Thanks giving day

[Guest guest]

Thanks Tatwamasi for your thought provoking post on thanks

giving ,can any body tell me what is the significance of the day

thanks giving ,

[Guest guest]

When the Pilgrims from the Old world first crossed the Atlantic Ocean

to come to America in 1620, they landed on the rocky shores of a

territory that was inhabited by the Wampanoag (Wam pa NO ag) Native

Americans. These people of the Eastern Woodlands respected the forest

and everything in it as equals.The Wampanoags also treated each other

with respect. Any visitor to a Wampanoag home was provided with a

share of whatever food the family had, even if the supply was low.

This same courtesy was extended to the Pilgrims when they met. Their

custom was to help visitors, and they treated the newcomers with

courtesy. It was mainly because of their kindness that the Pilgrims

survived at all. The wheat the Pilgrims had brought with them to

plant would not grow in the rocky soil. They needed to learn new ways

for a new world, and the man who came to help them was

called "Tisquantum" (Tis SKWAN tum) or "Squanto" (SKWAN toe).

 

Squanto was originally from the village of Patuxet (Pa TUK et) and a

member of the Pokanokit Wampanoag nation. In 1605, fifteen years

before the Pilgrims came, Squanto went to England with a friendly

English explorer named John Weymouth. He had many adventures and

learned to speak English. Squanto came back to New England with

Captain Weymouth. Later Squanto was captured by a British slaver who

raided the village and sold Squanto to the Spanish in the Caribbean

Islands. A Spanish Franciscan priest befriended Squanto and helped

him to get to Spain and later on a ship to England. Squanto then

found Captain Weymouth, who paid his way back to his homeland. In

England Squanto met Samoset of the Wabanake (Wab NAH key) Tribe, who

had also left his native home with an English explorer. They both

returned together to Patuxet in 1620. When they arrived, the village

was deserted and there were skeletons everywhere. Everyone in the

village had died from an llness the English slavers had left behind.

Squanto and Samoset went to stay with a neighboring village of

Wampanoags.

 

One year later, in the spring, Squanto and Samoset were hunting along

the beach near Patuxet. They were startled to see people from England

in their deserted village. For several days, they stayed nearby

observing the newcomers. Finally they decided to approach them.

Samoset walked into the village and said "welcome," Squanto soon

joined him. The Pilgrims were very surprised to meet two Natives who

spoke English.

 

The Pilgrims were not in good condition. They were living in dirt-

covered shelters, there was a shortage of food, and nearly half of

them had died during the winter. They obviously needed help and the

two men were a welcome sight. Squanto, who probably knew more English

than any other Native in North America at that time, decided to stay

with the Pilgrims for the next few months and teach them how to

survive in this new place. He brought them deer meat and beaver

skins. He taught them how to cultivate corn and other new vegetables

and how to build Indian-style houses.

 

He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be

used as medicine. He explained how to dig and cook clams, how to get

sap from the maple trees, use fish for fertilizer, and dozens of

other skills needed for their survival.

 

By the time fall arrived things were going much better for the

Pilgrims, thanks to the help they had received. The corn they planted

had grown well. There was enough food to last the winter. They were

living comfortably in their Native-style wigwams and had also managed

to build one European-style building out of squared logs. This was

their church. They were now in better health, and they knew more

about surviving in this new land. The Pilgrims decided to have a

thanksgiving feast to celebrate their good fortune. They had observed

thanksgiving feasts in November as religious obligations in England

for many years before coming to the New World.

 

The Algonkian tribes held six thanksgiving festivals during the year.

The beginning of the Algonkian year was marked by the Maple Dance

which gave thanks to the Creator for the maple tree and its syrup.

This ceremony occurred when the weather was warm enough for the sap

to run in the maple trees, sometimes as early as February. Second was

the planting feast, where the seeds were blessed. The strawberry

festival was next, celebrating the first fruits of the season. Summer

brought the green corn festival to give thanks for the ripening corn.

In late fall, the harvest festival gave thanks for the food they had

grown.

 

Mid-winter was the last ceremony of the old year. When the Natives

sat down to the "first Thanksgiving" with the Pilgrims, it was really

the fifth thanksgiving of the year for them!

 

Captain Miles Standish, the leader of the Pilgrims, invited Squanto,

Samoset, Massasoit (the leader of the Wampanoags), and their

immediate families to join them for a celebration, but they had no

idea how big Indian families could be. As the Thanksgiving feast

began, the Pilgrims were overwhelmed at the large turnout of ninety

relatives that Squanto and Samoset brought with them. The Pilgrims

were not prepared to feed a gathering of people that large for three

days. Seeing this, Massasoit gave orders to his men within the first

hour of his arrival to go home and get more food. Thus it happened

that the Indians supplied the majority of the food: Five deer, many

wild turkeys, fish, beans, squash, corn soup, corn bread, and

berries. Captain Standish sat at one end of a long table and the Clan

Chief Massasoit sat at the other end. For the first time the

Wampanoag people were sitting at a table to eat instead of on mats or

furs spread on the ground. The Native women sat together with the

Native men to eat. The Pilgrim women, however, stood quietly behind

the table and waited until after their men had eaten, since that was

their custom.

 

For three days the Wampanoags feasted with the Pilgrims. It was a

special time of friendship between two very different groups of

people. A peace and friendship agreement was made between Massasoit

and Miles Standish giving the Pilgrims the clearing in the forest

where the old Patuxet village once stood to build their new town of

Plymouth.

 

Today the town of Plymouth Rock has a Thanksgiving ceremony each year

in remembrance of the first Thanksgiving. There are still Wampanoag

people living in Massachusetts. In 1970, they asked one of them to

speak at the ceremony to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim's

arrival. Here is part of what was said:

 

"Today is a time of celebrating for you -- a time of looking back to

the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of

celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon

what happened to my People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the

Wampanoags, welcomed them with open arms, little knowing that it was

the beginning of the end. That before 50 years were to pass, the

Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and other Indians

living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from

diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian

is and was just as human as the white people."

 

(Summarized from

http://www.2020tech.com/thanks/temp.html#story)

 

While there is mixed sentiments about the origin of the Thanksgiving

Day and is definitely the most "American" of all the festivals, most

people today celebrate it as a day of expressing gratitude for the

blessings they have received in their lives.

 

A Question - As I speak with those who live in India, I have become

curious whether in Indian customs there are specific prayers/rituals

etc that are offered purely for thanksgiving. If anyone knows

anything about it could you please share it with us?

 

_/\_ Tat twam asi

 

Uma

 

 

post 4557 momooin wrote:

>can any body tell me what is the significance of the day

> thanks giving ,

[Guest guest]

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING

by James W. Loewen

 

[Jim Loewen teaches sociology at the University of Vermont-

Burlington, and is the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me - Everything

Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.]

 

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."

 

Part of the problem is the word "settle.Settlers" were white.

Indians did not settle. Nor are students the only people misled

by "settle." One recent Thanksgiving weekend, I listened as a guide

at the Statue of Liberty told about European immigrants "populating a

wild East Coast." As we shall see, however, if Indians had not

already settled New England, Europeans would have had a much tougher

job of it.

 

Starting with the Pilgrims not only leaves out the Indians, but also

the Spanish. In the summer of 1526 five hundred Spaniards and one

hundred black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pedee River

in what is now South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby

Indians caused many deaths. Finally, in November the slaves rebelled,

killed some of their masters, and escaped to the Indians. By now only

150 Spaniards survived, and they evacuated back to Haiti. The ex-

slaves remained behind. So the first non-Native settlers in "the

country we now know as the United States" were Africans.

 

The Spanish continued their settling in 1565, when they massacred a

settlement of French Protestants at St. Augustine, Florida, and

replaced it with their own fort. Some Spanish were pilgrims, seeking

regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish

Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know

that one third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas

to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has

been "American." Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible impact

on the West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and

the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary:

mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.

 

Beginning with 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is

now Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first

permanent British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent

settlers to Jamestown, Virginia. No matter. The mythic origin of "the

country we now know as the United States" is at Plymouth Rock, and

the year is 1620. My students are not at fault. The myth is what

their textbooks and their culture have offered them. I examined how

twelve textbooks used in high school American history classes teach

Thanksgiving.

 

Here is the version in one high school history book, THE AMERICAN

TRADITION: After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around

Plymouth Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived

in December and were not prepared for the New England winter.

However, they were aided by friendly Indians, who gave them food and

showed them how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the colonists

planted, fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter.

After harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends

celebrated the first Thanksgiving.

 

My students also learned that the Pilgrims were persecuted in England

for their religion, so they moved to Holland. They sailed on the

Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower Compact. Times were

rough, until they met Squanto. He taught them how to put fish in each

corn hill, so they had a bountiful harvest.

 

But when I ask them about the plague, they stare back at me. "What

plague? The Black Plague?" No, that was three centuries earlier, I

sigh.

 

"THE WONDERFUL PLAGUE AMONG THE SAVAGES"

 

The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. Black

(or bubonic) Plague "was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever

befallen mankind." In three years it killed 30 percent of the

population of Europe. Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself

comprised only part of the horror. Thinking the day of judgment was

imminent, farmers failed to plant crops. Many people gave themselves

over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as

much death as the disease itself.

 

For a variety of reasons --- their probable migration through

cleansing Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or

livestock-borne microbes --- Americans were in Howard Simpson's

assessment "a remarkable healthy race" before Columbus. Ironically,

their very health now proved their undoing, for they had built up no

resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the

microbes Europeans and Africans now brought them. In 1617, just

before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New

England. A plague struck that made the Black Death pale by

comparison.

 

Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influenza

are also candidates. British fishermen had been fishing off

Massachusetts for decades before the Pilgrims landed. After filling

their hulls with cod, they would set forth on land to get firewood

and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into

slavery in Europe. On one of these expeditions they probably

transmitted the illness to the people they met. Whatever it was,

within three years this plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96

percent of the inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian

societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scare left

alive," wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death

rate unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so

many corpses, survivors fled to the next tribe, carrying the

infestation with them, so that Indians died who had never seen a

white person. Simpson tells what the Pilgrims saw:

 

The summer after the Pilgrims landed, they sent two envoys on a

diplomatic mission to treat with Massasoit, a famous chief encamped

some 40 miles away at what is now Warren, Rhode Island. The envoys

discovered and described a scene of absolute havoc. Villages lay in

ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn

with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died

and none was left to bury them.

 

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we

know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. Europeans caught

smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered,

including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George

Washington." Indians usually died. Therefore, almost as profound as

their effect on Indian demographics was the impact of the epidemics

on the two cultures, European and Indian. The English Separatists,

already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality

play, inferred that they had God on their side. John Winthrop,

Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous."

To a friend in England in 1634, he 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 the small pox 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 fifty,

have put themselves under our protect....

 

Many Indians likewise inferred that their God had abandoned them.

Cushman, our British eyewitness, reported that "those that are left,

have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected,

and they seem as a people affrighted." After all, neither they nor

their To Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian

healers offered no cure, their religion no explanation. That of the

whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many

Indians surrendered to alcohol or began to listen to Christianity.

 

These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single

geopolitical event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the

planet. They meant that the British would face no real Indian

challenge for their first fifty years in America. Indeed, the plague

helped cause the legendary warm reception Plymouth enjoyed in its

first formative years from the Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally

with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages

that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

 

Moreover, the New England plagues exemplify a process which antedated

the Pilgrims and endures to this day. In 1942, more than 3,000,000

Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than

300 remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with

hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In

about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandans of North Dakota from nine

villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced

them from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues; a fourth

of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and souther Venezuela died in the

year prior to my writing this sentence.

 

Europeans were never able to "settle" China, India, Indonesia, Japan,

or most of Africa because too many people already lived there.

Advantages in military and social technology would have enabled

Europeans to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated

China and Africa, but not to "settle" the New World. For that, the

plague was required. Thus, except for the European (and African)

invasion itself, the pestilence was surely the most important event

in the history of America.

 

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.

 

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 savages." Today 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. 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 student south 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." Such accounts deny students the

opportunity to see the Pilgrims as anything other than pious

stereotypes.

 

"IT WAS WITH GOD'S HELP...FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?"

 

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!"

 

More help came from an alive Indian, Squanto. Here my students are on

familiar turf, for they have all learned the Squanto legend. LAND OF

PROMISE provides an archetypal account: Squanto had learned their

language, he explained, from English fishermen who ventured into the

New England waters each summer. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to

plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Would the small band of settlers

have survived without Squanto's help?

 

We cannot say. But 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).

 

What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned

English. As a boy, along with four Penobscots, he was probably stolen

by a British captain in about 1605 and taken to England. There he

probably spent nine years, two in the employ of a Plymouth merchant

who later helped finance the Mayflower. At length, the merchant

helped him arrange passage back to Massachusetts. He was to enjoy

home life for less than a year, however. In 1614, a British slave

raider seized him and two dozen fellow Indians and sold them into

slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from

Spain, made his way back to England, and in 1619 talked a ship

captain into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

 

It happens that Squanto's fabulous odyssey provides a "hook" into the

plague story, a hook that our texts choose to ignore. For now Squanto

walked to his home village, only to make the horrifying discovery

that, in Simpson's words, "he was the sole member of his village

still alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years

before." No wonder he throws in his lot with the Pilgrims, who rename

his village "Plymouth!" Now that is a story worth telling!

 

Compare the pallid account in LAND OF PROMISE. "He had learned their

language from English fishermen." What do we make of books that give

us the unimportant details--Squanto's name, the occupation of his

enslavers--while omitting not only his enslavement, but also the

crucial fact of the plague? This is distortion on a grand scale.

 

William Bradford praised Squanto for many services, including

his "bring[ing] them to unknown places for their profit.Their

profit" was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the

trip. It too came from the Indians, from the fur trade; Plymouth

would never have paid for itself without it. Europeans had neither

the skill nor the desire to "go boldly where none dared go before.|"

They went to the Indians.

 

"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 enact 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. 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."

 

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."

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 teachable 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 form 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.

 

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is

dangerous. The genial omissions and false details our texts use to

retell 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."

 

A Thanksgiving Prayer

by William S. Burroughs

 

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons,

destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses

to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,

To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil

faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind the own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the memories-- all right let's see your arms!

You always were a headache and you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal

of the last and greatest of human dreams.

 

(Posted on another Internet forum)