First time I read something of the following. My question is How much of this is true and has anyone in the Government ever asked for forgiveness to the American Indians for it?

Romanticized Fables Of Pilgrims And Indians Hide The Truth

The close of the month of November will bring a sigh of relief, a sigh echoed by the burping of countless containers of left-overs in refrigerators across the nation. As a Cherokee organization official, I'm often asked to speak during the period we jokingly call "The Moon of Paper Headdresses", the period from Columbus Day through the last Thursday in November. It's not the effort of speaking that stresses me, it's the pain of biting my tongue.

At this time of year, most Americans briefly remember that others were here before them, even though the declaration of November as American Indian Heritage Month goes largely unnoticed. As with Columbus Day, there is a reason that many Indians don't celebrate Thanksgiving and refuse to be associated with it. Many are surprised to learn it isn't a Native holiday at all. Our closest equivalent would be the Harvest Ceremony a month earlier, during the full moon of October, which for Cherokees is also the New Year. This is a time when we offer thanks to the Creator for our life and the blessings received during the year.

Many have grown up with romanticized fables of the "First Thanksgiving", complete with Pilgrims and Indians. This image comes from the late 19th century. The truth is less attractive.

In 1620, English Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts. We are told they were searching for religious freedom. The truth is they had all the freedom they could stand in Holland. So did other religious outcasts. What they really wanted was a land they could absolutely rule and control with their own ideas of religion, morality, and law.

When the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, the starving Pilgrims raided Indian storehouses, and even the bags of ceremonial grain  buried in Native graves. Aware of their extreme misery, the Wampanoags under Massasoit forgave the capital crime of grave robbing. They taught the English how to farm, how to hunt and harvest the foods of the area, and the following year brought 20 deer to a feast that was supposed to be a treaty.

Within a few years, the English had repaid the hospitality of their Wampanoag hosts by launching hostilities against them, which would culminate in 1676 with the execution and dismemberment of Massasoit's son Metacomet.

Relations with neighboring nations deteriorated as well. In the autumn of 1637, their neighbors the Pequots were gathered for their annual harvest festival near modern Groton. A detachment of English soldiers and Dutch mercenaries surrounded the village, and shot the Indians as they came out of the longhouse. At the end, they sealed exits and burned the village, killing some 700 men, women, and children.

The surviving Pequots were split into three groups: one-third were exiled to the Narragansett territory in Rhode Island (today's Paucatuck Pequots), one-third to the Mohegan territory in Connecticut (today's Mashantucket Pequots), and the remaining were shipped into slavery in the British West Indies colony of Barbados.

The next day, the English governor William Bradford declared "a day of Thanksgiving", thanking God that they had eliminated the Indians, opening Pequot land for white settlement. That proclamation was repeated each year for the next century.

The "freedom-seeking" English settlers, who had once survived by the capital crime of grave-robbing, now made it a capital crime to teach an Indian to read, to live among the Indians, or to speak the word "Pequot" in public.

In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, a shattered and disillusioned America sought a holiday of reconciliation. It was in this period that the "First Thanksgiving" mythology was born, complete with stoic Pilgrims and friendly, helpful Indians.

I relate the truth not to guilt trip white America or to ruin elementary school pageants, but to remind people that genocide and ethnocide are very real elements of U.S. history. When we see school children dressed as Pilgrims, complete with wide-barreled muskets, we remember all too well at whom the guns were aimed.

When our true history is known, perhaps more Americans will follow their turkey and cranberry sauce with a commitment to redress the outrages of the past by working to improve the living conditions of our people today, to confront the racism and political suppression that still exists at so many levels and to help us in preserving our culture and traditions for the future.

Only then can we can say, "let us give thanks together".

-- Enrique Ortiz (eaortiz@yahoo.com), November 11, 2003

Answers

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-- Enrique Ortiz (eaortiz@yahoo.com), November 11, 2003.

Enrique,

Are you suggesting a son responsible for the sins of a father?

-- Daniel Hawkenberry (dlm@catholic.org), November 11, 2003.

Enough of the political correctness, please. Were the English brutal to the Native Americans, yes indeed, but no less brutal than they were to the Celts in Ireland and Scotland and the French when they held territory there. It was a war for territory, the English colonists fought the native americans for land, and after 250 years, the Native Americans lost. I am sorry, but I do not go for guilt trips, because if you apply this standard to "white" Americans, apply it to everyone. The English certainly owe every bit the apology to the Celts they brutally repressed as they do to any tribes. I do not see many Irish and Scottish demanding English repay them for what took place.

Anyways, the native americans have US citizenship, and are protected by the constituion, and yes, justice is not allways blind, but it is not that native americans are not denied free will.

-- John B (rftech10@yahoo.com), November 11, 2003.

Jmj

Good day, Enrique.
I can't prove anything, but I strongly suspect that the entire list of alleged events is fictitious or dishonestly exagerrated in the extreme. In all my 52 years, I never heard such accusations, but these kinds of atrocities are not going to be kept hidden from the public for 225 years if they are really true. That's why I think that they are not true. They are presented by a member of a tribe (Cherokee) that was very badly mistreated by descendants of Europeans in the 19th century. However, it was a tribe that lived nowhere near the site of the first Thanksgiving. It has no "living memory" of what happened then. I smell an attempt at revenge here -- for all anti-Indian actions in U.S. history.

The "urban legends" site, www.snopes.com, does not have a page debunking the above allegations. However, it does have a page about U.S. Thanksgiving Day. See if you think the facts printed there mesh with the whinings of the disgruntled Cherokee ...

"Although the only two contemporary accounts of that first Thanksgiving mention 'fowl' and 'wild Turkies,' the animal we call a turkey was most likely not one of the items on the menu. Those words probably refer to geese, ducks, and pheasants (such as guinea fowl), not the wild North American turkey.

"Corn on the cob was another item probably not on the menu, since Indian corn was primarily used only for grinding up into meal. Pumpkin pie would have been absent as well, since the Pilgrims had no supply of flour. (They could have made something like a pudding from boiled pumpkin sweetened with honey or syrup, however.)

"Thanksgiving did not originate with the Pilgrims -- it was an ancient historical custom they would have been familiar with from England. What the Pilgrims were celebrating was really not a 'thanksgiving,' an occasion for religious piety and solemnity, but more of a harvest festival full of 'revelry, sports, and feast.'

"Because of a poor harvest the next year (and an influx of settlers in subsequent years), the pilgrims never celebrated another Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was an irregularly-celebrated holiday in America for over two centuries after that first occasion. The first time all the states in the USA celebrated Thanksgiving together was in 1777, but that was a one-time only affair prompted by the Revolutionary War. Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday celebrated on the last Thursday in November in 1863, and Franklin Roosevelt moved it to the fourth Thursday in November in 1939."

God bless you.
John

-- J. F. Gecik (jfgecik@hotmail.com), November 12, 2003.

Dear John: Thank you for your answer. BTW the previous post was NOT sent by me. Of course it is not the first time that someone uses my name and e-mail to send apocryphal messages.

En cuanto al tipejo ese que usa el nombre de otro para enviar mensajes aparte de ser un cobarde bien se puede ir mucho a la ......

God bless you.

Enrique

-- Enrique Ortiz (eaortiz@yahoo.com), November 14, 2003.

Enrique, if you wish, you can send the Moderator a private e-mail message [PaulCyp@cox.net] with the URL of this thread [http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00BWie], asking him to delete the thread, since it was started by an imposter. (I have no objection to losing my message, above, to deletion.)
JFG

-- J. F. Gecik (jfgecik@hotmail.com), November 16, 2003.

The mists of time have conspired with the lack of well documented history regarding much of what happened so long ago on those cold inhospitable shores of a world so far from their home, and what really happened is as much open to conjecture as it is to argument.

Given that we are ALL visitors to this shore, but having merely come at different times, it is important to look at some problems that still exist that existed then:

1. Tribalism-- The original social unit of the small tribal cluster has done more to hold back a sense of world peace and unity since long before the Paucatucks, Mashpees, Wampanoags, etc. squabbled with each other and had no unified defense against a more organized invasionary force. The Scots were conquered because of the same problem. Mc this and Mac that were too busy fighting with each other, and despite their bravery, (Braveheart type) and Wallace's declarations, it was their eventual downfall.

2. What I call the "Nya nya" factor, of whining about "rights" and "pride" and "we were here first" really serves no purpose in working towards peace. Whether Cherokee, or Aleut, we are STILL decendants of those travelers who spread humanity across the globe in their early bid to survive, possibly before, during, and since the last ice age. The europeans may have come here twice, but we ALL came here at some point. Hell, I am as much a 'native American' as anyone else by birth. So what?

3. War sucks. Having said that however does not negate what has basically been the history of humankind. War, conquest, and domination of one group of humans by another. Sorry but the earlier residents LOST to later comers. Stop laying guilt on us, WE did not lose. All these 'land settlements' and post facto reparations are foolishness. By these same rights, we 'white' people should sue the native Americans for the damages that their introduction of tobacco to us has created. Enrique, have YOU helped to addict anyone to tobacco? Probably not, just as I have never stolen land or killed Indians. Oh, is it still OK to say 'Indians?' The Wampanoags at Plimouth Plantation do not think so. They also deny that the natives fought each other and enslaved EACH OTHER long before us whiteys came to the beach for a cookout.

Harvest festivals or mere thanks for having 1/2 of your shipmates alive after one year, for whatever reason, we should ALL be thankful to be living in this country.

Bob

-- Robert Finlay (pabobfin@NOSPAMyahoo.com), November 22, 2004.