The Thanksgiving That Never Was.

If you haven't read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me then I demand you go get a copy of it and read it. I would like to thank him for the Thanksgiving information presented here. James Loewen is what my college history professor would have referred to as a "revisionist historian," and oh did he loathe them. Mostly because they challenged his white washed version of history that he had been proudly presenting for years. So here it is, Thanksgiving is a crock, your vision of the pilgrims and Native Americans sitting down around the horn of plenty to a massive feast never happened. Almost everything you have come to believe was bull. Abraham Lincoln is the one that coined the phrase Thanksgiving, and the word pilgrim didn't come around to being used until the 1870's. The whole concept of an autumnal harvest celebration was stolen from the Eastern Indians. It's all bunk plain and simple.
So why do we buy into the whole mythology. And by "we" I mean white folks. I am sure that there are a number of people of color that enjoy Thanksgiving traditions as much as the rest, but they were never included in the serene vision we have of the "first Thanksgiving." Well, we buy into it, and have for years because it fits a vision of the way we want to see ourselves as white people. The benevolent caretakers who were kind enough to invite the poor unfortunate Indians (we didn't call them Native Americans then, after all native would imply that they were here first and that somehow had claim to all of the land we took.). The fact is that the Native Americans were doing just fine before we showed up at the party with our diseases and weird ideology of what we could and couldn't take. In fact, if not for the Native Americans taking care of that first group of settlers, the settlers would have died. Bet they wish they could take that one back. White people want so desperately to buy into to this, or refuse to see the holiday for what it really represents because it calls for us to have personal accountability for our actions, past and present. Accountability is fine for all the people of color we accuse of mooching off welfare, committing vast numbers of crime, and rampant drug use, but for us, no way.
Thanksgiving in its traditions and folklore is just another way white society continues to rewrite history and push their ideology on everyone else. We were in the right back then, with God on our side committing mass genocide, and we're right now as justified by our inordinate control of any resources that would help a person succeed.
I don't celebrate thanksgiving, haven't for awhile. I like turkey though, and it's a good opportunity to talk to my kids about the way things really went down. I'm thankful for plenty of things, Thanksgiving just isn't one of them.