Thanksgiving

My first Uncooked blog is written on the day after Thanksgiving. We all know the story of Thanksgiving. Some pilgrims landed at Plymouth rock. Some Indians helped them survive. The next year the had a feast with their Indian friends to celebrate the things they were thankful for. Extra points if you can guess what year! (You have the internet in front of you so I'll save you the trouble of Googling it; it was 1621). Centuries later we maintain this Thanksgiving tradition.

This story is so wrong it is difficult to know where to begin. I guess I should begin at the beginning...

There was supposedly 102 Pilgrims on the Mayflower which was headed toward one destination but blown off course to end up at Plymouth (Massachusetts). It is actually maintained by some historians that there were only 35 Pilgrims on board the Mayflower, the other 67 were just passengers headed toward an already established colony in Virginia where their friends and families awaited them. This Pilgrim minority hijacked (or bribed is captain) to arrive at Plymouth instead of its intended destination. The other 67 passengers, extremely perturbed at not arriving where they had intended to go, were not ready to live at Plymouth at all, let alone peacefully. In response to the unrest of the majority passengers the Mayflower Compact was written in an attempt to calm the potentially violent upheaval.

As time went on roughly half the settlers died until a helpful Indian named Squanto showed up who magically spoke English (which he learned from Fishermen) and taught the Pilgrims how to survive. In reality Squanto was a Native American slave that spent quite some time in Europe, particularly Spain. He was able to escape and make his way to England where he encountered the leaders of the Pilgrims. Supposedly the leaders of the Pilgrims had surveyed the land his home tribe had inhabited as a potential place to settle. They, seeing the value in having a Native American guide, hired him on. Squanto, seeing the opportunity to return home, accepted the offer.

So the Pilgrims and their 67 English buddies did have Indian friends... er, an Indian friend... who they brought with them... because they wanted his knowledge and he wanted to go home. This mutually beneficial situation was something to be thankful for... but there was another beneficial situation that they were thankful for as well.

So the Pilgrim leaders surveyed Squanto's homeland some time before they actually packed up and settled. What was so good about Plymouth? Great fishing? Great farmland? Hunting? Why not just settle close to another English settlement where they could rely on an already established civilization for support? The value in Plymouth was that is was inhabited by no one... er... soon WOULD be inhabited by no one because, when the Pilgrims first surveyed the land it was, in fact, inhabited by Squanto's native people.

The land was already cleared. The houses were already built. Contrary to popular belief, at this time the Northern Native Americans lived in settlements that were almost indistinguishable from European settlements. European culture had been rubbing elbows with Northern Native American culture for over a millennia (wait! Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492! that's less than 200 years)... as I said, the cultures had been influencing each other for over one thousand years... by 1620 some Northern Native Americans lived in log cabins, some lived in tepees, others lived in clay huts... the ones on the east coast of North America lived in cabins for the most part. There was an existing Native American settlement at Plymouth that the Pilgrims intended all along to inhabit.

So the Pilgrims were gonna do what? Draft their 67 unwilling ship-mates and wage siege warfare against a native American settlement inhabited by people who not only knew the land but were also far better hunters? Very bad plan.

When the leaders of the Pilgrims surveyed Plymouth they found the Native American inhabitants overcome with sickness. They had lost a huge percent of their population to illness and were almost all dead. They were no longer able to use the settlement or even mount a reasonable defense on account of being dead when the Pilgrims arrived to inhabit their homes and use their farmland.

The predominant culprit in the decline of Native American civilization was, at least initially, disease. In Europe people lived in confined areas where disease ran rampant with exposure to all manner of wandering pilgrims, merchants, gypsies, soldiers, and anything else capable of transmitting contagion between population centers. For centuries survival was rough in Europe but the strongest built up immunities and survived to pass on those immunities to their children. Native Americans, by contrast, lived in small communities with few to no outside contact. Hygiene was common and accepted (as it was NOT in Europe) and for centuries survival for the Native American wasn't easy but far surpassed that of the European... there are accounts of some Native Americans living to be over 100 years of age which would have been unfathomable for a European of the same era.

So anyway, in the 1500's when contact between the disease ridden Europeans and the hygienic Native Americans dramatically increased the Native Americans lost out BIG. They had none of the immunities of their European counterparts. Plague decimated their numbers... but through no intent of the Europeans mind you. The concept of germ pathology would not be developed for centuries. Europe just saw the Native Americans were decimated by a mysterious plague and thanked God for choosing the white race as his ward and damning the savage race to suffer.

Even with literally having a settlement built for them, a Native American guide, and the manpower of 67 unwilling but stranded Europeans 50% of the Pilgrims and other Europeans died before the end of the first year.

So, it was time to give thanks! Thank you god for providing us with a Native American guide to teach us how to survive! Thank you god for suckering our European friends into not beating our asses and jumping back on the Mayflower! Thank you god for having the Indians build a settlement for us! Thank you god for killing those same Indians with a divine plague!

Actually, the first Thanksgiving had existed for centuries in Europe as a celebration of the autumn harvest. You were THANKFUL because you had just harvested enough food to MAYBE get you through the winter. It wasn't called Thanksgiving. It was called; "Hey! Lets eat cause we don't know when this food's gonna run out!"

A celebration of Autumn harvest was often observed by communities whenever they finished the harvest... sometimes in October, other times rarely in December... but always community by community. A few of the first American presidents proclaimed the celibration until about 1815 but never as an official American holiday... eventually the proclomation fell by the wayside and each community did its own thing. During the Civil War Lincoln, due in part from outside pressure, felt that the nation in its darkest years needed something to be happy about. He declared the third Thursday in November a national day of Thanksgiving.

Today we have millions of second graders put on plays with Pilgrims sitting next to Native Americans at a huge feast. The false story of Thanksgiving is told and retold until most of us believe it from childhood. The true origins of the holiday are far darker than we realize.

Does that mean we shouldn't celebrate it? Absolutely not! I'm thankful for many things and having a day to spend with my family and reflect on that is spectacular. I just don't think I need to lie to myself or anyone else in order to do that.

Tagged with: history, indians, pilgrims, Thanksgiving, truth