Why I Hate Thanksgiving
author: Posted by: Dire Wolf
By Mitchel Cohen with much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh
and others whose names have over the years been lost
11-26-3
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The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach.
Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked,
tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the
island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big
boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords,
speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food,
water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he
wrote:
"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many
other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks'
bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. They were
well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear
arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by
the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their
spears are made of sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With 50
men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy — the regime of
death — was inaugurated on the continent the Indians called "Turtle
Island."
You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus's
Army took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take
him to the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in
their ears. And how, with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took
many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta
— the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola
(today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be
taken prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death.
Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. During
the long voyage, many of the Indian prisoners died. Here's part of
Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:
"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that
no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for
something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to
share with anyone." Columbus concluded his report by asking for a
little help from the King and Queen, and in return he would bring them
"as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask."
Columbus returned to the New World — "new" for Europeans, that is
— with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves,
and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking
Indians as captives. But word spread ahead of them. By the time they
got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the
sailors left behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the
island in gangs raping women and taking children and women as slaves.
Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on
sending all the slaves that can be sold." The Indians began fighting
back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors, even though they
greatly outnumbered them. In eight years, Columbus's men murdered more
than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves in the
mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases brought to the Caribbean
by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people were murdered between
1494 and 1508.
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.
All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In
the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as
Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before
there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard
Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were
hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville
sacked and burned the whole Indian village.
The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside
the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan.
Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not
attack. And the English began starving. Some of them ran away and
joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed,
throughout colonial times tens of thousands of indentured servants,
prisoners and slaves — from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa
— ran away to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their
children there.
In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked
Powhatan to return the runaways, who were living fully among the
Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those who ran away, and none
wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take
revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16
Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the
village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into
boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out
their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the
boat and stabbed to death.
By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and
word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back,
and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to
enslave the Indians the English aristocracy decided to exterminate
them.
And then the Pilgrims arrived.
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to
vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story
goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were
fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went
to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they
landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their
religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to
the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen
for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy
possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited
Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
damnation."
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who
occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they
wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to
want to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that
area.
In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett
Indians on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians,
but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English
went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they
sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast,
destroying crops again.
The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They
burned village after village to the ground. As one of the leading
theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that
no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And
Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter
more Indians in the name of Christianity.
Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over
the next few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen
did not want this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some
European intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And
some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms
against the invaders from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted
the war, a war for land, for gold, for power. And, in the end, the
Indian population of 10 million that was in North America when Columbus
came was reduced to less than one million.
The way the different Indian peoples lived — communally,
consensually, making decisions through tribal councils, each tribe
having different sexual/marriage relationships, where many different
sexualities were practiced as the norm — contrasted dramatically with
the Puritan's Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men
decided everything, whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now
New York state women chose the men who represented the clans at village
and tribal councils; it was the women who were responsible for deciding
on whether or not to go to war. The Christian idea of male dominance
and female subordination was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not
use harsh punishment on children. They did not insist on early weaning
or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to
care for themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of land;
they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was
ridiculous, absurd. The European Christians, on the other hand, in the
spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control everything
— even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim
colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: "And surely there
is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from
natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten
down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility
and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon."
That idea sunk in.
One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet
people — a combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease
— was "the Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His
Providence for His People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims
robbed Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead
for religious reasons. Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being
watched, they shot at the Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had
been unknown among Native Americans in New England prior to its
introduction by the English, who began the practice by offering the
heads of their enemies and later accepted scalps.
"What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was
asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization I
think it would be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the
civilization of Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't
have been more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they
encountered, and so slaughtered them.
These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and whom we
celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as
Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the
Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in Maine. They went to Puritan
villages and, having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and
beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them
and helped them survive their first years in their New World. He taught
them how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other
vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants
could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a peace treaty between
the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty that
gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And even that
treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as the First
Thanksgiving.
My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But
they couldn't do that. Their humanity made them assist other human
beings in need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they
— and those of us who are not Indian as well — paid a terrible price:
The genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now
America.
Let's look at one example of the Puritan values — which were not,
I repeat, the values of the English working class values that we "give
thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.
In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the
English working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the
guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and
merchants from France in order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and
break the guilds. This alliance between international finance, national
capital and military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the
imperialist nation-state.
The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants.
A secret rumor said the commonality — the vision of communal society
that would counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the
nobility and the landowners — would arise on May Day. The King and
Lords got frightened — householders were armed, a curfew was declared.
Two guys didn't hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.).
They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers
stormed the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners
were freed. A French capitalist's house was trashed.
Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three
hundred were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the streets, and a
proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet together, and
that all men should "keep their wives in their houses." The prisoners
were brought through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children.
Eleven sets of gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were
hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme cruelty.
Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated
in answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May
Day riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted
from their lands they had used for centuries in common), and by
exploitation (people had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital).
Working class women organizers and healers who posed an alternative to
patriarchal capitalism — were burned at the stake as witches.
Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged the people who, in
losing their commons, also lost a place to put their Maypole.
Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550
Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the
Vietnam war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all
red cloth, as it was being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of
the National Liberation Front).
In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot
Indians, the Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. They had
defeated the Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing
proletarian insurgency at home as well.
Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book,
Revelation, became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who
would turn the Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love,
the Anabaptists, the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton,
the man who in 1626 went to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his
Indian friends put up the first Maypole in America, in contempt of
Puritan rule.
The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and
hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat
person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later,
the Manchester proletarian who founded the communal living, gender
separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the
Puritans up the wall.
The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It
crossed cultures and continued through the ages. In the late 1800s, the
Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the
center, which was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle
feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great
Spirit." They didn't call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of
all Indians, the return of the dead, and the expulsion of the invaders
on a particular day, the 4th of July, but otherwise it might as well
have been a Mayday!
Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair.
To buy watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for
small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion —
they stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five
days, jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the
Shakers! Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance,
everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine took the dance
across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced
the left foot following with the right, hardly lifting the feet from
the ground. The Federal Agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it
was a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just as the Puritans had
claimed the Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian riots, just as
the Shakers were dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism.
On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2
pound explosive shells at 50 a minute — always developing new
weapons!) massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded
Knee. As in the Waco holocaust, or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia,
the State disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out
James Mooney to investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The
Indians were responsible for the engagement."
In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does
each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There are
many speeches for the crowds who attend. That year — the year of
Nixon's secret invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred
at Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried
to electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins — the
Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to
select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims'
arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.
Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was
allowed to speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white
people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written,
they would not allow him to read it.
First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it.
What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What
does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians,
that this "holyday commemorates? As we sit with our families on
Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we can to get out of work or off
the streets and be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that
all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do
with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and
everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the
Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the
name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor.
Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am
revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of
wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those
charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived
communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these
shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of
children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is
impossible. So all I look forward to the utter destruction of the
apparatus of death known as Amerika — not the people, not the
beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the
Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future
where I will have children with Amerika, and they will be the new
Indians.
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national
newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA, www.greenparty.org, and
organizes with the NoSpray Coalition, www.nospray.org and the Brooklyn
Greens.
In memorium. Lest we forget. The First Thanksgiving
From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of
Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700
Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and
illness his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B.
Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a
Penobscot, has degrees from two universities, and was the former
chairman of the anthropology department at the University of
Connecticut.
"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of
700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green
corn dance — Thanksgiving Day to them — in their own house," Newell said.
"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by
mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the
building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were
burned alive in the building," he said.
Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the
13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and
reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in
England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian
agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said.
"You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first
hand. It is not hearsay."
Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of
the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine
base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians
and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day
was "fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first
settlers.
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