So, today is Thanksgiving. You know: the holiday in which we remember the Pilgrims who would have starved to death had it not been for those nice Indians who brought turkey, pumpkin, squash etc., and all the nice white people sat side-by-side with all the nice brown people, and we all lived happily ever after.
Not according to my college anthropology professor.
In lecture he said that the first Thanksgiving was proclaimed by Cotton Mather--or one of those Puritan religious fanatics--to thank God for their heroic victory over the local Indian tribe, who weren't getting with the program. Apparently, they convinced the Indians to gather inside a Puritan's house, and set it on fire, trapping the Indian men, women, and children inside.
So...while we sit around obsessing over those Muslim fanatics, just keep in mind that it wasn't that long ago that our ancestors did crazy shit like that, too.
Odds are, though, that when Abraham Lincoln and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Thanksgiving a national holiday (FDR moved the date that Lincoln had set) they didn't know about the mass execution. By then history--which after all, is written by the victors--had blurred events. As a matter of fact, you won't find a lot about this on the internet. You certainly won't hear people discussing this--or even what happened to the indiginous people of this continent, in general--while sitting around the dining room table, tonight.
Food for thought.
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