Many people believe that the original Thanksgiving was a fancy celebration between Native Americans and pilgrims, but the reality is far more disturbing.
Fanaticism for the holiday obscures the reasons why it shouldn’t be celebrated. The killings and mistreatment of Native Americans by English colonizers are glossed over during the “happy” feast.
The beginning of the end of Native American life began with the Pequot Massacre on May 26, 1637, when English colonizers defeated the Pequot tribe, leading to the tribe’s eventual downfall.
Although the holiday was made out to make those who celebrate it grateful for land that the Englishmen’s “God” presented to them, the conquest of the Americas was purely an act of genocide.
It gave an idea of peace that may have never existed between Native Americans and the pilgrims.
According to a Nov. 20, 2017 Business Insider article, “In 1637 . . . Governor John Winthrop declared a day of thanks-giving to celebrate colonial soldiers who had just slaughtered 700 Pequot men, women and children in what is now Mystic, Connecticut.”
Winthrop’s Thanksgiving celebrated the slaughter of Native Americans.
English colonizers learned to survive by backstabbing, murdering, enslaving and stripping Native Americans of their ancestral roots, not to mention they brought deathly diseases from Europe that plagued the Americas.
Native Americans have been continuously mistreated and “patriotic” Americans used their mistreatment as propaganda.
According to a Nov. 19, 2019, History.com article, on Nov. 26, 1863, Abraham Lincoln officially declared the last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day to promote peace and unity.
In the same article by History.com, it said that by establishing the holiday as an American custom, Lincoln hoped it would help “heal the wounds of the nation.”
Although Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation that year, a year prior he had issued an order for the death of 38 Dakota Native men in Minnesota, which became the largest mass execution in U.S. history, according to a Dec. 26, 2012 article by The Nation, a
news magazine.
Lincoln’s decision was more than just trying to stop Native Americans from gaining back their land, but rather to punish them for
killing white settlers while defending their ancestral land.
“Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the United States stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels,” according to an article by The Nation. “He never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after the
Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers.”
Lincoln showed his true colors at this instance by demanding to kill only the natives and not the racist confederates.
According to a Nov. 1 article by The Washington Post, even when the 14th and 15th Amendments granted citizenship and the right to vote for African Americans, Native Americans were still excluded.
“It took until the 1960s and the passage of the Voting Rights Act for Native Americans to get the right to vote in every state, with Utah and Maine being among the last to recognize their full voting rights,” according to the same Washington Post article.
From the betrayal of their ancestors by English colonizers to stripping them of their identities, we should be mindful of all the suffering that Native Americans have gone through and not celebrate Thanksgiving.
