Rethinking The Thanksgiving Holiday

Rethinking The Thanksgiving Holiday

By William Katz

Since 1621 and Governor William Bradford of the Pilgrim colony of Massachusetts, Thanksgiving Day has been a political holiday. Usually wrapped in warm family and patriotic values, our rulers have shaped it to meet their needs. A Presidential Proclamation announces Thanksgiving each year and relatives and friends sit down to turkey feeling they are participants in a moment rich in tradition and worthy of celebration.

But is this tradition something to celebrate? In 1620, Pilgrims from England aboard the Mayflower came ashore in Massachusetts. They were able to avoid disaster and starvation when the Wampanoag Nation brought them gifts of food and offered advice on planting, hunting, and fishing. Since half of the world's crops had been planted by Native Americans and were unknown to Europeans, the Wampanoags brought the Pilgrims something of a miracle.

In 1621 after surviving their first winter, Pilgrim Governor William Bradford ordered a celebration. But Pilgrim thanks were not extended to the Wampanoag hosts but to their white God and deep Christian faith. If the Wampanoags were invited by the newcomers who viewed them as inferiors and servants, it probably was to have them bring the turkey, corn, and other delicacies, or serve the food.

If the Pilgrims learned any lessons about interracial co-operation in 1621, they were soon forgotten. In 1637 Governor Bradford, who saw his colonists locked in mortal combat with dangerous Native Americans, ordered his militia to conduct a night attack on the sleeping men, women and children of a Pequot Indian village. To Bradford, a devout Christian, the massacre was imbued with religious meaning:

It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same and horrible was the stink and stench thereof. But the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice and they [the Massachusetts militiamen] gave praise thereof to God. Reverend Increase Mather, Pilgrim spiritual father and still a hero in most US textbooks, asked his congregation to give thanks to God "that on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell."

Other English colonists had landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and almost immediately had trouble with their Indian neighbors. In 1619, a Dutch ship sold 19 African laborers at Jamestown, and the rulers of Jamestown treated both Africans and Native Americans as untrustworthy inferiors. In 1622, the year after the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, patience ran out for Virginia's Native Americans. They staged a massive attack on Jamestown that took 350 lives, historian James H. Johnson reports: “The Indians murdered every white but saved the Negroes.” Even at this early date two peoples of color showed a willingness to unite.

In 1789 Thanksgiving was revived when George Washington as first President asked the US Congress to make it a national holiday. By using the holiday's mythology of generosity and cooperation, he sought to unify diverse ethnic and racial groups behind the new political experiment called the United States.

Thanksgiving then was forgotten until the Civil War again sorely tested the nation. President Abraham Lincoln had to deal with many northern citizens who refused to support the war effort and his new emancipation policy. Pioneer feminist Sarah J. Hale, editor of a famous woman's magazine, had little trouble convincing the embattled Commander-in-Chief that a unifying, humanitarian holiday could serve his political goals.

Thanksgiving again disappeared until 1939 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt--seeking to unify Americans threatened by a Great Depression at home and fascist aggression abroad--called on the country to honor the holiday. In 1941, the year the US entered World War II, Congress decreed the fourth Thursday in November a Thanksgiving holiday.

Born and reborn as a unifying political symbol, Thanksgiving has glorified the European invaders, and accepted their oppression of people of color. But instead Thanksgiving could honor those Native Americans and African Americans who became our first freedom-fighters and the unity these two peoples often forged during five hundred years of resistance. Their rich history of heroism and unity deserves a Thanksgiving holiday.

© Copyright 2003 by William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. His website is: williamlkatz.com
Reprint from Global Black News