As Thanksgiving draws near let us take a minute to acknowledge the true meaning of the holiday, greed.
The story begins in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. Behind them they left smallpox, which virtually wiped out all those who weren't taken as slaves. By the time the Pilgrims finally arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language. Despite his past, he taught them to grow corn and how to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. Thus saving the Pilgrims from their failing attempt of a socialist society (which resulted in laziness, ending in starvation). At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags for saving them from death. The indians supplied most of the food.
After a while Pilgrims started telling their Indian neighbors that their Indian religion and Indian customs were wrong. The Pilgrims displayed an intolerance toward the Indian religion similar to the intolerance displayed toward the less popular religions in Europe. The relationship deteriorated and within a few years the children of the people who ate together at the first Thanksgiving were killing one another in what came to be called King Phillip's War.
The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first themselves and then everyone else of everything they did not accept in their own interpretation of scripture. Later New England Puritans used any means, including deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve that end. They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we have of them. This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it, Mather the Elder gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth"
In 1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.
Cheered by their "victory", the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.
Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced a second day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts where it remained on display for 24 years.
The killings became more and more frenzied, with days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful massacre. George Washington finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving a year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War, on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota. But it wasn't until 1939, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving forward by one week, to mark the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Leaving it were we know it today, the last Thursday in November.
The story of Thanksgiving is also the story of the birth of America. It is a story of greed and corruption, which happen to be the principals in which our nation was founded and still runs on today. Have things really changed over all these years? Maybe we are not kicking Native Americans heads around like sporting equipment, but we are still a nation of greed who continues to not learn from our mistakes. We polish the story of Thanksgiving into a homogenized version which forces us to forget our past. There may have been a moment where we sat peacefully and ate, but soon after we grew greedy and ungrateful and ruined it. It is a perfect example of the human race and America as a whole. I'm not saying I'm immune to it. I have credit card debt, not to mention a mean addiction to EBay.
So, maybe this year we should be thankful for what we do have. A crumbling economy in the middle of the biggest financial slump in history, er, I mean, pie, lots of pie.
