Keeps conflict down.

So, ask the source where they got the info, and be sure to have a pen and paper, and look mildly inquisitive.
Most times, they will backtrack, and the subject can die.

Book Excerpt: The Real Thanksgiving Story

That old Pilgrims' tale may have been an early example of fake news.

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker | November 21, 2016



The authors of a book on myths about Native Americans think that the scene, depicted in this painting of the first Thanksgiving by J.L.M. Ferris, doesn't tell the real story. (Image via Getty)

(Editor’s Note: As Thanksgiving approaches in the midst of a strained political time, it’s worth remember that the roots of the iconic American holiday are also bound up with political infighting and more than a bit of “fake news.” In this excerpt from the newly published book All the Real Indians Died Off: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, writers Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker examine what’s real and what’s not about the story of this nation’s origins.)




Second only to the Columbus discovery story, the Thanksgiving tale is the United States’ quintessential origin narrative. Like the Columbus myth, the story of Thanksgiving has morphed into an easily digestible narrative that, despite its actual underlying truths, is designed to reinforce a sense of collective patriotic pride. The truths are, however, quite well documented. Their concealment within a simplistic story inevitably depicts a convoluted reality about the Indigenous peoples who played crucial roles in both events, and it presents an exaggerated valorization about the settlers’ roles. The result is a collective amnesia that fuels the perpetuation of Native-American stereotypes, playing out over and over again in the classrooms and textbooks of American schoolchildren, generation after generation. This only masks the complexities of the relationships between settlers and Indians, and thus the founding of the United States. The Thanksgiving story as we know it is a story of unconditional welcome by the indigenous peoples, a feel-good narrative that rationalizes and justifies the uninvited settlement of a foreign people by painting a picture of an organic friendship. A more accurate telling of the story, however, describes the forming of political alliances built on a mutual need for survival and an Indigenous struggle for power in the vacuum left by a destructive century of foreign settlement.


THE BACKSTORY

The offenses of the Thanksgiving story stem from lack of historical context. For example, it often gives the impression that the Mayflower pilgrims were the first Europeans to settle on the land today known as the United States. But by the time the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620, Europeans had been traveling to the North American continent, and founding colonies there, for well over a century. Armed with information about the region — made available by the knowledge and mapping of predecessors like Samuel de Champlain — the Eastern Seaboard was dotted with numerous European enclaves and towns. Jamestown, for example, was founded in 1607, while Florida had been populated by the Spanish since the founding of St. Augustine, in 1565. Some colonies, such as the one in Roanoke Virginia, had failed. The Mayflower immigrants, who came to be known as the Pilgrims, were thus, in December 1620, only the latest newcomers to the land, all of which was known at the time to the English as Virginia. Exposure to European diseases had resulted in pandemics among the Natives up and down the coast from Florida to New England throughout the 16th century, exacerbated by the Indian slave trade started by Columbus. Between 1616 and 1619 the region that would soon become Plymouth Colony underwent an unknown epidemic that decimated the Indigenous population by at least one-third to as much as 90 percent — a fact the Pilgrims knew and exploited.

The settlement the Pilgrims called New Plymouth was the ancestral land of the Wampanoag (Pokanoket) people, who called the place Patuxet. Contrary to the popular myth that the Pilgrims arrived to an unoccupied “wilderness,” it had for untold generations been a well-managed landscape, cleared and maintained for cornfields and crops like beans and squash, as well as for game. Also contrary to popular mythology, the Wampanoags, like most eastern Indians, were farmers, not nomads. Up until the epidemic, the Wampanoag nation had been large and powerful, organized into 69 villages in what is today southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. Their exact population is unknown, but estimates range from 24,000 to upward of 100,000. The epidemic decimated their population, however, and destabilized relations with their traditional enemies, the neighboring Narragansett, Mohegan, and Pequot peoples, among others. In 1620 the Wampanoags were in a state of military tension, if not full-scale war with the Narragansetts.


When the Pilgrims arrived at New Plymouth in the depth of winter, food was the first concern. From colonists’ journal entries we know that right after their arrival Native homes and graves were robbed of food and other items. Written accounts describe taking “things” for which they “intended” to pay later. Ever pious and believing in divine predestination, the religious separatists attributed their good fortune to God, “for how else could we have done it without meeting some Indians who might trouble us.” Thus, the Pilgrims’ survival that first winter can be attributed to Indians both alive and dead. Before the epidemic, Patuxet had been a village with around 2,000 people. Months after their arrival, the colonists had their first serious encounter with an Indian. In March 1621 they came face to face with Samoset, a Wampanoag sachem (leader) of a confederation of about 20 villages. In rudimentary English learned from English fi sherman and trappers, Samoset explained about the plague that had just swept through the area. He also told them about Massasoit, who was considered the head Wampanoag sachem, also known as a sagamore. Within a few days, Massasoit appeared at the Plymouth colony accompanied by Tisquantum (Squanto), eager to form an alliance with the colonists in light of the shifting balance of power in the Indigenous world due to the plague. A formal treaty was immediately negotiated, outlining relationships of peace and mutual protection. Massasoit sent Squanto as a liaison between the Native confederation and the colonists, and Squanto taught them Native planting techniques that ensured the bountiful harvest they would enjoy in the fall. Squanto had been kidnapped as a child, sold into slavery, and sent to England, where he learned how to speak English. Having escaped under extraordinary circumstances, he found passage back to Patuxet in 1619 only to find himself the sole male survivor of his village.

. . . .

http://billmoyers.com/story/real-thanksgiving-story/




THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING

by Susan Bates



Most of us associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast. And that did happen - once. 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.

In 1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered. Cheered by their "victory", the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.

Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced a second day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts -- where it remained on display for 24 years. The killings became more and more frenzied, with days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful massacre. George Washington finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War -- on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.

. . . .

https://www.manataka.org/page269.html

http://www.indians.org/articles/thanksgiving.html

the only reason I celebrate is in honour of the earth tradition harvest festivals (like the green corn one mentioned above)

basically, almost everything we ever learned about the history of this greatest, bestest, most wonderfulest nation in the whole world is a lie.

if you have not yet read dunbar-ortiz' "an indigenous people's history of the united states", I urge you to do so.

We all have myths. Most of what's said here we know, but some of it's a bit exaggerated. Settlements "dotted" the N. American east coast, but only really in Florida (and perhaps a place in S. Georgia), with Roanoake no longer in existent to do much dotting. In other words, basically from Georgia to Nova Scotia there wasn't a single dot.

For example, Tisquantum's "Native" planting technique was otherwise unattested in the Americas. However, it was attested in a part of Europe where he'd been taken by a raiding party. But it sounds rather less impressive to say that Tisquantum saved the British settlers by teaching them Iberian planting techniques he'd culturally appropriated without apparent attribution.

Then there's the entire process by which Thanksgiving became accepted enough to be made into a holiday. Such things usually have a lot of threads, instead of a single event--and when the dust settles, the events aren't necessarily entirely as believed. Such is the power of a "myth" or "story" which many anthropologists say are what social and cultural identity's built around. Under that kind of an analysis, a lot of "academic advocacy" in the last 50 years has been geared to creating myths and stories to reaffirm a strong ethnic identity by some groups and to undermine the myths and stories that affirm any sort of pan-US ethnos. Much of this is subject to a lot of spin and forgetfulness. It's racist to fail to undermine certain myths; it's racist to undermine certain myths. Depends on the Cause.

just a couple of "dots" here.

Thanks. Now I have some good reading whilest at my in laws.

Man I missed DU so much.

"ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota"

You mean the ones that Dee Brown described like this?

"Another reason was the indiscriminate killing of white settlers on the north side of the Minnesota River, a bloody slaughter carried out by marauding bands of undisciplined young men while Little Crow was besieging Fort Ridgely. Several hundred settlers had been trapped in their cabins without warning. Many had been brutally slain. Others had fled to safety, some to the villages of Sioux bands that Little Crow hoped would join his cause." (BMHWK pp 51-52)

Yeah, the poor dears were just starving. Its not like they were killing people or anything.

For another thing she makes it sound like Mystic happened a) at Thanksgiving and b) out of nowhere.

Pure bullsh*t. It happened on 26 May 1637 and it was in the midst of a war. You know, there was an attack on Wethersfield a month earlier.

"23 April 1637
Attack on settlers working in field near Wethersfield, in retribution for confiscation of land belonging to Sowheag, a sachem. Seven to nine settlers are killed and two girls are taken captive."

Wilson says this about that attack (in his pro-Indian book "The Earth Shall Weep"
"Even this (attack on Wethersfield) when set against Endecott's massacre on Block Island (which killed 90, mostly Naragansetts), seems (and was almost certainly intended to be) a fairly measured reprisal, but it provoked intense fear and anger amongst the colonists." (TESW p. 89)

Note, the attack produced - intense fear and anger.

Meanwhile Uncas, a Mohegan rival to the Pequot sachem, was stirring up crap, basically playing the colonists for his own purposes, again, here is Wilson

"Uncas - who voraciously seized the opportunity to undermine Sassacus's position by suggesting that 'out of desperate madnesse' he planned an all-out war against the settlers.' (TESW p. 89)

And this business about the Wampanoag chief. Is she perhaps talking about King Phillip? 38 years later after the events of 1637? There was 50 years of relative peace between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims after 1620. Then there was King Phillip's war (of course Francis Jennings calls that the Pilgrim's "Second war of conquest". But are we supposed to pretend that this did not happen?

During King Phillip's war, the Wampanoags, and their allies, wiped out 13 settlements and killed 600 settlers.

As the descendant of some of those Pilgrim's am I supposed to be sad because the Indians did not win the war and wipe out the Pilgrims? (Well as Queen sang I do "sometimes wish I'd never been born at all" but perhaps there will be better months ahead.)

Of course, we are supposed to remember and feel deep shame about the 300-700 Indians who were killed at Mystic.

In the meantime, probably nobody has ever heard or will ever remember the 10,400 people killed at the Battle of Noerdlingen in 1634. Perhaps 10,000,000 Germans died in the thirty years war (many of them from plagues spread by the war) from 1618-48 but it is only a genocide when 3 million Indians die of disease. (Best population estimates I have seen are in Thornton's "American Indian holocaust and survival" which shows a population of about 5 million in 1492 which was down by 40% by 1600, before there was any significant English settlement.)

When the white man came and took our land.

Food like turkey, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash (pumpkin), cranberries, pecans, green beans, etc. were all indigenous to America, not appearing elsewhere in the world until after Columbus arrived.

Tomatoes, pineapples, green peppers, vanilla, chocolate and other types of food originated in America too, but much of it isn't typically included in Thanksgiving fare. I assume that food wasn't grown or eaten as often in North America during past harvest holidays?