The Myths About Thanksgiving
In 1620, the Pilgrims did not bring any thanks with them when they boarded the Mayflower. They did not even express gratitude. Instead, they committed racial genocide. With 102 passengers, the Mayflower set sail in September 1620 to escape religious persecution in their home town of Plymouth, England. Unfortunately, they brought the hatred with them. They arrived near Cape Cod after a journey of 66 days and began building a village near Massachusetts. About half of the original Mayflower crew perished in their first winter, but in the springtime, a settler brought a Native American named Squanto back to help the remaining colonists. The Pilgrims learned from Squanto how to grow corn and fish in rivers, as well as how to avoid poisonous plants and establish a successful colony. Were they thankful? Unfortunately, it was the beginning of hatred that would endure for centuries.
It’s important to know that for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest since it commemorates the arrival of racist settlers in North America and the centuries of oppression and genocide that followed. One of the horrible things that these settlers did when no food was available was to dig up Indigenous Peoples (Native Americans) graves. This was done because the white supremacist settlers noticed that many tribes buried their dead with bushels of corn and other items that could be eaten. When the Native People discovered that the graves of their love ones were being desecrated it meant war.
At my home, Thanksgiving is not celebrated for the mythical reasons given to us by professional liars, but to be thankful for family and the thankful for knowing the real story of the murder of Indigenous People. The Wampanoag Tribe today remembers the truth of how the racist and brutal Pilgrims came to their homeland land to pit one tribe against another in order to steal their traditional homeland so that Pilgram squatters and land thieves could settle on land they did not belong to them. The mythical Thanksgiving is seen as a day of sadness, rather than a moment of giving thanks. The crimes of this guilty land were hidden on purpose in order to create a false that never made America great.
According to the Smithsonian, in speaking about the American myths, “One is that history doesn’t begin for Native people until Europeans arrive. People had been in the Americas for least 12,000 years and according to some Native traditions, since the beginning of time. And having history start with the English is a way of dismissing all that. The second is that the arrival of the Mayflower is some kind of first-contact episode. It’s not. Wampanoags had a century of contact with Europeans–it was bloody and it involved slave raiding by Europeans. At least two and maybe more Wampanoags, when the Pilgrims arrived, spoke English, had already been to Europe and back and knew the very organizers of the Pilgrims’ venture.”
Thanksgiving is a celebration of land robbery and genocide in the United States. Some years back, one Native representative official, known as Frank B. James, wrote these words in response to an invitation from the Massachusetts Department of Commerce for his “tribe” to participate in the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims: “This is a time of celebration for you, celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America … It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my people. Even before the Pilgrims landed [here], it was a common practice for explorers to capture ‘Indians,’ take them to Europe, and sell them as slaves … The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. … Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts. Yet he and his people welcomed and befriended the settlers ….”
The first “Thanksgiving” of 1621 was not called Thanksgiving and was not repeated every year. The next time it was celebrated as a “day of thanksgiving’ was after White settlers massacred more than 400 Native American Pequot people; men, women and children. White authorities celebrated the day, for over 100 years, and was in honor of that bloody victory in which they thanked God for this murder. Hatred of Native Americans by White settlers resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands who were murdered by white supremacists. Think about these things and be thankful for family not the slaughter of Native People. One should be thankful for the Civil Rights Movement that exposed the lies we grew up with. We should be thankful of the teachers that are telling the real story of this holiday and who are still WOKE.