Episode 46: Thanksgiving
The More You Know
As we approach the holiday season we will hear a great deal of rhetoric about families and family values. We will hear about the historical importance of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and how they were both expressions of Christian values.
Christmas is a religious holiday that has been adopted by all kinds of people as a secular celebration. Thanksgiving is no less religious, and it has also been adopted as a secular holiday.
Thanksgiving needs to be practiced with some awareness of its problematic origins.
The first Thanksgiving was a three day harvest celebration held by about fifty Plymouth colonists who survived the difficult passage and conditions that killed off, and a little over a hundred uninvited members of the Pokanoket Wampanoag tribe, including their chief, Ousemequin. The celebration became an irregular tradition for many years, and was declared a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, an attempt to mend the country after the Civil War:
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union. In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
The Wampanoag people, People of the First Light, were nearly decimated by contact with European settlers and traders. Speculation is that as high as ninety percent of local indigenous populations were lost, and local confederated tribes were destabilized by the continued expansion of settlers into Indigenous lands. Many Wampanoag, devastated by illness and their helplessness in the face of mass deaths, decided to convert to Christianity. To do it, they accommodated the European ideas about Patriarchy, abandoning their own traditions where women could inherit family wealth and had a voice in tribal decisions.
Chief Ousemequin had two sons that converted to Christianity, Wamsutta and Metacom. They were given Christian names, Alexander and Phillip. Alexander died suddenly, under what many Wampanoag felt was suspicious circumstances. Phillip was not only of the opinion that the ever expanding settlers had poisoned his brother, but that they would poison him as well. He was summoned to a meeting with settlers where they accused him of resisting progress, and insisted that he signed a document demanding the surrender of all Wampanoag firearms. Chief Phillip signed the agreement but did not comply.
Aggressions rose between the colonizers and the indigenous tribes. It led to what is remembered as King Phillip’s War, a fight in which the Christian Indians, their loyalties divided, often took up arms against their own chief. At the end of the war 40 percent of the Local indigenous population was dead. Members of the revolt were drawn and quartered, and those parts put on public display. Chief Phillip’s wife and nine year old son were sold into slavery. In 1676 Phillip himself was captured and killed.
The first recorded celebration was in 1621. King Phillip’s War ended after two bitter years in 1676. Fifty one years after that first celebration of unity the settlers and native peoples, a program of destabilization and genocide had already begun.