The warm and cozy image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day, the one that we all had to color for school - that's pure bullshit. (Although Indians did share food with the first settlers to keep them from starving, and were wiped out in return for it).
From the Community Endeavor News, November 1995:
The
first official Thanksgiving wasn’t a festive gathering of Indians and
Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men,
women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his
voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84,
talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has
degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the
anthropology department at the University of Connecticut."Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.
"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building," he said.
Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
So what is this "holiday" really about? Gratitude for the freedom to use religion to justify murder? Gratitude for an endless supply of industrial food products? Or the utter ignorance of the blindfold we wear while we mindlessly partake in the essence of it all?
Perhaps it is just a marker to let us know that we only have one month to go out and buy products for the next, even larger day of mindless consumption...
1 comment:
Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to celebrate.
The ruling powers of the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That’s why they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).
Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the “bounty of the American way of life,” while covering up the brutal nature of this society.
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