Thanksgiving is one of the most popular holidays in the United States (and Canada), a day to reflect on and be thankful for all we have, while delighting in childhood dramas of the First Thanksgiving, a feast shared by Pilgrims from the Mayflower who landed at Plymouth Rock and American Natives in the fall of 1621.

But how accurate is our collective memory of this event? How much is mythology and how much is fact, meaning the best conclusion based on historical evidence? And are we forgetting details that might make the holiday much more meaningful, a chance to celebrate both Indian culture and generosity?

Let’s consider some awkward truths about the First Thanksgiving. Much of this information can be found in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by historian James Loewen, which I encourage everyone to read.

There was no such thing as “Plymouth Rock” and no such thing as a “Pilgrim”

At least not by the diction of the time, anyway. The term “Pilgrim” was actually not in common usage until the 1870s. It is used today to describe the English Separatists, who broke from the Church of England. (These were not, bear in mind, the Puritans, who desired no such break from the Church.) The Mayflower had 102 passengers onboard, but only about 35 were Separatists. The rest were ordinary settlers seeking wealth and land in the New World, devoid of religious motivation for their travels.

The “Plymouth Rock” part of the story, that is, the exact spot where the Mayflower passengers supposedly disembarked, originated over a century after the event. Further, they made landfall at Cape Cod a month before going on to what would become the Plymouth area.

Natives saved the Plymouth colonists from starvation, despite horrific white-Indian relations…and still may not have been invited to the First Thanksgiving

In the winter of 1620, half the Plymouth colonists died of disease and starvation. They knew nothing of how to survive in this strange new world. One the other hand, Native American tribes developed half the crops on the globe today, according to Loewen.

Only the intervention of Natives like Hobomok and Squanto saved them. Squanto was enslaved by English invaders in 1614 and had somehow escaped from Spain and made it back to his Patuxet village, to find everyone dead of disease and war. Whites enslaved him, yet he took pity on the Plymouth colonists. William Bradford called him “a special instrument sent of God.”

The Plymouth colonists were grave-diggers. They ransacked Massachusett, Narragansett, and Nauset graves, taking anything of value. To the Natives, this was desecration. The colonists were also thieves, stealing Indian corn, beans, and other crops from the Wampanoags and others.

Nearby, the Europeans had already gone to war with Indian tribes, such as in 1585 when Richard Grenville’s forces destroyed an entire Indian village in present-day Virginia after one Indian stole a silver cup, or in 1611, when Jamestown attacked the Powhatan Indians for refusing to return English settlers who had joined the Powhatan tribe to avoid starvation; the English destroyed a village, slaughtered about 15 Indians, stabbed the queen of the tribe to death, threw children into the river and began “shoteing owtt their Braynes in the water” (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States).

Despite this, the Wampanoags befriended the Plymouth colonists. Though admittedly, according to Loewen, this was in part because the Wampanoags had been decimated by the plague and desired allies to survive.

In the fall of 1621, the colonists celebrated their first successful corn harvest, and may have invited their saviors and allies, the Wampanoags, to feast with them for three days. (They did not celebrate annually, though they did have a similar feast in 1623.)

However, some historians doubt the Natives were invited. Tobias Vanderhoop, an Aquinnah Wampanoag, says his ancestors heard celebratory gunfire during the colonists’ feast, and marched to investigate, concerned their fragile peace treaty with the whites was on the verge of collapse. Vanderhoop says only when they arrived were they invited to join… and it was a “tense” meal.  

About 50 years later, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay colony waged war on the Wampanoags to seize their lands, and the Wampanoags were all but destroyed.

Was the First Thanksgiving actually in Florida?

Native Americans had a long history of celebrating the autumnal harvest before Europeans invaded their shores, and “both the Separatists who came over on the Mayflower and the Puritans who arrived soon after brought with them a tradition of providential holidays—days of fasting during difficult or pivotal moments and days of feasting and celebration to thank God in times of plenty.”

But even before the November 1621 feast of the Wampanoags and the Mayflower settlers, there was Pedro Menéndez de Avilé and crew, the Spanish who landed in St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, held a mass to thank God for their safe voyage, and feasted with the local Timucua.

There is also some evidence of a “thanksgiving to God” at Baffin Island, Canada between Englishmen and Natives in 1578.

The English celebrated a “day of thanksgiving to Almighty God” on December 4, 1619, without any Natives, when 38 British settlers landed at Berkeley Hundred on the James River. The Spanish may have similarly celebrated by themselves at San Elizario on the Rio Grande, in present-day Texas, in 1598.

In any case, days of thanksgiving became common practice in the New England colonies.

The first official “Day of Thanksgiving” was proclaimed in 1637 by Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had gone to Mystic, Connecticut to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children, and men.

The Continental Congress set aside a few days a year during the American Revolution for thanksgiving, George Washington declared a national day of thanksgiving in 1789, Sarah Josepha Hale (creator of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”) campaigned from the 1820s to the 1860s for a national holiday, and Abraham Lincoln declared the final Thursday of November Thanksgiving Day in 1863, the most dire year of the Civil War, “when the Union needed all the patriotism such an observance might muster.”

Not until the 1890s did the feast of the Plymouth settlers and Wampanoags become part of the modern American tradition.

English settlers were most thankful for the plague

Native American peoples, their immune systems unprepared for European diseases, died by the millions. Smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, influenza, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, and so on, began wiping out entire tribes as soon as the invaders arrived in the Americans in the late 15th century. 90% of the original Indians in New England died from disease.

While this is well-known, less known is how it delighted New England settlers. Today religious Americans give thanks for God for all they have on Thanksgiving; the prayers of our forefathers were far more disturbing.

William Bradford, a founder of the Plymouth colony, wrote, “It pleased God to afflict these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of 1,000, over 950 of them died, and many of them lay rotting above ground for want of burial…” He described the Indians with small pox:

[T]hey fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep.

John Winthrop, governor of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony that came after the Plymouth colony, called the Native American epidemic “miraculous,” writing, “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 the smallpox… God hath thereby cleared our title to this place…”

Speaking of a land dispute in 1631, Puritan minister Increase Mather said, “God ended the controversy by sending the small pox amongst the Indians. Whole towns of them were swept away, in some of them not so much as one Soul escaping Destruction.”  

This view laid a firm foundation for the enduring American belief that the formation and success of the United States was God’s will, no matter how many other people were killed or cultures destroyed in the process.

Meanwhile, Native Americans have held a National Day of Mourning on the final Thursday of November since 1970.

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The appropriation of symbols is interesting indeed.

Today being the fifth of November, much attention will be paid to the Guy Fawkes mask, popularized in the U.S., like the “Remember, Remember” rhyme, by the 2006 film V for Vendetta, in which a vigilante wearing the mask battles to overthrow a fascist dictatorship in Britain in a dystopian future.

The vigilante is the protagonist, murderous toward his enemies but compassionate toward his friends, with enough humanity to allow the British Parliament building time to empty before he blows it up.        

Since the film, the Fawkes mask has become a symbol of anti-government resistance, used by the hacker group Anonymous, which publicizes State secrets, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which opposes how corporations and the wealthy control the State, and popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and Asia.

Of course, there exists a serious disconnect between the modern use of this symbol and the historical person on whom it is based, as I will explain. The dichotomy reminds me, actually, of the appropriation of the Confederate flag and the embarrassingly anhistorical justification of its use.

It’s an interesting comparison because on the one hand we have a symbol that might be associated with the most radical of leftists, and on the other a symbol usually associated with the far right.

After a young white racist tried to spark a “race war” by massacring nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, fierce debate over the Confederate flag (which the shooter displayed in his personal life) shook the U.S. It led to the removal of many Confederate flags from government buildings in the traditional South.  

The debate over the flag was fierce. True, flying the Confederate flag doesn’t necessarily make you a racist, but it is a racist symbol regardless. These things are in no way mutually exclusive.

Many whites who fly it likely do carry conscious anti-black prejudice (nearly all whites have subconscious biases), but surely not all, in the same way many whites who use “nigger” are racist, but not necessarily all of them (Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy, explores this).

So we have non-racists who fly the flag, actual racists who fly the flag, and progressives who despise the flag.

Regarding the first of these, American whites (and even blacks) who display the Confederate flag say liberals who hate the flag (and actual racists who love it) are misrepresenting it, that it really represents “heritage, not hate.”

This is somewhat vague. By heritage, I suppose this means all Southern culture, tradition, and history besides slavery, insurrection, Jim Crow laws, white terrorism, lynching, etc. In reality, it’s only these non-racists who fly the flag that misrepresent it (appropriate it), in a “positive” way: ignoring its white supremacist origins. They are sugarcoating, whitewashing it.

It is well-known that the symbol originated as a battle flag for traitorous states that sought to preserve black slavery, and was popularized by a white terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan, after the war. According to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s

…foundations are laid…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…   

The creator of the flag (which originally had the stars and bars in the corner, the rest white) was quoted in the Daily Morning News on April 23, 1863 as saying:

As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.

It’s nonsense to claim progressives or actual bigots misrepresent its true meaning. It has evolved to mean something else, something benign, for some whites, which absolves them of blatant racism but also threatens to breed historical amnesia.

The Guy Fawkes mask is a similar story.

Fawkes was a Catholic terrorist who, along with co-conspirators, tried to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605. Unlike the hero of V for Vendetta, he did not seek to destroy an empty building. He and his companions wanted to assassinate King James I, a Protestant, no matter how many innocent people died beside him. The plot was uncovered in time and Fawkes was executed.

It was an act of religious and political terrorism, as Fawkes opposed decades of persecution of Catholics by the British royal family, a small act in an era of unspeakable religious violence, both within European nations and between them.

In the early 1500s, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others broke from the Roman Catholic Church to create a more “pure” Christianity. Northern Europe became dominated by Protestant states (like Britain), Southern Europe by Catholic states. Central Europe (primarily Germany) plunged into violence that lasted more than a century. Torture was widely used. It all then culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which devastated Europe and killed some 8 million people.

Perhaps one will justify Fawkes’ actions as being acceptable because of State oppression of Catholics (predictably, a justification more likely if the one making it is Catholic). Yet I wonder if one would say the same of a Sunni terrorist attempting to assassinate an oppressive Shiite ruler in a Middle East nation, an attempt that would massacre innocent bystanders. Would one not be quick to call that terrorism?

The Fawkes mask is a symbol of the violence bred by religion–both State violence against a minority religious group, and group violence against the State out of revenge. It symbolizes violence as the answer to religious conflict.

I support the actions of the groups mentioned above that today wear the Fawkes mask. Yet like the Confederate flag, their symbol should be buried. Why would decent human beings hold a flag created to represent the superiority of the white race, or wear a mask of a religious terrorist willing to kill innocent people to get to one enemy?

Put bluntly, it’s because they do not study history.

Remember, remember!

The fifth of November,

The Gunpowder treason and plot;

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot!

Guy Fawkes and his companions

Did the scheme contrive,

To blow the King and Parliament

All up alive.

Threescore barrels, laid below,

To prove old England’s overthrow.

But, by God’s providence, him they catch,

With a dark lantern, lighting a match!

A stick and a stake

For King James’s sake!

If you won’t give me one,

I’ll take two,

The better for me,

And the worse for you.

A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,

A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,

A pint of beer to wash it down,

And a jolly good fire to burn him.

Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!

Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!

Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

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A handful of American cities in the U.S. have abolished Columbus Day and replaced it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Apparently some think it makes more sense to celebrate the history and culture of Native Americans than the mass murderer who launched the campaign that nearly exterminated them.

As documented in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, when Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 and was greeted by Arawak Indians with food and gifts, he wrote in his journal, “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…they would make fine servants…with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

And so the Atlantic slave trade began. Columbus, noticing the gold ornaments the Arawaks wore on their ears, took several aboard his ships as prisoners to extract information from them.

After all, Columbus’ mission was not one of simple exploration and discovery. His mission was to find gold and spices in Asia. In return, Spain promised him governorship over all the lands he discovered, the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and 10% of all profits from the loot.

Columbus, moving from the Bahamas to what is now Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, sent several dozen Indians as slaves back to Spain in February 1494. In 1495, he rounded up 1,600 Indians in Haiti, selected the 550 “best males and females,” and sent them to Spain as slaves; two hundred died during the voyage. The remainder of the 1,600 back in the New World were handed out as slaves to his men.

Columbus, like the European invaders of the Americas that followed him, justified his atrocities with religious platitudes, saying, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

Indians were also rounded up and put to work on New World plantations called encomiendas. The death toll was catastrophic, and many women were raped.

After an Indian woman “treated me with her finger nails” because “she did not want it,” one Spaniard said, “I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams…” The woman then complied like she had “been brought up in a school of harlots.”

Columbus gave sex slaves to his men, saying girls “from nine to ten are now in high demand.”  

As it became clear that gold was in very limited supply on these Caribbean Islands (quite the opposite of what Columbus told the king and queen of Spain), Columbus grew more brutal.

All Arawaks over fourteen were ordered to collect a specific amount of gold every three months. Those that did not (and most could not) had their hands cut off, and left to bleed to death. Indians who fled were hunted down with dogs, who devoured them alive.

Dogs were also used when the invaders participated in monteria infernal: hunting Indians for sport.

Indians tried to mount a defense against Columbus, but were wiped out. They had no iron, no guns, no horses. Prisoners taken by the Spanish were hanged or burned to death.

A Spanish priest, Bartolemè de las Casas, wrote that Columbus’ men “thought nothing of knifing Indians by the tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” He saw two soldiers decapitate two Indian boys “for fun.”

He wrote, “They attacked towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women…cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughterhouse.”

Many Arawaks committed suicide with cassava poisoning, and parents killed their babies to keep them away from Columbus. The invaders “took infants from their mothers’ breasts…pitching them headfirst against the crags or…threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter.”

After two years on Haiti, half of the estimated 250,000 original inhabitants were dead. By 1515, there were about 50,000 left. By 1550, 500. By 1650, they had been exterminated completely for a long time.

Las Casas estimated that by 1508, “over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this?”

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