Why I Hate Thanksgiving
…with much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh and others whose names have over the years been lost
The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach.
Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages
onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came
ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later
wrote of this in his log. Here is what he wrote:
"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads
and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome
features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut
themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With
50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy -- the regime of death -- was inaugurated on the continent the Indians
called "Turtle Island."
You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus's Army took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and
insisted that they take him to the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears. And how, with
utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta -- the
Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused
to be taken prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the
Azores and Spain. During the long voyage, many of the Indian prisoners died. Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen
Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:
"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it.
When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." Columbus
concluded his report by asking for a little help from the King and Queen, and in return he would bring them "as much
gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask."
Columbus returned to the New World -- "new" for Europeans, that is -- with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim
was clear: Slaves, and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But word
spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors
left behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping women and taking children and women as
slaves. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors, even though they greatly outnumbered
them. In eight years, Columbus's men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves in the
mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people
were murdered between 1494 and 1508.
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico,
Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.
Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to
spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this "the primitive
accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and
culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North American English colonies, the pattern was
set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English
settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when
one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.
The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the
chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack. And the English began
starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial
times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa
-- ran away to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their children there.
In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the runaways, who were living fully
among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown
then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses,
cut down the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into boats, then
ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken
off the boat and stabbed to death.
By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians
fought back, and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians the English
aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
And then the Pilgrims arrived.
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of
Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution
in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at
Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They
appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the
uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans
13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to
themselves damnation."
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode
Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule
firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area.
In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English landed and
killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village
to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast,
destroying crops again.
The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to the ground. As one of
the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were
brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in
the name of Christianity.
Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few years. It is important to note: The
ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like
Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the
invaders from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for power. And, in the
end, the Indian population of 10 million that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one
million.
The way the different Indian peoples lived -- communally, consensually, making decisions through tribal councils, each
tribe having different sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were practiced as the norm --
contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything,
whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose the men who represented the clans at
village and tribal councils; it was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to war. The
Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children. They did not insist
on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to care for themselves. And, they
did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd.
The European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control
everything -- even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his
parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride,
which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in
humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people -- a combination of slavery, murder by the
colonists and disease -- was "the Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His People's
Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead for
religious reasons. Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the Wampanoags, and scalped
them. Scalping had been unknown among Native Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who
began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted scalps.
"What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western
Civilization? I think it would be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of Christian Europe, a
"civilizing force" that couldn't have been more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and
so slaughtered them.
These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and whom we celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also
known as Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in Maine.
They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry,
cold Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in their New World. He taught them
how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how
other plants could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head
chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And even that treaty was
soon broken. All this is celebrated as the First Thanksgiving.
My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn't do that. Their humanity made them assist
other human beings in need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they -- and those of us who are not Indian
as well -- paid a terrible price: The genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.
Let's look at one example of the Puritan values -- which were not, I repeat, the values of the English working class
values that we "give thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.
In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English working class staged a huge revolt. This was
done through the guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in order to
undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This alliance between international finance, national capital and
military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist nation-state.
The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret rumor said the commonality -- the vision of
communal society that would counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the landowners --
would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened -- householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys
didn't hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and
700 workers stormed the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French capitalist's house
was trashed.
Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the
streets, and a proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet together, and that all men should "keep their
wives in their houses." The prisoners were brought through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of
gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme
cruelty.
Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of
capitalism. The May Day riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their lands they had used
for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class
women organizers and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism -- were burned at the stake as witches.
Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a place to put
their Maypole.
Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as,
during the Vietnam war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as it was being sewn into
the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation Front).
In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot Indians, the Puritans in England abolished May Day
altogether. They had defeated the Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing proletarian insurgency at home
as well.
Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation, became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to
those who would turn the Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers, Levellers,
Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up
the first Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.
The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton had come over on
his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian who
founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up
the wall.
The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and continued through the ages. In the
late 1800s, the Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with
strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit."
They didn't call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return of the dead, and the expulsion of
the invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday!
Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the
Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion -- they stopped drinking
alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days, jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the
Shakers! Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were.
Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following
with the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was
a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian
riots, just as the Shakers were dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism.
On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells at 50 a minute -- always
developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust, or
the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney
to investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The Indians were responsible for the engagement."
In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the
townspeople. There are many speeches for the crowds who attend. That year -- the year of Nixon's secret invasion of
Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to
electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag
Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.
Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to speak he was told to show a copy of his
speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to
read it.
First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it.
What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide
of the Indians, that this “holyday” commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we
can to get out of work or off the streets and be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things we
have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and
everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the
colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor.
Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been
accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go
back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to
sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that
is impossible. So all I look forward to the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika -- not the
people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands
for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and … they will be the new Indians.
**********
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA, http://www.greenparty.org, and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition, http://www.nospray.org and the Brooklyn Greens.
**********
In memorium. Lest we forget.
The First Thanksgiving
From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the
massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he
talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot,
has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of
Connecticut.
"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate
the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to
them-in their own house," Newell said.
"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered
from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building," he said.
Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick
sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers
of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that
because it is first hand. It is not hearsay."
Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a
nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a
large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was "fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first settlers.