Why I Hate Thanksgiving

From ZNet:

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.

Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area.

In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again.

The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the name of Christianity.

Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one million.

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Okay, I don't really hate Thanksgiving. I love a good feast; that's for sure. And football is always in plentiful supply on turkey day. And, of course, I'm quite fond of family and friends coming together for the ostensible reason of giving thanks, to God or fate or good luck, for all the really cool shit we have in America, and by world standards, most of us are freakin' rich. Thankfulness, as a value or concept, runs completely counter to the capitalist notion of give-me-what's-mine: how could I not approve of such a holiday?

On the other hand, I despise the mythology behind Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims most decidedly did not maintain peaceful, mutually beneficial relations with the indigenous populations of the northeast. Sure, there were a few individual exceptions to this, one of which serves as the grain of truth on which the lie is based, but, on the whole, Pilgrims were too busy murdering Indians to sit down and have supper with them.

Compounding this myth's intense insult, to both Native Americans for obvious reasons and white Americans who deserve to know the truth, is the fact that it is not generally understood that the US government essentially committed genocide against the numerous peoples collectively called American Indians. Indeed, the US's murderous policy toward native peoples was so strikingly effective that the Nazis studied it as a model when crafting their own genocidal policies against the Jews.

Because the myth is so utterly intertwined with the holiday, perhaps it would be a good idea this Thanksgiving to take a couple of moments to remember how the Pilgrims really treated the Indians, how our government did everything it could to wipe them out. Thanksgiving needs to be a memorial as well as a celebration.


Pilgrims slaughter Pequot Indians

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