Thanksgiving is always a tough day both for American Indians who choose in various ways to make their peace with this holiday and enjoy a family get-together and those who choose to ignore and deplore it because of the iconography and history that goes with it. Parents of Indian children in some public schools are still, in the 21st Century, asked to dress up to imitate the phony images American culture has passed down to us of the supposed original Thanksgiving in 1621 with Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians showing up in Plymouth Colony for a three-day feast.
As a consequence, some Indians and their allies in New England have joined each year at this time at Plymouth, Massachusetts, for a National Day of Mourning. Yesterday they came together for the 45th year of this event.
Yesterday was also the day some assholes sent out this tweet without a single thought about the irony:
Sigh.
I would like to believe that Dan Snyder is just clueless in this matter. But we all know this is not the case. He's had plenty of time to educate himself. Many Indians, including the National Congress of American Indians, the oldest pan-Indian organization and far from anything that could be called militant, has opposed this name and explained its offensiveness since 1968. Indians nationwide have protested the name at games and elsewhere. Ever more newspapers and broadcast outlets no longer use the "R*dsk*ns" slur in their game coverage. A survey of verified Indians found 67 percent believe the term is racist.
Snyder remains adamant about not changing the name. Thus do we get tweets like the one above.
This stubbornness is no different than the resistance to getting the truth out about what is still presented every year as the first Thanksgiving. That doesn't happen because of the Black Friday sales propaganda that floods the media for a half-month before Thanksgiving and leaves no room to tell the story. Rather it's because the real history is a little too inconvenient for the people who view subsequent Indian-white relations in America through the lens of the alleged kumbaya moment that the Pilgrim-Wamponoag feast four centuries ago represents in the collective cultural consciousness of the nation.
More about that history below orange frybread.
The Wampanoags, who arrived on what many of us were taught in school was the “first” Thanksgiving, were not invited to the feast with the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1621 after having rescuing them from certain starvation. Massasoit and about 90 of his men just showed up. What followed, we are told, was three days of eating and entertainment, much of which included large quantities of beer. The tension was surely palpable. In the sole firsthand, contemporaneous account we have, nobody called it “thanksgiving.” Not long afterward, in an act of raw treachery that was precursor to a thousand others over the years, Captain Myles Standish, military commander of Plymouth colony – determined to make a pre-emptive strike against a non-existent military threat – strode into a Wampanoag village with his men on the pretext of trading. He left with the severed head of Wituwamat, which he stuck on a wooden spike at Plymouth, where it remained for years.
The real first Thanksgiving was declared in 1637 by Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop, he of the famous “city upon a hill” speech. That celebration capped off the Mystic, Connecticut, massacre of 400-700 Pequots, southern neighbors of the Wampanoags, remnants of a tribe already deeply wounded by epidemics of smallpox and measles. Survivors were executed or sold into slavery in the West Indies. Proclaimed Winthrop, “This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots.”
The descendants of Massasoit’s Wampanoags who had sat down in 1621 were treated to their own slaughter during King Philip’s War 54 years later. After decades of being pushed off their old lands, the Wampanoag were led in resistance by “King Philip,” known among his own people as Metacom. When the year of fighting was over, his wife and son were captured and sold into slavery in Bermuda. Metacom was decapitated and his head publicly displayed for more than 20 years. Once again, survivors were executed or sold into slavery, with a bounty of 20 shillings offered for every Indian scalp and 40 shillings for any captive able-bodied enough for enslavement.
On June 20, 1676, the governing council of Charlestown, Massachusetts, proclaimed:
“…It certainly bespeaks our positive Thankfulness, when our Enemies are in any measure disappointed or destroyed; and fearing the Lord should take notice under so many Intimations of his returning mercy, we should be found an Insensible people, as not standing before Him with Thanksgiving, as well as lading him with our Complaints in the time of pressing Afflictions:
The Council has thought meet to appoint and set apart the 29th day of this instant June, as a day of Solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God for such his Goodness and Favour…”
That slaughter of “heathens” and the round-up of survivors which followed allowed more European immigrants to squat on what had once been Indian land. It was a theme that kept being repeated for the next 220 years right across America. My own people, Seminoles—an amalgam of Creeks, Apalachees, runaway slaves and “renegade” whites— eventually fought three wars, and kept a few slivers of their traditional lands, although most were force-marched to “Indian Territory,” where their descendants still live today.
On the day after Thanksgiving, in homage to American Indian Heritage Day and a retort to that awful "R*dsk*ns" tweet, I urge you to crank up the Google and check out which American Indians in your part of the country (or who used to be there) were slaughtered, enslaved or removed to lands the conquerors did not yet covet.