Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, my first as a vegetarian, and I don't know what I am going to eat. Tofurky? The box makes it look pretty good, at least to me:



Nevertheless, I am excited to spend time with my family. I'm also glad that all of America gets the weekend off from school and work.

That being said, the Thanksgiving that we all celebrate is a bloated, skewed version of the actual event the holiday represents.

Again I find myself too selfish, lazy, and engulfed to rebel.

Here is some information I found on this website:
http://www.danielnpaul.com/TheRealThanksgiving.html

from a book called:
"The Hidden History of Massachusetts: A Guide for Black Folks"
by Tingba Apidta

I have paraphrased some of the information for convenience.

It is your right to know what really happened

1621 - The first "Thanksgiving"
by 1675 - The Massachusetts Englishmen were in a full-scale war with the great Indian chief of the Wampanoags, Metacomet.
1863 - Abraham Lincoln declares Thanksgiving a holiday

1970 - Frank B. James, president of the Federated Eastern Indian League, prepares a speech for a Plymouth banquet exposing the Pilgrims of crimes, but is told he can't deliver it. He then declines to speak, and on Thanksgiving Day hundreds of Indians from around the country come to protest.


According to a single-paragraph account in the writings of one Pilgrim, a harvest feast did take place in Plymouth in 1621, but amidst the imagery of a picnic of interracial harmony is some of the most terrifying bloodshed in New World history.


Though it later became known as "Thanksgiving," the Pilgrims never called it that. The Pilgrim crop had failed miserably that year, but the agricultural expertise of the Indians had produced twenty acres of corn, without which the Pilgrims would have surely perished.

Contrary to popular mythology the Pilgrims were no friends to the local Indians. They were engaged in a ruthless war of extermination against their hosts, even as they falsely posed as friends. Just days before the alleged Thanksgiving love-fest, a company of Pilgrims actively sought to chop off the head of a local chief.


The Pilgrims invited the Indian sachem Massasoit to their feast, and it was Massasoit, engaging in the tribal tradition of equal sharing, who then invited ninety or more of his Indian brothers and sisters-to the annoyance of the 50 or so ungrateful Europeans. No turkey, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie was served; they likely ate duck or geese and the venison from the 5 deer brought by Massasoit.

The Pilgrims wore no black hats or buckled shoes-these were inventions of artists hundreds of years since that time.


After writing this, what I am going to eat for Thanksgiving seems like less of an issue.