on right now.
I’m not really seeing how you can separate thankgiving and (Native) Americans. Well, maybe if someone tries to erase or reduce us to erasure–but that, in my eyes, seems very difficult to do and immensely skeevy if someone could/did. As Mandolin points out the holiday exists both within the past and present spheres of Native American and colonial histories & politics.
Even if we continued to try and sanitize and pretty it up to a commercial holiday & non-religious holiday of thanks can’t fully erase the history as without it the holiday would have never existed.
@comment 16
I didn’t really ever learn about that in school until late highschool/early college.
Many of them (especially the water crisis) I didn’t tend to think of as primarily Native American issues, but it certainly affects them.
Oh, and I’m not sure what you mean by the water crisis not primarily affecting Native Americans, but that’s simply wrong. I’m not an expert on water law (and really, very few people are – it’s complicated as fuck) but I’ve done some reporting on water issues in the West, and I can tell you this: The Indians got the worst raw deal on water of anybody, and it continues to affect them to this day. There’s a general principle that whoever got there first, has the first claim to the water, that their water rights supersede later comers. Except they start the clock when Anglo ranchers come into the area, and completely ignore that there were people using that water for agriculture centuries before the ranchers showed up. Ranchers pumped the water for their cattle, Indian crops withered, and Indians were reduced to begging for government handouts or starving. Now, in modern times, tribes have had to basically get in the back of the line for water rights that already are oversubscribed throughout the West. In Arizona (and maybe other states) we just now, like two or three years ago, settled a major lawsuit over Indian water rights that was first filed decades ago. And the tribes STILL don’t actually have the water. They’ve been promised Colorado River water and treated effluent, but there’s no infrastructure to take it to the reservations. It’s paper water. As things continue to get drier and drier, what do you think the chances are the tribes ever see that water?
(Edited to add the comment I was referencing.)
The crops are very important! But I was thinking about access to clean, safe drinking water…
Even if we continued to try and sanitize and pretty it up to a commercial holiday & non-religious holiday of thanks can’t fully erase the history as without it the holiday would have never existed.
The last bit, I’m not sure of. The “without it, the holiday would never have existed.” I mean, I can’t prove a counter-factual, but people have been holding fall harvest festivals for as long as people have engaged in agriculture. The difference is that ours is national, instead of religious. A lot of the religious ones have stories behind them. Ours has a story behind it, and it’s the sanitized myth some would like to believe about the founding of what would become our country. I suspect some reverse-engineering in the linking of it to the declaration by the Pilgrims of a feast of thanksgiving. I mean, there have been thousands and thousands of massacres of native peoples by Europeans and white Americans, but our calendar isn’t dotted with celebrations of all the most important ones.
The crops are very important! But I was thinking about access to clean, safe drinking water…
I actually thought that was what you meant. No, really. In fact, I meant to have a line in there that I thought that’s what you meant, not the broader “water crisis” of the western United States that it seemed like Simple Truth was referring to. But I also wanted to dispute what I thought Simple Truth was saying. (And I may have misinterpreted that, too.)
I find irony in the Christian bumper sticker: “Christmas: Remember the Reason for the Season.” There is, of course, no evidence regarding the date of Jesus’s birth. It is my understanding that early Christians chose to have a celebration on December 25 to have an alternative to the Roman’s Saturnalia (Celebration of Saturn). Saturnalia, in turn, was scheduled to coincide with the winter solstice. And in Mediterranean/Mideastern cultures (where the growing season is longer than in N. America), winter solstice celebrations often coincide with harvest celebrations. (So honest, this discussion is on topic, kinda.)
After the harvest is the time of abundance: If there is any time of year that a society might have more food than it can store, this would be it. Many cultures also slaughter livestock and cure/preserve meat at this time to save labor during the winter months; in these cultures, the fall represents the last time to eat fresh meat. Finally, after the harvest, there is relatively little work to do. The combination of these dynamics leads many cultures to develop traditions around feasting, gift-giving, leisure and even social inversion (where servants are released from their duties and take on airs of their masters) at this time.
So, what really is the “reason for the season” of Christmas? Christ’s birth? The Roman god Saturn? The winter solstice? I say it’s a harvest festival established according to a Mediterranean calendar. So the next time you hear someone saying that Christmas has become excessively focused on material things, feel free to remind them that it is “the reason for the season”!
I want to apologize for my lack of clarity, and the fact that at this point I am not really going to be able to make it more clear due to an intense lack of sleep.
Many of you are far more aware of the issues involving NA than I am. I defer to your wisdom.
I did not ever intend to degrade NA or say that their issues are 400 years past. My position (in the ignorance of all that has been brought up) was that Thanksgiving and the massacre were not related in my mind.
This is me checking my privilege now.