Peace! The following article was originally posted on a Nation of Gods and Earths listserv by my brother in Allah's Mathematics, Allah Divine. Much love!
The Lie
The Pilgrims left England seeking religious freedom. When they landed here, the righteous Pilgrims met wild Indians who soon became their friends. They learned to work together even though they had different languages and cultures.
In October of 1621, the Pilgrim settlers and the Indians of Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts celebrated their good harvest and had a feast together. They each brought foods, which they shared with each other, in the first Thanksgiving, a celebration thanking God for taking care of their people. Thanksgiving is a wonderful way to remember all that we should be thankful for, and a reminder that white people and people of color can unite and be happy together. Yeah Turkey!
The Truth
This is how it really went.
The Pilgrims may have been religious radicals who were driven out of England, but they were never known for being "righteous" people. Although we are often taught that they were "fleeing religious persecution, " most schoolbooks don't mention that their voyage was being funded by a trading company. The trading company and the Pilgrims were interested in a lot more than religious freedom.
In 1620, the Pilgrims were pleased to find the ruins of a former Native village of the Pawtuxet Nation. They settled here and built a colony which they called the "Plymouth Plantation."
The Pawtuxet people had lived there in peace for thousands of years. That is, until the English settlers began arriving. In 1614, an English soldier named John Smith arrived and began taking Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. Another common practice among Europeans was to give "Smallpox Infected Blankets" to the Indians.
The settlers would offer the blankets as a friendly gift, secretly knowing what would soon happen to their new "friends." Since smallpox was unknown on this continent before the arrival of the Europeans, Indians did not have any immunity to the deadly disease. In a short time, smallpox would wipe out entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans. The Europeans thanked their God for the Indians' demise. A colony founder remarked in a letter back to England: "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 smallpox which still continues among them. So…God hath thereby cleared our title to this place."
By the time the Pilgrims arrived six years later, only one Pawtuxet had survived, a man named Squanto, who had spent time as a slave to the English.
When the Pilgrims met Squanto, they were sick and near starving. Since Squanto understood the language and customs of the Puritans, he taught them to use the corn growing wild from the abandoned fields of the village, taught them how to fish, and taught them about the foods, herbs and fruits of the land. Basically, Squanto saved their lives. Without his help, Plymouth Plantation would not have survived its first winter.
Squanto also negotiated a peace treaty between the Puritans and the Wampanoag Nation, a very large Native nation which totally surrounded the new Plymouth Plantation. Because of Squanto's help, the Puritans enjoyed almost 15 years of peaceful harmony with the surrounding Indians, and the Pilgrims prospered.
At the end of their first year, the Puritans held a great feast following the harvest of the food that Squanto had taught them how to farm. The feast honored Squanto and their friends, the Wampanoags. The first Thanksgiving was a day of the Pilgrims giving thanks for the Indians who helped them and took care of them. However, the Indians who were there were not even invited! Actually, a few days before this feast took place, a squad of Pilgrims led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian chief, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth settlement for the very purpose of keeping Indians out!
The feast was followed by three days of "Thanksgiving" celebrating their good fortune. The Pilgrims drank even more than their daily custom of half a gallon of beer, and engaged in drunken acts of violence and sodomy. They were having a good old-fashioned European party.
Soon after this first "Thanksgiving, " in 1629, the Puritans began a march inland from the shore. Using *Bible Passages* to justify their every move, they seized land, took the strong and young Indians as slaves to work their land, and killed the rest.
They destroyed their "friends" the Wampanoag pretty easily. Their chief was beheaded, and his head placed on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts - where it remained for 24 years.
But when they reached the Connecticut Valley around 1633, they met a different type of force. The Pequot Nation, very large and very powerful, had never entered into the peace treaty negotiated by Squanto, as had the Wampanoag and the Narragansett. They were not interested in helping or befriending the white settlers. The elders of the Pequot had warned them not to trust these people.
When resisting Pequot Natives killed two slave raiders, the Pilgrims demanded that the killers be turned over to them. The Pequot refused. This act of resistance led to the Pequot War, the bloodiest of the Indian wars in the northeast.
An army of over 200 white settlers was formed. They also convinced over 1,000 Narragansett warriors to join them by using lies and deceit. Although they would later destroy the Narragansett as well, the Narragansett Indians believed that they were helping the right group of people.
Commander John Mason decided not to fight a head-on battle. Instead, the Pequot were attacked, one village at a time, in the early hours of the morning. Each village was set on fire with its sleeping Natives burned alive. Women and children over 14 were raped and captured to be sold as slaves. Other survivors were brutally tortured and murdered.
Indians were sold into slavery in the islands of the West Indies, Spain, Algiers, and England; everywhere the Pilgrim traders went. The slave trade was so profitable that boatloads of 500 at a time left the harbors of New England. Of course, all this helped lay the foundations for the African slave trade.
As Ras Kass rapped in "Nature of the Threat":
Stealin land from the indigenous natives
Gave them alcohol to keep the Red (and BrownMan) intoxicated
Whites claim they had to civilize these pagan animals,
But up until 1848 there's documented cases
of whites bein the savage cannibals, eating Indians
In 1992, it's Jeffery Dahmer
They slaughtered a whole race with guns
Drugs, priests and nuns
1763, the first demonic tactic of biological warfare
As tokens of peace, Sir Jeffery Amherst
passed out clothin and blankets to the Indian community
Infested with small pox, knowin they had no immunity
Today it's AIDS, you best believe it's man made
Cause ain't a damn thing changed
The destruction of Indians in the Pequot War soon led to more destruction in King Philip's war. In 1641, the Dutch governor of Manhattan offered the first scalp bounty. Usually, we are taught that the Indians were the ones scalping white people. The truth was that it began with whites scalping Indians, and other Indians being paid or tricked to scalp their brothers and sisters.
The Dutch and Pilgrims joined forces to exterminate all Natives from New England, and village after village fell. Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Connecticut, the churches of Manhattan announced a day of "Thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the "heathen savages."
One colonist in Manhattan wrote, "There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts." Strange, indeed.
This was the Second Thanksgiving. Since that day, Thanksgiving has been a celebration of the destruction of Native people in the name of white supremacy. And somehow, God is all part of the plan.
During the feasting that followed this second Thanksgiving, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets of Manhattan like soccer balls. This is the origin of the football tradition on Thanksgiving.
From then on, a Thanksgiving feast was held after each successful massacre. Each town held days of Thanksgiving to celebrate their own victories over the Natives until it became clear that there needed to be an order for these special occasions. It was George Washington who finally brought a system and a schedule to Thanksgiving when he declared one day to be celebrated across the nation as Thanksgiving Day.
Years later, Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day a legal national holiday during the Civil War - on the same day and at the same time he was ordering troops to march against the Sioux Indians in Minnesota.
Epilogue
In 1492, there were over 80 million Native Americans. A century later there were only ten million. Today, there are about two million left.
You can't help everybody.First it was smallpox blankets meant to kill any Indian who touched them. But the Europeans gave them to the Indians as an act of friendship. The Indians would not be cold during the winter, thanks to the generous white people, right? Then they all started dying.
Then the Europeans offered alcohol to help the Indians cope with the cold winters (especially since many of them had lost their homes), and also to help celebrate their…um, well they ain't have sh*t to celebrate, did they? And now alcoholism is a major problem for Indians. They call it their "firewater" and that sh*t is killing many of them slowly.
Finally, some people learned that casinos could be built legally on Indian land. This seemed great. After all, the Pequot Indians, who were almost destroyed in the Pequot War, now make about $9 Billion a year off their casino built in the same area where they once fought. But guess what?
Now, the Indians have two more problems. First, they're losing their traditional values and deep understandings of man and nature. Instead, they're becoming shallow and materialistic in the pursuit of more money. And now the Indians have another addiction after alcohol: gambling.
Be careful whose "help" you accept.Everyone offering help isn't sincere.
PEACE!
