Your Cranberry Sauce Is Made From Indigenous Blood, Granny
Image: Conscious Living TV
Four hundred years ago, under the fortunes of a bright, blue sky, English Pilgrims — “Puritans”, as historians & a resentful Queen Elizabeth I of England would dub them — & Indigenous folx came together for the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth. History’s favorite working-class Christians were saved from starvation by Tisquantum (better known as Squanto) from the Patuxet tribe in modern-day Maine. After the Pilgrims had suffered their first winter in 1620, Squanto had taught the backwater settlers how to fish, hunt, and cultivate corn, blissfully unaware of the fact that these short, aggressive, absurdly pious European settlers were carrying a virulent strand of hepatitis & hatred.
Blame school textbooks for abridging history & shoving a slew of cringe-worthy stereotypes down elementary schoolers’ throats. Blame historians for buddying up the relationship between the European colonists and the munificence of the Wampanoag. Blame ordinary Americans like — well — Rush Limbaugh, for inveighing against those who oppose white America’s proprietorship over the past & our knowledge of it (They did fire celebratory gunshots & stuff their faces with turkey & homegrown vegetables, Rush’s courteousness allows, “but it was not the Indians...it was capitalism & Scripture which saved the day”. What jeopardized Pilgrim survival, you may ask, daring to plunge into the muttonheaded-ness of the everyday American? Why it was no other than the lack of industriousness & precolonial-socialism that left these folk emaciated!).
The revisionist history that popular talk radio hosts superimpose upon all-too-eager ears is greeted with bemusement by me (and professional historians). You can choose to be a part of the crowd of townspeople who love reenactments as much as the next (white) guy, wearing monochrome capotains, bearing blunderbusses, & marching uproariously to Plymouth Rock. Or, you can choose to crinkle your nose in disgust at the preconceived notion that the first Thanksgiving was some kind of cross-cultural love-fest.
The truth is that Indigenous magnanimity was met with contempt; Pilgrims, in the droves their thinning numbers could muster, robbed Wampanoag graves in search of maize, effectively desecrating the dead. They cold-shouldered the friendliness of Indigenous folx and instead posited them as uncivilized & satanic heathens, and the nebulous relationship between the natives & the early settlers came apart at the seams in what is now Mystic Connecticut, where the Pequot tribe was celebrating their own Thanksgiving, the green corn festival. Licensed by Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop — who remorselessly revered God’s destruction of the defenseless Pequot village — this slaughter set the precedent that had served as justification for the routine massacres of Indigenous folx following “days of thanksgiving”.
The mythos of popular imagination — the smokescreen that shelters the American public from acknowledging and atoning for their collective sin — is promulgated by deeply-entrenched discriminatory attitudes. One’s refusal to understand that settler vigilantes unyieldingly pushed themselves into Native homelands, dispossessed them of their autonomy, & reconfigured history to paint themselves as the victims, not assailants, is synonymous with violence. Indigenous folx are hammered with historically-inaccurate inculcations & offensive “Indian” paraphernalia; these actions, taken from an extensive list that is a testament to the commodification & exploitation of Indigenous pain, all attempt to obfuscate the unpleasant truths about this country’s true founding & real history.
It’s past time to honor the Indigenous resistance. We need to undo the romanticized notions of the holiday that has long suppressed the Indigenous voice & perpetuated a dangerous skewed narrative. The cultural genocide hasn’t stopped just because some gastronomic gathering of buckled shoes & hapless Indigenous folx occurred. Generations of Americans are responsible for institutionalizing the Thanksgiving prevarication, but ultimately, change can occur as individuals awaken to the reality that their Thanksgiving meals celebrate a violent, whitewashed history; promoting a genuine national commitment to deal with this problem — the problem that has desensitized a nation to Indigenous suffering — until it no longer is one would go a lot further than any mea culpa for the murderous past.
Want a takeaway? Next time you have a Thanksgiving meal with your family, eating Costco rotisserie chicken to assuage the corporate overlords, think for yourself. Refuse to view history through a sanitized scope. Make an effort to recognize your social programming & raise our collective consciousness so that we amplify both past & contemporary Indigenous narratives. But, most importantly, stop your pals from getting their history lessons from people like Rush Limbaugh.