25th November 2015
By Irwin Ozborne
Contributing Writer for Wake Up World
Thanksgiving: Celebrating all that we have, and the genocide it took to get it.
Thanksgiving is one of the most
paradoxical times of the year. We gather together with friends and
family in celebration of all that we are thankful for and express our
gratitude, at the same time we are encouraged to eat in excess. But the
irony really starts the next day on Black Friday. On Thursday we
appreciate all the simple things in life, such as having a meal, a roof
over our head, and the connection with those close to us. But in less
than 24 hours, we literally trample over others in a mad dash to
accumulate as many material possessions as possible at bargain-prices.
So what is the true history of Thanksgiving? Well,
just like we have stories of Easter in which a magical bunny hops
around the world and hides baskets of goodies for us to find, or stories
of Christmas where Santa Claus travels the globe in one night to
leave presents under the tree for good boys and girls – Thanksgiving,
too, has its traditional myth which we share with our children. We
recount stories of the Indians and Pilgrims getting together for a
magical feast of brotherly love and appreciation. The only problem is
that, unlike the other holidays, we never reveal the truth about
Thanksgiving to our children as they grow older. In fact, most of us
don’t understand its bloody history ourselves…
The first actual proclaimed “Day of
Thanksgiving” came in 1637 in a meeting between the Pequot Indians and
English religious mercenaries. The Pequot were celebrating their annual
Green Harvest Festival, which resembles modern-day Thanksgiving. On the
eve of the festival, the English demanded that everyone comes out of
their homes, puts their weapons on the ground, and surrenders by
converting to Christianity.
Those who obliged with these terroristic
demands were either shot dead or clubbed to death. Those who stayed
inside their longhouses – including women and children – were burnt to
death. In all, more than 700 Pequot men, women, and children were
slaughtered that day.
The “victory” was celebrated by the
Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony holding a feast and trumpeted this
as a “Day of Thanksgiving.” During the celebration, they cut off heads
of Natives and put them on display publicly; including beheading the
Wampanoag Chief and impaling his head on a pole in Plymouth which stayed
on display for the next 24 years.
New Family Values
I was in third grade and playing in my
back yard, when I noticed a moving truck in the parking lot beyond the
fence. We lived in a middle-class suburban community, but right beyond
our fenced in yard, there was a Section 8 Housing Community.
As I stood and watched, a young boy around my age came running over to the fence to greet me.
“Hi, My Name is Doug,” he said, “We are moving in next door.”
It’s funny as kids, we are so free and
we see someone our age and we just want to be friends. Someone we can
spend time with. This shows the natural desire of human connection.
Doug and I became pretty good friends
instantly. We spent time at each other’s house often, mostly playing
Nintendo or throwing the ball around in the yard.
Until one day, one of my favorite video
games was missing. No idea what happened, but the game was gone. We
always had anywhere from three to 10 people over at our house and there
is no way of knowing what happened to the game or if it was simply
misplaced.
“No more going over to that Indian’s house,” my Dad told me, “He took your game.”
Indian? What’s an Indian? I remember
thinking that to myself. To me, Doug was just my friend. Now, just like
that, he was my Indian-friend. I knew very little about other races at
that time. Sure, we saw that people looked different, but never attached
a label like that.
The only thing I knew about Indians, I
learned in school. And the things I learned in school, was just being
passed down from what our teacher’s learned in school with no
adjustments to the curriculum. We learned how to sit “Indian-Style,” we
learned how to sing “Ten Little Indians,” learned what it meant to be
called an “Indian-Giver,” and we learned to play “Cowboys and Indians.”
I can honestly remember in First or
Second grade around Thanksgiving, we made headdresses and colored
feathers to dress up like Indians. Then they told us how to do war-cries
by putting your hand over your mouth and yelling, “Ahh-Ahh-Ooh-Ooh.”
They instructed the class that the
Pilgrims came over from Europe to escape religious persecution. Upon
arriving in America, they realized that there were already people living
here. The brave Europeans encountered the Indians, who wore
headdresses, make weird noises, and were uncivilized. So, the
Pilgrims decided to help them out and
they had a giant feast together. Everyone got along and then for every
year since then, we celebrate Thanksgiving.
But, Doug didn’t do any of those things.
I never met an Indian, he was just a normal kid. But, I was told not to
trust him. The irony of a white person not trusting an Indian is too
much to even comprehend.
“Doug, do you have my video game?” I
asked him, “And, I am not allowed to come over here anymore and you
can’t come over to my house.”
“No, I don’t have it. Why would I take
it? You always let me use it whenever I want,” he replied, “But I
understand. I won’t come over anymore.”
As the next couple years went by, I
start seeing more movies with Cowboys and Indians with the natives
viewed as hostile savages and the cowboys save the country. I am now in
fifth grade and have been trained and brainwashed to hate a race of
people and believe that I am good and they are wrong. And, still no one
has given me an answer as to what happened to all the Indians that lived
here?
Then, I gained perspective from the
oddest of sources – the comedy movie, “Addams Family Values.” In the
movie, the children were at some type of summer camp in which they are
putting on a play for their parents, reenacting the first Thanksgiving.
All the rich-white privileged kids at the camp were playing the role of
the wholesome pilgrims; whereas, the outcasts of the camp were stuck
playing the part of the “uncivilized” Indians. As the pilgrims invited
the Indians for a meal together, Wednesday Addams –playing the role of
Pocahontas (although this is historically inaccurate as Pocahontas lived
near the Jamestown Settlement) – decides to go off the script just
prior to sitting down for the meal:
“Wait, we can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims. And especially do not trust Sarah Miller. For all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.” [view scene]
I remember watching this scene and my
friends were laughing hysterically, but not me. I was more in shock and
awe. It all made sense. I realized that everything I had been told about
history was a lie. And I have been searching for the truth ever since.
A National Day of Mourning
We are very impressionable as children
and take what elders, parents, and teachers tell us as fact. It gets
very difficult to break these thoughts that shape our identity. However,
the story of Thanksgiving described above has only a small semblance of
truth. The Pilgrims and Indians got together for a giant feast – one
time. And in all recorded history of that time, there are actually only
two documents of record reporting this event, over the total of three
paragraphs – indicating the very minor significant of this event.
Thanksgiving Day is also known as The
National Day of Mourning among Native American Tribes. In 1970, there
was a huge celebration in Massachussets to celebrate the
350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. Today, there are still
Wampanoags living in the area. On the day of the celebration, they
asked one of them to speak:
“Today is a time of celebrating for you — a time of looking back to the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end. That before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people.
Although our way of life is almost gone,
we, the Wampanoags, still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has
happened cannot be changed. But today we work toward a better America, a
more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.”
The Lies of Thanksgiving
To get started, the Pilgrims were not
seeking religious persecution – they already had that in Holland by
1608. However, they did not like the work and demands of Holland and
wanted to seek commercial ventures overseas. However the Pilgrims also
had no money or resources, so they had to borrow a loan from the
Virginia Company of London and Plymouth. The agreement stated that they
were to take all the money earned over the first seven years and put it
into a common stock – sounds like Communism.
So, the communist Pilgrims sailed across
the sea in September of 1620. Yet, it is also important to note that
they did not call themselves Pilgrims. They were originally referred to
as Separatists as they no longer followed the Church of England. Yet,
they referred to themselves as God’s Chosen People, in which they called
themselves “Saints.”
The rest of England, considered them “religious dropouts.”
The Pilgrims were also not farmers, nor
woodsmen; they were mostly city people and artisans that had no clue how
to survive in the Wilderness. It would be like if a group of
broke-hipsters decided to move to a remote jungle in South America to
start their own civilization because they do not fit in with mainstream
society. Yet, they don’t have money, so they take out a loan from the
government to set up their little expedition.
They were not just being persecuted for
religious beliefs either, they were revolutionaries who intended – and
in fact, did in 1649 – overthrow the English Government.
On November 20, 1620, they landed at
Cape Cod – not Plymouth Rock. A winter storm had sent them off-course
and they were many miles north of their destination in Virginia. They
landed in a desolated area in which the Patuxet used to live – but were
completely wiped away by disease in 1617. The Pilgrims raided the land
for corn, beans, and robbed the gravesites at Corn Hill to steal as much
winter provisions as they could handle.
It wasn’t until another month later that
they landed at Plymouth Rock. In which, the crew was decimated and the
settlers were either dead or dying from starvation, malnutrition and
disease. Only 53 of the remaining 102 members of this ship made it
through the winter. In March, they were greeted by two English-Speaking
Indians – Samoset and Squanto.
While this tale seems miraculous, in
fact Plymouth Governor Bradford referred to Squanto as “a special
instrument sent from God.” However, it was not that simple.
Squanto had been captured in 1605 and
sold into slavery in England, in which he was forced to learn English.
Then they sent him back to America, only to serve as a guide for the
explorers to further ravage his land. In 1614, he was captured again and
shipped to Spain. This time “rescued” by friars who tried to control
the slaves and convert them to Christianity. He jump-shipped again and
made his way back to his homeland in 1619, only to see that every member
of his tribe had perished to disease.
Hence, Squanto was the last
living Patuxet and was forced to live with the nearby Wampanoag.
This is the man that helped the Pilgrims
survive – enslaved twice, forced to learn English, attempted to be
forced to convert to Christianity, then to return home and find everyone
he loved was dead. If it were not for Squanto, all historians agree
that the Pilgrims would have starved to death and had quite a different
impact on American history.
As Governor Bradford explained:
“Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish, and to procure other commodities, and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never let them till he died.”
The Pilgrims were living in dirt-covered
shelters, had no food, and nearly half of them had died during the
winter. They obviously needed help and the two men were a welcome sight.
Squanto, who probably knew more English than any other Indian in North
America at that time, decided to stay with the Pilgrims for the next few
months and teach them how to survive in this new place.
Squanto had orchestrated a treaty between the Pilgrims and Indians to protect each other from neighboring tribes.
By Fall of 1621, things had greatly
improved for the Pilgrims. They put together a feast to celebrate their
harvest – a common custom of the day in all parts of the world. This was
celebrated back in Europe for many years, as well as the local tribes
had six different “Thanksgiving” feasts throughout the year.
As they Pilgrims were shooting their
guns in the air – likely with a mixture of the hefty amounts of alcohol
they consumed – they were met by ninety or more Wampanoags. As the story
goes, they invited the Indians to join them. However, it is more likely
that the Indians rushed over to see what all the gunfire was about and
then were asked to join. They had a three-day feast, in which the
Indians provided the majority of the food.
This was never called “Thanksgiving” and
it was not the beginning of some beautiful friendship, in which they
all lived happily ever after. In fact, it never happened again. This was
the first, and only, time that they got together in peace. The true
“First Thanksgiving” was a much bloodier hell on Earth which tells the
tale of the next 400 years for the Native Americans.
The “First Thanksgiving”
It is hard to tell the true intention of
the first Pilgrims at Plymouth as they were severely outnumbered and
had no means of survival in the New World. Once word was spread about
the Paradise out West, more and more religious zealots, known as
Puritans, came sweeping across the shores of America.
Once they arrived, they noticed no
fences around the land and considered it all to be public domain. They
were not in as great need of help from the Natives, as the original
Pilgrims, and the friendship between the two weakened rapidly. Soon, the
Pilgrims were demeaning the Indians for their religious beliefs and the
children of those who shared this majestic meal together were killing
each other in the next generation’s King Phillip’s War.
That is the foundation of America’s idea
of “freedom.” We want freedom for ourselves, but not for those who do
not look, think, act, and believe as we do. In the Declaration of
Independence it is stated that “All Men Are Created Equal” but each of
the founding fathers were slave-owners who valued white supremacy and
favored Indian genocide. They didn’t want equality, they just wanted
equality from the British, but the oppression they did to
African-Americans, Indians, and Women was completely acceptable.
The Pilgrims were religious bigots who
saw themselves as the “chosen elect” and first planned to purify
themselves and then anyone who did not accept their interpretation of
scripture. They believed they were fighting a holy war against Satan. In
a “Thanksgiving” sermon in 1623, Maher the Elder gave special thanks
for destroying “chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of
increase, thus cleaning the forests to make way for a better growth.”
Yes, thanking the Lord for giving smallpox to the same Wampanoag that
saved them from starvation two years prior.
In 1637, as stated in the opening
paragraphs of this article, the first Thanksgiving was held to celebrate
the systematic slaughtering of the “heathen savages.” These killings
become more and more, as the settlers went from village to village
wiping out generations of tribes. With each “victory” they would hold
days of thanksgiving feasts for each successful massacre.
During the next century, the Tribes
continued to get pushed further West. The likes of Lord Jeffrey Amherst
intentionally gave smallpox-infested blankets to tribes in the early
forms of biological warfare. Whereas, the 1756 Indian Scalp Act paid out
bounties for the scalps of Indian men, women, and children.
This continued up through the
French-Indian War in which the British defeated the Indian-French
allies; but proclaimed that the settlers can not go West of the
Appalachian Mountains – not because they grew a heart for the Indians
–but because it would be too hard to manage the settlers which would
soon revolt against the Kingdom.
Even during the Revolutionary War, there
were Days of Thanksgiving honored after a victory against the British.
Until George Washington suggested that there is only one day of
Thanksgiving set aside per year, rather than after each massacre.
The “Most Free Country on Earth”
After being declared a “free country,”
the savagery continued. President Andrew Jackson issued the Indian
Removal Act of 1830, which forced the Natives west to Oklahoma. The
Cherokee removal from Tennessee became known as the infamous “Trail of
Tears” in which Cherokee were slain in front of family members if they
did not oblige.
As the land continued to be stolen, the
Native Americans set up reservations. This land was not GIVEN to the
Native Americans, it is land that THEY reserved for themselves that
could not be taken from them. However, as we find out that did not seem
to matter as the United States has broken every treaty ever signed with a
Native American tribe.
It’s also important to understand that
the government does not just hand out money “because they are Indians.”
They are given money that is owed to them due to the treaties signed by
the United States to purchase their land, and they settlements due to
breaking every single treaty ever signed. It is not just a charity
hand-out, it is part of a guilty plea.
However, false propaganda and poor
educational curriculum like to inform the mainstream that we “gave the
Indians reservations” and “pay them money.” This ignorance is a direct
result of America not teaching their children what a treaty actually
entails, or why it was signed in the first place.
In 1851, the Sioux made two treaties in
which they were to be compensated with cash, food, and goods to give up
over one-million acres of land to the United States, while living on the
reservation. However, there were corrupt leaders in the Bureau of
Indian Affairs who refused payments and gave goods out to white settlers
instead. Once Minnesota became a state, Chief Little Crow took his
grievances to Washington – in return, the United States took half of the
land back from the Sioux and opened it up for white expansion.
Each year the situation got worse, until
the summer of 1862 in which the Sioux were literally starving in these
unlivable situations. This is referred to in history as the “Sioux
Uprising.” They were “uprising” because you were starving them to death
because of lies and broken promises.
One day a group went off the reservation
hunting and stole some eggs from white settlers and eventually murdered
them. The authorities in Minnesota then rounded up 303 Sioux, many of
which were not involved in the uprising, and sentenced them to be hung
to death. The Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln issued the
largest mass-killing in American history with the hanging of 38 Santee
Sioux in Mankato, Minnesota. He reduced the number to 38 in fear that
European nations may take the side of the South in the Civil War and
exchange he promised Minnesota to kill or remove any Indians from
Minnesota and pay $2 million in settlement – he only owed the Sioux$1.4
million for the land.
One year later, Congress expunged all
Sioux treaties from the records, took back their reserved land and
ordered the entire tribe to be expelled from Minnesota. As an incentive,
a bounty of $25 was offered for the scalp of any Sioux found living in
the state. In the same year, President Lincoln decided that Thanksgiving
should be a Federal Holiday.
During this time, the Wild-Wild West
included the likes of Custer going from camp-to-camp killing Indian
women, men, and children for sport. They would burn, rape, and mutilate
entire villages and were celebrated in the news as heroes. This includes
his raid of the sleeping Cheyenne and their peace Chief Black Kettle,
despite his previous surrender to the military and willingness to live
on the reservations.
In 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation
the Natives were practicing ghost dances, in which the military was
called in and turned a peaceful dance into a massacre with another 300
dead at the hands of their conquerors.
“The people who are citizens of the U.S., these are your treaties. They aren’t just the Indians’ treaties. No one gave us anything. No one was dragging any land behind them when they came here. This was our land… As native American peoples in this red corner of Mother Earth, we have no reason to celebrate an invasion that caused the demise of so many of our people, and is still causing destruction today.” ~ Suzan Shown Harjo, the Morning Star Institute, a national Native American rights organization.
Boarding Schools
As the Sioux Wars ended, and it wasn’t
as easy to deliberately kill the Indians, the Americans needed a new way
to carry out genocide. They introduced the Boarding School System in
1890. This was United States Government policy that they could show up
at your doorstep, take away your infants and toddlers and ship them to
boarding schools hundreds of miles away. Your children were no longer
yours.
At these schools they were banned to
speak native languages, mocked their traditions and cultures, cut their
hair, made them look American, as well as physically, emotionally, and
sexually abused on a daily basis. Some children would never see their
parents again. Or if they did, they had become different people.
It was a systematic eradicating of a
race of people, they looked Indian but they were Americanizing them.
Every Indian today is a product of this boarding school system. It
peaked in the 1970s and carried into the 21st century.
In the 1950s, the United States then
wanted to “re-civilize” the Indians and invited them to live back in the
city. The problem is they had no money, education, or skills, and could
not find work. Most of them ended up homeless or in jail.
Primitive Savages
There are volumes and volumes of
dissertations written on this information listed above and it is
difficult to condense it to less than a couple thousand words. (I
encourage you to do you own research.) But in reading through the
horrors, atrocities, genocide, and institutionalized racism
enacted against the indigenous people, what is quite clear is that the
label of ‘savages’ is on the wrong end.
Our society’s practice of “might is
right”, consumerism, competition, separation and judgment is the
opposite of how humans were designed to live. We were meant to live in
harmony with each other and respect our fellow man. These ideas and
values had already been in place for many years, but have been since
removed by an advanced military society, but a primitive spiritual one.
“When your people came to our land, it was not with open arms, but with Bibles and guns and disease. You took our land. You killed us with your guns and disease, then had the arrogance to call us godless savages. If there is a Heaven and it is filled with Christians, than Hell is the place for me.”
Primitive spirituality and genocidal
practices over the past four-hundred years have resulted in nearly 100
million deaths of indigenous people – making the Europeans the true
primitive savages. Before the European invasion of the Americas, there
were believed to be as many as 80-100 million native people occupying
what is now the United States. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, only
5.2 million people in the U.S. identified as American Indian and Alaskan
Native, either wholly or in part, and out of this total only 2.9
million people identified as solely American Indian or Alaska Native. At
the time of European invasion, at least 300 different languages were
spoken in addition to numerous “trade languages”. The natives of the
Americas were not only “living lightly on the land”, as is so often
claimed, but were engaged in landscaping, building and agriculture,
trade and commerce, in addition to sustainable hunting and gathering,
and of course, ancient cultural and earth-based spiritual practices —
much of which has now been decimated.
When Christopher Columbus first landed
in the Americas, ho entered an occupied land with force to subjugate and
exterminate the civilizations that had existed for at least 30,000
years (some estimates are as high as 200,000 years), a trend that
continued for several hundred years. And although he and the colonists
that arrived in the years to follow have become icons of our national
mythology, the result has been mass assimilation, raping, slaughtering,
enslaving, and intention to wipe out all evidence of a native population
of between 50 and 100 million indigenous people from the land — the greatest genocide in recorded history.
But, one day out of the year, we are
able to give thanks and show gratitude as part of the traditional
celebration to honor a bloody massacre.
Previous articles by Irwin Ozborne:
- Licensed to Kill: Psychiatry, Big Pharma and the State-Sanctioned Drug Cartel
- The Craving Behind the Craving: Addiction as a Spiritual Disease
- Bipolar? Or Gifted? The Modern Day Epidemic of Medicated “Madness”
- Suicide: Falling Through the Cracks of Stigma
- The Fictions Surrounding ADHD and the “Chemical Imbalance” Theory of Mental Illness
An avid historian, Irwin Ozborne (a
pen-name) is a survivor of childhood abuse and torture over a period of
13 years, and a recovered alcoholic. As a mental health practitioner,
today Irwin practices holistic care and incorporates eastern philosophy
into his work with clients. He is available for speaking engagements as
well, and can be contacted via email:takingmaskoff@yahoo.com
Please visit www.takingthemaskoff.com for more information.
