I'm going to get together with my family this year on Thanksgiving. As always everybody is coming to my house and it will be great. But I'm going to tell the story of the real Thanksgiving to my kids, cause lies don't get it, and it's more important than ever that everybody be aware of the mindset of the people who run the nation we are living in.

Don't mean to be a downer, but you know, history is a downer-- for everybody but white Western men.

http://www.iwchildren.org/plymouth1.htm

Heart
I don't want to Feminism is a revolution, not a public relations campaign. -- Margaret Sloan-Hunter

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind. -- Andrea Dworkin

Good afternoon Sisters and Brothers:

On October 19th (1998) of this year, a little over 30 days ago, United American Indians of New England
and the Town of Plymouth signed a most historically significant document. Under the terms of this
settlement agreement, the frame-up charges against 25 of us from last year were dropped. Plymouth
has provided funds for a Native educational project and also for two historical plaques in town, one
here on Cole's Hill and one in Post Office Square, that will have factual information about National
Day of Mourning and about the true history of the pilgrim invasion. Finally, Plymouth has recognized
our right to have National Day of Mourning here every year and to march in Plymouth without a
permit.

This settlement with Plymouth marks the first time since 1620 that the pilgrims have been forced to
stop taking and start giving something back to the Native people.

This victory was made possible because of the support of people from not only this area but from
across the country and around the world. Countless thousands of people signed petitions, sent faxes,
made telephone calls, and wrote letters supporting our struggle for justice. Also key was the support
and sacrifice of the Plymouth 25 themselves, the 25 people, from the four directions, who were
arrested last year for the supposed "crime" of supporting our struggle. Many of the Plymouth 25 are
here today, and we want to acknowledge them and recognize them as heroes in the people's
struggle.

I will not now recount the events that took place on National Day of Mourning 1997. Those who
witnessed what happened to us at the hands of the combined forces of the state will long remember
what happened. For Native people it was just one more incident in a long history of our
mistreatment at the hands of the European invaders. We have not forgotten, we well remember, the
long, bloody trail of European conquest that led from early settlements like Plymouth to places like
Great Swamp, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee.

National Day of Mourning began in this manner: Nearly 30 years ago a Wampanoag man,
Wamsutta Frank James, was invited to address a gathering of so-called dignitaries celebrating the
350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. When he attempted to tell the truth, he was told his
words were not acceptable. The planners of the gathering, fearing the truth, told him he could speak
only if he were willing to speak false words in praise of the white man. He refused. National Day of
Mourning came into being as a result of his refusal to speak untrue words.

Many times over the past year we have been asked what is the true history of thanksgiving. This
comes as no surprise. The truth has been buried for over 375 years. The first Thanksgiving did not
occur in 1621 when the pilgrim survivors of the first winter sat down to dinner with their Indian
friends. The first official day of thanksgiving and feasting in Massachusetts was proclaimed by Gov.
Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637. He did this to give thanks for the safe return of
men from the colony who had gone to what is now Mystic, Connecticut to participate in the
massacre of over 700 Pequot men, women and children.

What happened in October of 1621 may have been a harvest home, but the Indians who attended
were not even invited by the Pilgrims, who considered our people to be devils. No turkey, cranberry
sauce, or pumpkin pie was served. Just days before this alleged thanksgiving communion, a
company of pilgrims led by Myles Standish actively sought the head of a local chief. The pilgrims
deliberately caused a rivalry between two friendly Indians, pitting one against the other in the classic
European method of divide and conquer. An 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire
Plymouth settlement for the purpose of keeping the Indians out.

Native people do not give thanks just one day a year. Every day, we thank the Creator for this
beautiful earth and for our survival. But we will not give thanks for the European invasion of our
country. We will not celebrate the theft of our lands and the genocide of our people. We will not sing
and dance to please the tourists who come here seeking a Disneyland version of history. Attention all
tourists: If you are expecting us to put on a show, you would be better advised to go down to
Plymouth Rock and watch the tide wash over it.

That first Day of Mourning back in 1970 was a powerful demonstration of Native unity. Today is a
powerful demonstration of not only Native unity, but of the unity of all people from the Four
Directions who want the truth to be told and want to see an end to the oppressive system brought to
these shores by the Pilgrim invaders.

There are those who feel threatened by the movement that we are building when we come together
at National Day of Mourning. There are those who would have us be good Indians and act like a
conquered people and beg for the scraps from the Thanksgiving table.

But these attacks are merely spit in the winds of change.

Some ask us: Will you ever stop protesting? Some day we will stop protesting: We will stop
protesting when the merchants of Plymouth are no longer making millions of dollars off the blood of
our slaughtered ancestors. We will stop protesting when we can act as sovereign nations on our own
land without the interference of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and what Sitting Bull called the "favorite
ration chiefs." When corporations stop polluting our mother, the earth. When racism has been
eradicated. When the oppression of Two-Spirited people is a thing of the past. We will stop
protesting when homeless people have homes and no child goes to bed hungry. When police
brutality no longer exists in communities of color. We will stop protesting when Leonard Peltier and
Mumia Abu Jamal and the Puerto Rican independentistas and all the political prisoners are free.

Until then, the struggle will continue.

Today, we will correct some history and do so in a country that continues to glorify butchers such as
Christopher Columbus, glorifies slave-owning presidents such as Washington and Jefferson and even
carves their faces into the sacred Black Hills of the Lakota.

But we have a lot more to talk about than the pilgrims or what happened in the 1600s. We will also
be speaking today, as we have every year since 1970, about conditions in Indian country today,
about the racism which we face on a daily basis. We are here, as we have been for 28 years, to
unite people and to speak the truth. On our program will be only Native speakers. This is one day
when we speak for ourselves, without non-Native people, so-called "experts," intervening to
interpret and speak for us. We are more than capable of speaking for ourselves.

Today, for a few hours, we are gathered here in liberated territory. Our very presence frees this land
from the lies of the history books, the profiteers, and the mythmakers. We will remember and honor
all of our ancestors in struggle who went before us. We will speak truth to power. We will
remember in particular all of our sisters and brothers, including Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu
Jamal, who are caged in the iron houses.

We are not vanishing. We are not conquered. We are as strong as ever.
http://www.iwchildren.org/plymouth1.htm
********

Heart

I still get shit from enough people for calling it Thanksfornothing.

But, I think one can still do holidays like this, being truthful about them, WITHOUT being a downer. I don't think telling the truth ever makes anything less so, ever, only more.

if people are serious about thanks-giving, in any context, then they have to be serious about learning compassion, eh?

The winter solstice is going to be a particularly tough one for me this year but November is also chock full of family memories that need to be treasured but also looked at honestly.

I was going to just skip it but accepted a last minute invitation that was just so unlikely that it felt "right".

I've looked and looked and just can't seem to find it. Does anyone else see the words "women" and "sexism" mentioned above? (Except for the vague reference to transexuals of course). So I'm curious, just how do these people manage to overlook and invisibilize the oppression of 70% of the world's population? Which has gone on for far longer than a few measely centuries? And who have been oppressed, discriminated against, enslaved, maimed, tortured and murdered far more than all of these other groups put together? Just how do they miss that gigantic elephant standing in the middle of their livingrooms?

I can only conclude that only penis people are being referred to here. Only those born with penises should not be subjected to discrimination, injustice or oppression. Women need not apply.

As Abigail Adams once said, "All men would be tyrants if they could." And she's right. These boys aren't in the least bit interested in doing away with oppression. The only thing these boys are upset about is that they aren't the ones at the top of the food chain doing the oppressing.

Until all of these boys start practicing what they preach and put an end to their own hyprocritical oppressive ways towards women, as far as I'm concerned, they all speak with forked tongues.

--------------------

You're welcome, anonymom.

Heart

Puritans had "Thanksgiving feasts" quite regularly for one reason or another, just because they believed it was the right thing to do in their faith. However, the first one on record in the American colonies was in a settlement in Virginia years before the Massachusetts colony ever existed. There has been no actual documentation of the Thanksgiving we all celebrate today ever actually happening in Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Ah well, can't let that get in the way of things when you're trying to win a Civil War. The whole myth of Thanksgiving was begun as a way to show that the North was much better at race relations than the South, because see how the Northern colonists got along with the Indians????? It was war propaganda. And now it's a cultural icon, a myth we were taught was true.

I'm reading a facinating book now called Cherokee Women by Theda Perdue which is a fine piece of ethnohistory that attempts to trace how the Cherokee were influenced by and influenced the European invaders, how both cultures were changed by the interaction, how European ways, even more than the outright slaughter of Native Americans, eroded and almost eradicated a people -- cultural genocide. History is written by the winners, you know, and ethnohistorians have quite the task to piece together the history of the oppressed people, to dig up the clues and piece them together so that we might have a wider lens, the other 50% of the equation. It's exactly like women's history.

I was just reading something having to do with a term paper I am writing about gender in the early Christian church about how when men got all bent about women holding leadership positions in the churches and argued against it, men's words are the ones scribes saw fit and worthy to reproduce over the centuries. We don't have the words of the women who fought to keep their positions and freedoms. However, even in the writings of the men they would sometimes quote the women's arguments in order to refute them, and so there we find clues about what the women were saying. That is what ethnohistorians do and it's tedious but highly valuable, worthy work. Finding the voices of the oppressed in and among the writings of the oppressors who cast the oppressed in such a dim light.

So what we learn challenges all we thought we knew, what we were indoctrinated to believe was fact was only a very biased, at times fictional account of the way the "winners" desired to be remembered. As more and more ethnohistory is studied, as more women become archaeologists and feminist anthropologists, as oppressed people speak out and tell their OWN histories (thankyouverymuch) maybe we will come closer to what actually DID happen in history.

Sophia

Sophia, I think the North was indeed better at race relations, if only in that slavery was not, in general, institutionalized in the North. And I think the North needed to win the Civil War, and I think slavery needed to be abolished. Slavery was huge. Racism in the North was as to racism in the pre-Civil War South as anti-semitism anywhere is to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

:/

Can I ask you where the above information you've posted is coming from, what sources? I don't think that white men anywhere, North or South, got along with the Indians. I think they were and are straight-up perpetrators of genocide against Native Americans. And I have no doubt that white men in the North lied about their relationships with the Indians, and I have no doubt that they did it for reasons which were exploitive and wrong. Which doesn't change the fact that the North needed to win the Civil War. Which doesn't change the fact that ownership of human beings, slavery, was institutionalized in the South, and needed to end.

Heart

Ironically, the institution of slavery in this country began in the state of Massachusetts with the capture of Native Americans exported as slaves.

And no, the original, documented Thanksgiving that happened in that Virginia colony was not any love fest between colonists and Native Americans either. It was simply the first recorded Thanksgiving feast by the Europeans on these shores, but Texans have an even earlier record so who knows? It doesn't really matter much that it happened North or South, it's the same sad story countrywide. My mentioning the feast in the South was simply to say that the one widely recognized in Massachusetts as "The First Thanksgiving," well, it wasn't.

As for white men getting along with Native Americans...eh, a little here, a little there, but it soon ended with a vengeance after the exotic newness of it wore off which led to a literal and cultural genocide of horrifying proportions.

Sophia

An extract from chapter 17 of the book Where White Men Fear to Tread, by Russell Means:

"When we met with the Wampanoag people, they told us that in researching the history of Thanksgiving, they had confirmed the oral history passed down through their generations. Most Americans know that Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag had welcomed the so-called Pilgrim Fathers—and the seldom mentioned Pilgrim Mothers—to the shores where his people had lived for millennia. The Wampanoag taught the European colonists how to live in our hemisphere by showing them what wild foods they could gather, how, where, and what crops to plant, and how to harvest, dry, and preserve them.
The Wampanoag now wanted to remind white America of what had happened after Massasoit's death. He was succeeded by his son, Metacomet, whom the colonist called "King" Philip. In 1617-1676, to show "gratitude" for what Massasoit's people had done for their fathers and grandfathers, the Pilgrims manufactured an incident as a pretext to justify disarming the Wampanoags. The whites went after the Wampanoag with guns, swords, cannons, and torches. Most, including Metacomet, were butchered. His wife and son were sold into slavery in the West Indies. His body was hideously drawn and quartered. For twenty-five years afterward Matacomet's skull was displayed on a pike above the whites' village. The real legacy of the Pilgrim Fathers is treachery.
Americans today believe that Thanksgiving celebrates a bountiful harvest, but that is not so. By 1970, the Wampanoag had turned up a copy of a Thanksgiving proclamation made by the governor to the colony. The text revealed the ugly truth: After a colonial militia had returned from murdering the men, women, and children of an Indian village, the governor proclaimed a holiday and feast to give thanks for the massacre. He also encouraged other colonies to do likewise—in other words, every autumn after the crops are in, go kill Indians and celebrate your murders with a feast.
In November 1970, their decendants returned to Plymouth to publisize the true story of Thanksgiving and, along with about two hundred other Indians from around the country, to observe a national day of Indian mourning."

http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/883/thank.htm

"Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to celebrate.

A little known fact: Squanto, the so-called "hero" of the original Thanksgiving Day, was executed by the Indians for his treacheries.

But the ruling powers of the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That's why they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).

Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the "bounty of the American way of life," while covering up the brutal nature of this society. "

This website is also informative:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/First_Thanksgiving_LMTTM.html

The point that I was attempting to make was that the whole Thanksgiving image of the Pilgrims and the Indians interacting in a way that benefitted both of them is not just dressed up history from the perspective of the winners/oppressors but patently false and was not even considered "history" until the Civil War where this tidy little myth was used as Northern war propaganda.

What gets my antennae twitching is terms like "Northern war propaganda" or the idea that Thanksgiving mythology was about making the North "better at race relations than the South" (and I'm glad you clarified your earlier post, Sophia.) I just think there is a lot of interest these days in idealizing and romanticizing the pre-Civil War South and, for that reason, in minimizing the horrors of slavery, often by pointing the fingers at racism and racists in the North, and that's what language like this gets me thinking about. I think white men came to America to conquer it, to subdue it, to secure dominion, to build empire, and to do that they had to engage in genocide and enslave human beings. And responsibility for that is shared by all of the white imperialists and colonizers who settled in America, period, no matter where they settled, North or South, East or West, to the degree that they did not resist genocide and slavery, thinking now about the Abolitionists and those who did resist slavery and genocide from the very beginning. These people existed from before the American War of Independence in Pennsylvania and other of the northern colonies.

I think Thanksgiving myth-making was an attempt to unify Northern and Southern whites and new immigrant whites, and whites, just in general around the vision of manifest destiny (to wit: imperialism, colonialism), as one editorialist puts it, in that Lincoln invokes the myths after the horrendous Battle of Gettysburg. Consider the following, from a great editorial entitled "The End of American Thanksgivings," published in The Black Commentator (and I'll post a link):

****

The Revolution that exploded in 1770s New England was undertaken by men thoroughly imbued with the worldview of the Indian-killer and slave-holder. How could they not be? The “country” they claimed as their own was fathered by genocide and mothered by slavery – its true distinction among the commercial nations of the world. And these men were not ashamed, but proud, with vast ambition to spread their exceptional characteristics West and South and wherever their so-far successful project in nation-building might take them – and by the same bloody, savage methods that had served them so well in the past.

At the moment of deepest national crisis following the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the national fable that is far more central to the white American personality than Lincoln’s battlefield “Address.” Lincoln seized upon the 1621 feast as the historic “Thanksgiving” – bypassing the official and authentic 1637 precedent – and assigned the dateless, murky event the fourth Thursday in November.

Lincoln surveyed a broken nation, and attempted nation-rebuilding, based on the purest white myth. The same year that he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he renewed the national commitment to a white manifest destiny that began at Plymouth Rock. Lincoln sought to rekindle a shared national mission that former Confederates and Unionists and white immigrants from Europe could collectively embrace. It was and remains a barbaric and racist national unifier, by definition. Only the most fantastic lies can sanitize the history of the Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/66/66_cover_thanksgiving.html

(Emphasis mine).

Heart