The Pilgrim Hall Museum has this record of the 2 (and only 2) primary sources for the events of autumn 1621 in Plymouth : Edward Winslow writing in Mourt's Relation and William Bradford writing in Of Plymouth Plantation
The eyewitness accounts don't use the name 'Thanksgiving' however it does describe a feast of many days in length, and describes a mingling of native people with the Pilgrim settlers.
This article by Mitchel Cohen, published by Counter Punch, recounts the horrific crimes committed by Europeans settling the 'New World' (new to Europeans). He starts with "The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach" recounts the brutality of Columbus as "When some refused to be taken prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death" and the story goes on from there.
'What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.'
Thanatocracy, the regime of death.
S. Brian Willson offers an alternate history of Thanksgiving beginning with: 'Native Americans in the Caribbean greeted their 1492 European invaders with warm hospitality. They were so innocent that Genoan Cristoforo Colombo wrote in his log, "They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They do not bear arms . . . They would make fine servants . . . They could easily be made Christians . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." This meeting set in motion a 500-year plunder of the Western Hemisphere, then spread to the remainder of the globe. And it has not stopped!'
So much for Christopher Columbus as a noble explorer. The story goes on to the settling of America who brought death to the Natives in the form of diseases and open battle and massacres. 'The Pequot tribe reportedly numbered 8,000 when the Pilgrims arrived, but disease had reduced their population to 1,500 by 1637, when the first, officially proclaimed, all-Pilgrim "Thanksgiving" took place. At that feast, the whites of New England celebrated their massacre of the Pequots. "This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots," read Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop's proclamation. Few Pequots survived.'
So it goes.
' The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language. He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.... But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest. But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought. '
An article which appeared in Revolutionary Worker #883, November 24, 1996 discusses the truth of the Thanksgiving celebration as having been rooted in massacre of the native peoples of this land. This website is the home of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Therefore one should read this with a grain or two of salt in that their article is going to be slanted to support their cause.
For example the article starts with: Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists--and of the ruthless ways of capitalism.
This article has section headers which reveal the content:
How the Puritans Stole the Land
The Birth of "The American Way of War"
Discovering the Profits of Slavery
Thanksgiving in the Manhattan Colony
The Conquest of New England
Runaways and Rebels
Celebrate?
An article appearing in The Black Commentator magazine is clearly written from the viewpoint of downtrodden Black people exposing a 'four centuries-old abomination' and the White Supremacy being celebrated in the Thanksgiving observation. 'The real-life events – subsequently revised – were perfectly understood at the time as the first, definitive triumphs of the genocidal European project in New England. The near-erasure of Native Americans in Massachusetts and, soon thereafter, from most of the remainder of the northern English colonial seaboard was the true mission of the Pilgrim enterprise – Act One of the American Dream. African Slavery commenced contemporaneously – an overlapping and ultimately inseparable Act Two.'
An interesting factoid is the myth of Europeans settling in a 'New World' as if nobody was living here and the land was widely available to simply settle here. The truth is that this land was filled with native peoples, and that the Europeans conducted decade after decade of warfare against the native people in order to 'settle' here. But the Black Commentator article quotes: 'In a letter to England, Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop wrote, "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection."' and that the Thanksgiving feast celebration in the early 1600's was about their luck that the native peoples had somehow disappeared prior to the settling of this land by the Pilgrims.
The truth seems to be that the Plymouth Company of England hired Captain John Smith (the same Smith who had led the first successful English Colony at Jamestown) to do exploration of other land. One technique used by these explorers was to distribute 'Smallpox Blankets'. The Europeans were immune to Smallpox but it being an old world disease the native peoples did not have this immunity. In this way they spread Smallpox to the native peoples and the disease did the work of wiping them out without having to conduct warfare. 'smallpox would effectively wipe out entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans... From 1615 to 1619 smallpox ran rampant among the Wampanoags and their neighbors to the north.... Most of the Wampanoag had died from the smallpox epidemic so when the Pilgrims arrived they found well-cleared fields which they claimed for their own. A Puritan colonist, quoted by Harvard University's Perry Miller, praised the plague that had wiped out the Indians for it was "the wonderful preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ, by his providence for his people's abode in the Western world."'
The article keeps going with more discussion and details. It is worthwhile recognizing the author of that article is clearly embedded in the worldview of centuries of suppression of the Black People, the African Americans. Just as he points at the Thanksgiving Myth at being embedded in the worldview that White European Americans praise truth and honesty and carry a myth of American cultural morality, we all have a form of blinders on our perception of truth based on our cultural heritage.
Timothy Walch, is the director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. He has a story about the history of Thanksgiving. ' So what are the facts of that first Thanksgiving? In fact, the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony in today's Massachusetts did share a meal with the Wampanoag Indians in the autumn of 1621, but the rest of the details are uncertain. The only documentary evidence of the event comes from the journal of Plymouth Colony's governor, Edward Winslow, who noted simply that the colonists met with Chief Massasoit and 90 of his men for a feast that lasted four days. No one worried about cholesterol or obesity in 1621!'
Rick Shenkman, the editor of the History News Network, has an article discussing myths about the Thanksgiving celebration.
MYTH # 1: The Pilgrims Held the First Thanksgiving
MYTH # 2: Thanksgiving Was About Family
MYTH # 3: Thanksgiving Was About Religion
MYTH # 4: The Pilgrims Ate Turkey
MYTH # 5: The Pilgrims Landed on Plymouth Rock
MYTH # 6: Pilgrims Lived in Log Cabins
MYTH # 7: Pilgrims Dressed in Black
MYTH # 8: Pilgrims, Puritans -- Same Thing
MYTH # 9: Puritans Hated Sex
MYTH # 10: Puritans Hated Fun
Jeremy Bangs, former Chief Curator of the Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, MA, has an article discussing the myths about the Thanksgiving holiday. He says the mythsmaking include the United American Indians of New England describing "the ‘first Thanksgiving’ as merely a pretext for bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades".
He has an interesting question... in aspiring to discover the true history of an event, "these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we want to be in an ever changing Now". By keeping alive our Past does this confine us to only be who our ancestors were? Can we not learn and grow from our Past to be who we truly desire to be? We all desire peace and justice but any study of history shows our ancestors conducted many bloody massacres often in the name of Religion.
Dr. Bangs discusses several sorts of Thanksgiving feasts and celebrations which occurred in the settling of this land by the Europeans. While these feasts were related to other sorts of harvest festivals, to the Puritans 'Thanksgiving' was a specific sort of Religious observance in their cult. He goes into a lot of details and excellent information about several aspects to the history of the Thanksgiving observance.
The founders of the Plymouth Colony were Separatists and they observed three holy days. 'the weekly Sabbath, the Day of Humiliation and Fasting, and the Day of Thanksgiving and Praise.' Carolyn Freeman Travers, Research Manager of Plimoth Plantation goes on to explain: 'The latter two were held for special circumstances. A series of misfortunes meant that God was displeased, and the people should both search for the cause(s) and humble themselves before him. Good fortune, on the other hand, was a sign of God’s mercy and compassion, and therefore he should be thanked and praised. ...Early fast days and thanksgiving days were similar in many respects. They were called by either church or civil officials or the two working together. Occasionally, officials reacted to one overwhelming situation, such as an epidemic. More frequently, there were a number of reasons....A 1685 Day of Thanksgiving in the Plymouth church was held for “continuance of spirituall & civill liberties, a good harvest notwithstanding a threatening drought, & for health.”'
'Prior to the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the 1621 harvest celebration, Pilgrims or Native People. Thanksgiving started as a traditional New England holiday that celebrated family and community. It descended from Puritan days of fasting and festive rejoicing. ... The Pilgrims, Wampanoag and Thanksgiving were first linked together in 1841, when historian Alexander Young rediscovered Edward Winslow’s account of the 1621 harvest celebration. The account was part of the text of a letter to a friend in England, later published in Mourt’s Relation (1622)....One of the first private organizations to undertake “Americanizing” new immigrants was the Daughters of the American Revolution. As early as 1910, the group published a guide for new citizens...Industries like the Ford Motor Company conducted Americanization classes for their employees. These classes included information about the Pilgrims. At the closing ceremonies of Americanization classes at Plymouth Cordage Company, Plymouh, Massachusetts, employees reenacted scenes in American history, including the landing of the Pilgrims....'
'What is it about the story of “The First Thanksgiving” that makes it essential to be taught in virtually every grade from preschool through high school? What is it about the story that is so seductive? Why has it become an annual elementary school tradition to hold Thanksgiving pageants, with young children dressing up in paper-bag costumes and feather-duster headdresses and marching around the schoolyard? Why is it seen as necessary for fake “pilgrims” and fake “Indians” (portrayed by real children, many of whom are Indian) to sit down every year to a fake feast, acting out fake scenarios and reciting fake dialogue about friendship? And why do teachers all over the country continue (for the most part, unknowingly) to perpetuate this myth year after year after year?'
Indeed. Judy Dow (Abenaki) and Beverly Slapin go on to discuss, in great detail and with footnotes citing sources, several myths about the settling of the land we call the United States of America, and myths about the Thanksgiving feast. These myths are:
Myth #1: “The First Thanksgiving” occurred in 1621.
Myth #2: The people who came across the ocean on the Mayflower were called Pilgrims.
Myth #3: The colonists came seeking freedom of religion in a new land.
Myth #4: When the “Pilgrims” landed, they first stepped foot on “Plymouth Rock.”
Myth #5: The Pilgrims found corn.
Myth #6: Samoset appeared out of nowhere, and along with Squanto became friends with the Pilgrims. Squanto helped the Pilgrims survive and joined them at “The First Thanksgiving.”
Myth #7: The Pilgrims invited the Indians to celebrate the First Thanksgiving.
Myth #8: The Pilgrims provided the food for their Indian friends.
Myth #9: The Pilgrims and Indians feasted on turkey, potatoes, berries, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and popcorn.
Myth #10: The Pilgrims and Indians became great friends.
Myth #11: Thanksgiving is a happy time.
It would be a strong indication of moral progress in the United States of America if the Thanksgiving holiday would be widely acknowledged as to what actually happened. And that instead of a feast we might hold a national Day of Atonement for the genocide perpetrated by our European ancestors against the native peoples of this land. 'it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society....Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.'
'How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?'
"Thanksgiving is not just about turkey and mashed potatoes." Americans have been told a fictional story about the Thanksgiving holiday, that "it was just about them offering us food and being nice to the newcomers". That makes for a nice story doesn't it? The truth is that the Europeans who settled this land had to slaughter the people living here to make room for Europeans to live here.
'On 8 November 2004, after more than two months of aerial attacks, the US began its second major assault on Fallujah - originally codenamed “Thanksgiving Massacre” - devastating the city and killing hundreds of civilians. ' Much of the resistance fighting against the U.S. occupation of Iraq stems from the bloodthirsty violence launched by U.S. forces against Fallujah in November 2004. And to be accurate, November 8, 2004 was the Monday following George Bush's re-election on November 2, 2004. It would obviously have been bad politically for George Bush if a bloodthirsty slaughter had been occuring before the election.
It may seem curious why the U.S. Military used the codename 'Thanksgiving Massacre'. However the true history of the Thanksgiving celebration is a celebration of a successful massacre of native americans, so has a curious sort of logic to it.
'To many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a "Day of Mourning" that marks the genocide of thousands of Native Americans, the theft of Native lands and the assult on Native cultures. A few hundred Native Americans plan to gather along Plymouth shore to tell the stories of their ancestors. ... Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop might have declared 1637 the first official day of Thanksgiving, but for many of the nearly 3 million Native Americans, it's a cruel reminder of the massacre that year of 700 Pequot men, women and children by the Puritans, who had arrived a few years earlier on the Mayflower and were warmly greeted by Native Americans with food. Later, the visitors were given land, taught to plow, sow and tend to their crops.'
There are several gatherings of surviving native peoples around the country to hold "anti-Thanksgiving' events. One is held on Alcatraz Island, and this article discusses another held in Plymouth Rock Massachusetts.
This article is an interview with Sundust Teocuauhtli Martinez is the executive director and co-host of Native Voice TV, a nonprofit news program in San Jose, Calif. He's discussing what he claims is the true history of Thanksgiving, that the 1621 'feast' was actually to celebrate a massacre of the Pequot tribe. He explains: It was portrayed by the government and mainstream media authorized it. I think a lot of things contributed [to the myth]. People think, 'It makes money, sounds good, smells good -- let's keep promoting it.' I'm sure if a lot of people knew what happened they would think about it in a different way.
Herbert Storch "became curious and started to browse through the Internet and see what I would find about the history of Thanksgiving. Well, there is an overwhelming amount of information, but to my surprise, the "History of Thanksgiving" started and ended on the borders of the United States. You will find detail description about the Pilgrims, who celebrated their first bountiful harvest by having a "Feast" in the year of 1621. The authors accidentally forgot to mention that this "Feast" was not officially repeated until 1676, when Governor Bradford proclaimed another day of thanks." He goes on to detail several instances where Thanksgiving feasts were held in honor of massacre's of "Heathen Savages".
There is a long tradition in all cultures of harvest time feasting, giving thanks for the bounty the land honors us with. No doubt the current feast really stems from that tradition. However the specific instance in the U.S.A. carries a context of European "settlers" having to wrest this land from the native peoples living here. To 'wrest' land from people already living here inevitably led to fighting. Such as: The Dutch and the Puritans (with Bible passages in their hands to justify their every move), joined forces to exterminate all "Natives Savages" from New England. Woman and children over 14 were captured to be sold as slaves; other survivors were massacred. The Natives were sold into slavery in the West Indies, the Azures, Spain, Algiers and England, where ever the Puritan traded. The slave trade was so lucrative that boatloads of 500 at a time left the harbors of New England. So, the 2nd "Thanksgiving" was to celebrate the victory (massacre) over the "Heathen Savages". During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets of Manhattan like soccer balls as part of the celebration.
""Thanksgiving Day" was first proclaimed by the Governor of the then Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual Green Corn Dance...In June 1637 John Underhill slaughtered a pequot village in just the manner described above. Narranganset Indians were used as the mercenaries. ...The Jamestown Colony may be the source for the tradition of Indians under the leadership of Powhaton joining with early settlers for a dinner and helping those settlers through the winter. "
Laura Elliff, Vice President, Native American Student Association asks "Is All That Turkey and Stuffing a Celebration of Genocide?" She goes on to discuss The standard history of Thanksgiving tells us that the "Pilgrims and Indians" feasted for three days, right? Most Americans believe that there was some magnificent bountiful harvest. In the Thanksgiving story, are the "Indians" even acknowledged by a tribe? No, because everyone assumes "Indians" are the same. So, who were these Indians in 1621?
History is written by the winners, and in the history of the land we call the United States of America the winners were the Europeans who came to this land and slaughtered the native peoples of this land. I am a descendent of those Europeans but I am aware enough to recognize genocide when I see it.
She explains the official Thanksgiving holiday we know did not come into existence until 1637. In 1621 there was some kind of feast held in this context: "Pilgrims perceived Indians in relation to the Devil and the only reason why they were invited to that feast was for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands for the Pilgrims"
In 1637 there was a massacre of 700 native peoples of the Pequot tribe, and the Governor of Massachusetts declared "A day of Thanksgiving, thanking God that they had eliminated over 700 men, women and children." It was signed into law that, "This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots."
