---

Don’t Spread Myths During Thanksgiving

Comment: Pictured is impoverished native child living on Pine Ridge Rez.

A historian’s perspective

Nov 27

Public post

White people love to engage in fairytales during thanksgiving.  They have a nice mythology, involving Turkeys and pilgrims. The mythology begins by  ” Sometime in the 1600, Pilgrims who came on a boat from England met with the Indians.  The Indians taught pilgrims about food that grows in America.  They sat together and had a feast, and that’s why we celebrate thanksgiving.

NONE OF THIS HAPPENED.  

There is an easy option if you don’t want to get into gruesome genocide

Instead of reinforcing this dangerous myth, tell them the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

If we are being historically accurate, we would say, “during the civil war, Abraham Lincoln noticed the troop morale was low.  Lucky for him, the North had some victories under their belt, so he offered the First Proclamation Of Thanksgiving. 

The advantage of using this approach:

• It is truthful
• If you have very young children, you don’t have to expose them to the true horrors of genocide and settler-colonialism. 
• You stop perpetuating the strange thanksgiving myth.  

---

Meanwhile, if you do want to get into the gory genocidal details, listen to our episode about the Pequot Wars

Thanksgiving was actually a celebration of Mass Murder:

By 1637, Jensen writes, Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop “was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children” – a bloody pattern that would “repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated”.

Thanksgiving: The annual genocide whitewash | US …
https://www.aljazeera.com › indepth › opinion › thanksgiving-annual-gen…

Nov 23, 2017 – On the surface, it may seem that there’s not much to criticise about a holiday based on gratitude and eating – especially when it’s accompanied …