🚀 go-pugleaf

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Interesting piece on "historical perspective".

Ireland, for example, "defines" its history by "The Five Invasions"
which basically tally the strangers who came and conquered, and the
results, thereof and thereafter.

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The Stuff They Didn't Teach About Thanksgiving By Bob Harris 

When I was in first grade, we never spent a day talking about the
"meaning" of Halloween or Memorial Day. We spent a week on the
Thanksgiving story. 

Plymouth Rock, 1621: Pilgrims escaping religious persecution and
settling an empty continent shared their bounty with primitive Indians
with whom they shared the land. 
(Aside to uptight liberals: most actual American Indians really don't
care much if we call them "Indians," "Native Americans," or
"Constantinople." As if a polite term could undo 500 years. You should
hear what they call us.) 
Thanksgiving is really a creation myth for white America, a capsule of
what cheap politicians consider traditional values: manifest destiny,
the Protestant work ethic, cultural superiority, etc. Our ritual
reenactment of the feast is nothing less than a civil sacrament. 
It's also almost completely phony. 
To begin with, the word "settler" is deceptive. The Indians had long
before "settled" most of the east coast, and fairly comfortably at that.
(Are Mexicans moving to L.A. "settlers?" Potato, potahto.) 
America was not empty. Archeologists have found Indian communities of
30,000 or more all over America; the current consensus is that around
12-15 million folks were living north of the Rio Grande when Europeans
got off the boat. 
Other explorers soon followed Columbus, but colonies were another deal
entirely. Providing homes for dozens of people, thousands of miles from
the nearest supplies, using only 16th century tools you could fit on a
boat, was a heck of a trick. 
Spanish colonists gave it a shot in 1526, but faced with new crops,
strange animals, dwindling supplies, and no cable, they bagged it right
away. The first English colony was established on Roanoke Island in
1585. It was gone by 1590. Nice try. 
Finally, in 1607, the Brits founded Jamestown. Hoorah. By the end of the
first winter, two-thirds had died of disease and starvation. The
remainder received handouts from the Powhatan Indians -- welfare for
illegal immigrants, in modern terms -- and survived. 
To the Powhatans, Europeans looked pretty goofy: far from home for no
visible reason, unable to grow crops, short-lived, and sick all the
time. 
Boy, were they sick. Sanitation wasn't exactly a European strong point.
Remember, London and Paris still had raw sewage running in the streets.
For many, religious modesty forbade routine bathing. And the newcomers
had been living on a boat for months. In short, Europeans were pretty
skanky. 
Skip ahead a few years. 
Shortly before the Mayflower landed, the area around Plymouth was
ravaged by an epidemic, probably smallpox brought to shore by French and
British fishermen. Europeans often survived the disease, since it was
their funk in the first place, but 90 percent of the local Indians died
between 1617 and 1620. 
We're not talking European Black Death rates of 30%, which was enough to
mess things up for hundreds of years. We're talking Ebola mortality
here, albeit at a slower speed. 
This pattern was repeated in the Americas for centuries. It's one of the
main reasons the thriving Indian civilizations are gone. Europeans had
major cooties. 
Imagine the impact of anthrax, cholera, influenza, and assorted plagues
and poxes on communities with no resistance. Over and over again, the
first white folks into an Indian village found three or four times as
many inhabitants as expeditions just a generation or two later. 
That's why later Europeans were sometimes able to "settle" right in the
middle of former Indian towns, growing crops on fields cleared by
Indians, using the very tools the Indians left behind, using the
survivors as teachers and servants. 
Cutting some slack, most colonists didn't run around infecting Indians
intentionally. Many were too busy bleeding and throwing up to be
bothered. 
Think of it as a (mostly) unintentional form of biological warfare, with
the front moving west at an average of 10-15 miles per year, and you're
not far off. 
Then remember that over three-quarters of the federal budget in
Washington's time was spent on various methods of killing Indians and
taking their land -- intentional genocide is a whole other subject for
another time -- and you can see how, at the dawn of the 20th century,
those 12-15 million Indians were reduced to just 250,000. 
That's why the most famous Indian storytellers in America are Kevin
Costner and Walt Disney. It's why so much of our history -- which until
this century was mostly a series of European/Indian interactions -- is
largely white stories of white glories. 
Like the Mayflower Thanksgiving myth, for example... 
Only about a third of the passengers on the Mayflower were Pilgrims --
"Separatists," actually, radicals who considered the Church of England
beyond help -- and they weren't fleeing persecution. They'd done that a
decade earlier by running off to Amsterdam. After which they had kids,
and then Holland suddenly seemed too tolerant. 
It happens. You hit 30, you start watching VH-1. Probably genetic. 
The Mayflower was originally headed for Virginia, where Jamestown was
throbbing with activity. By 1620, tobacco traders had kept slaves,
robbed and poisoned the local Indians, and occasionally resorted to
cannibalism to survive. (You don't hear much about the latter, and for
good reason -- just try building a ritual feast around that.) 
So how'd they wind up in Plymouth? They weren't lost; latitude was
simple to navigate. They probably steered north to settle in the area so
recently cleared by smallpox. 
See, British leaders considered the first major epidemic among the
Indians a sign from heaven that the English should own America. Before
the Mayflower even raised anchor, King James himself was praising "God
in his great goodness" for "this wonderful plague among the savages." 
James was a real creep. 
Anyway, you can see how a bunch of religious Separatists would prefer
open land to Jamestown, which by now was only missing Siegfield and Roy. 
Incidentally, the famed Mayflower Compact, in which every guy on board
agreed to a "civil body politic," is supposed to be this big precedent
for our democracy, but it's not. Both Jefferson and Franklin, for
example, were more impressed with the Iroquois Confederation (even while
they considered Indians savages). What the Compact did was prevent a
mutiny from the non-religious majority who had sought fortune in
Virginia. 
Their actual landing spot is another head fake. Although the city of
Plymouth has moved the Rock (which is only about as big as I am) at
least three times to bring in more tourists, the Separatists actually
first landed at Provincetown. Which figures. 
Once ashore, the Separatists forced everyone to surrender all their
private supplies for the general good -- buncha damn commies -- and
immediately set about the important business of getting sick and
starving. 
Fortunately, help arrived. Remember Squanto, the "good" Indian (where
"good" meant "whiter")? 
Squanto only spoke English because in 1614 he was kidnapped by a British
slave trader. That's how he missed the Plymouth plague. By the time
Squanto escaped and returned home, everyone in his village was dead, and
a bunch of starving Brits were moving in and smelling up the place. 
So Squanto did the best he could, as did the nearby surviving Wampanoag
Indians, who salvaged their economy by setting up the colonists in the
fur trade and teaching them to cultivate local crops. The Mayflower
colony survived the winter of 1620 and had a good harvest the following
year. 
Thus the big shindig. 
As to the Thanksgiving meal itself, it's entirely Indian. Harvest feasts
were a coastal Indian practice, and all the food involved was indigenous
to this continent. 
One more thing: forget the silly hats, black outfits, and buckled shoes.
The Separatists wore bright colors. The one contemporary portrait
depicts -- get this -- gold buttons and tassels. Not quite Liberace,
exactly, but not the Dutch guys on the cigar box, either. 
A few years went by. Puritans (who wanted to reform the Church of
England, not leave it) formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and soon the
Separatists and their primal patio party were largely absorbed and
forgotten. 
Two hundred years later, the Separatists were resurrected as "Pilgrims"
by 19-century Victorian moralists, who mythologized the story to reflect
their own beliefs regarding race, God, and destiny. 
In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, President Lincoln seized on the
symbolism to fortify Yankee confidence and declared Thanksgiving a
national holiday. 
After that, you turned six and someone handed you construction paper.
End of story. 
Bottom line: Thanksgiving was an Indian meal eaten in the wake of a
plague at the dawn of a holocaust by a bunch of desperate
proto-communist theocrats who had no real historical significance. 
Sorry. 
Here's the point of all this: the myth built around the colonists --
that "we" Europeans were superior to the Indians -- is both false and
dangerous. If we believe that "our" culture is better, anointed, and
inevitable -- as the Thanksgiving story teaches -- we can rationalize
darn near anything. 
Think about it. Maybe stuff like this helps whites ignore the fate of
Indians past and their poverty in the present. Maybe it's part of how we
live with ourselves as we drive cars built in Latino maquilladoras, wear
clothes sewn together by Asian children, bomb the crap out of Arabs, and
deny obvious racism toward our African neighbors. 
Almost four centuries later, are we still no better than King James? 
Maybe teaching a false, unnecessary, and racist myth isn't the best way
to nurture love in our children's hearts. 
Next time, let's do the other, better Thanksgiving stuff: providing food
and shelter for the needy, expressing gratitude for the blessing of
another year of life, and teaching our kids how to love others as
ourselves. 
Even better, let's not wait for next year. Today will do just fine. 

Happy Thanksgiving.  


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