Thanksgiving: A 'National Day Of Mourning' For Some Americans

I enjoy Thanksgiving as a time to be together with family.  But beyond that, I really have little use for the holiday, especially some of the quasi-religious overtones.  Perhaps it's because I living Virginia and resent the way in which the Pilgrim's hijacked the Thanksgiving story which actually began in Virginia at Berkeley Plantation before the Pilgrims - who in reality were religious extremists - even arrived in North America.  But, it's really more about the fraudulent mythology that is perpetuated around the holiday that glosses over the genocide done by the Pilgrims and their descendants against the indigenous people they found.   It's also about the religious persecution that the Pilgrims inflicted on others - both settlers and native American - who failed to subscribe to their foul version of Christianity.   Indeed, the Pilgrims launched the model of religious persecution that has long haunted America, with LGBT individuals long being a favored target of religious based animus. A piece in Huffington Post reminds us of the other side of the Thanksgiving myth.  Here are highlights:

When Cedric Cromwell sits down with his family for a meal on Thanksgiving each year, the day holds a unique kind of significance.

Cromwell is the chairman and president of the tribal council of the Mashpee Wampanoag, the same Native American tribe that first made contact with the Pilgrims who arrived in Massachusetts in 1620. While the Wampanoag welcomed the Pilgrims and helped them ensure a successful first harvest, they were nearly wiped out by warfare and disease that arrived with the settlers. 

For Cromwell, Thanksgiving is an opportunity to give thanks, but also to highlight the way that his people suffered at the hands of the settlers.

The day is both a chance to ceremoniously express gratitude -- a practice that existed in Native American culture before the Pilgrims arrived -- and an opportunity to highlight the challenges the community faces today. Just as some are pushing to recognize "Indigenous Peoples' Day" on Columbus Day, there is an effort to use the Thanksgiving holiday to bring an accurate representation of Native American history into mainstream American culture.

Cromwell said that it was important to both give thanks and highlight the brutal history Native Americans have faced.

"Some would say, 'Why be so dark about it?' Well, it's real, it's truthful, it was a holocaust, and that holocaust must be shared and communicated so that we ensure that mankind doesn't do that to each other again," Cromwell said. 

"The real underlying issue is the mythology; there's a view that we're this big melting pot country, or there's a view that the Natives and the Pilgrims lived happily ever after and the Native people just evaporated into the woods or something to make way for the Pilgrims and all of the other aspects of the European invasion," she continued. "All around the country, schools continue to dress up their children in little Pilgrim and Indian costumes and the Indians welcome the Pilgrims and they all sit down together and everybody says 'Isn't that cute, that's so nice.' That's not at all what happened."

Here's some sobering evidence from Endgenocide.org of the intent to exterminate the native peoples in New England:

Throughout the Northeast, proclamations to create ‘redskins’, or scalps of Native Americans, were common during war and peace times. According to the 1775 Phips Proclamation in Massachusetts, King George II of Britain called for “subjects to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.”

Colonists were paid for each Penobscot Native they killed – fifty pounds for adult male scalps, twenty-five for adult female scalps, and twenty for scalps of boys and girls under age twelve. These proclamations explicitly display the settlers’ “intent to kill”, a major indicator of genocidal acts.

• 10 million+ Estimated number of Native Americans living in land that is now the United States when European explorers first arrived in the 15th century
• Less than 300,000 Estimated number of Native Americans living in the United States around 1900

That's right, state sponsored murder of children and the near annihilation of a people.  As we gather today, let's pause and remember the horrors done by the Pilgrims and other European settlers who painted the indigenous peoples as "savages" and "heathens" and used these labels as a justification for the extermination.   Much of America's history is very ugly and we need to remember this reality.

Native Americans - The Other Side of Thanksgiving

Putting aside the fact that the first Thanksgiving took place at Berkeley Plantation here in Virginia on December 4, 1619, rather than in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, there is another whole side of Thanksgiving that most will not reflect on today: that of Native Americans.  While popular culture and school room drawings this time of year reflect on the assistance that Native Americans gave to the Massachusetts colonists, nothing is said about the fact that those same colonists would soon launch a campaign of genocide and land theft against the same Native Americans that helped them survive.  Worse yet, that genocide would eventually become national policy for the new American nation.  Along with this agenda was the campaign against the two spirited Native Americans whom the godly Christians viewed as an abomination.  A piece in Gay Star News looks at this other side of what Thanksgiving means.  Here are highlights:

[F]or many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration, but rather a national day of mourning, remembering the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution and genocide of Native Americans and the long history of bloodshed with European settlers.

And in a supposedly more enlightened, if not ‘post-racial’, you would think that television images of whites doing ‘war whoops’ and ‘tomahawk chops’, coming across your screen were buried and long gone with its troubled era of Native American relations in this country.

I am also reminded of my Two-Spirit Native American brothers and sisters who struggle with their families and tribes not approving of their sexual identities and gender expressions as many of us do with our families and faith communities.

Homophobia is not indigenous to Native American culture. Rather, it is one of the many devastating effects of colonization and Christian missionaries that today Two-Spirits may be respected within one tribe yet ostracized in another.

‘Homophobia was taught to us as a component of Western education and religion,’ Navajo anthropologist Wesley Thomas has written.

‘We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos, which did not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior rather than the intricate roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this misrepresentation, our nations no longer accepted us as they once had.’

Traditionally, Two-Spirits symbolized Native Americans’ acceptance and celebration of diverse gender expressions and sexual identities.

They were revered as inherently sacred because they possessed and manifested both feminine and masculine spiritual qualities that were believed to bestow upon them a ‘universal knowledge’ and special spiritual connectedness with the Great Spirit.

The term Two-Spirits was coined in the early 1990s. Prior to this, Different indigenous peoples had specific words for Two-Spirits. In Lakota they were wíŋkte and nádleehé in Navajo. Today, the term has come to include all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex Native Americans.

The Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were right in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. But their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the civil and sexual rights of Native Americans.

And the Pilgrims’ animus toward homosexuals not only impacted Native American culture, but it also shaped Puritan law and theology.

Because the Pilgrims’ fervor for religious liberty was devoid of an ethic of accountability, they acted without moral liability and legal justice. They brought about the genocide of a people, a historical amnesia of the event, and an annual national celebration of Thanksgiving for their arrival.

As we get into the holiday spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers to the New World.

It is in the spirit of our connected struggles against discrimination that we can all stand on a solid rock that rests on a multicultural foundation for a true and honest Thanksgiving.

And in so doing, it helps us to remember, respect, mourn and give thanks to the struggles not only our LGBTI foremothers and forefathers endured, but also the ongoing struggle our Native American Two-Spirit brothers and sisters face everyday – and particularly on Thanksgiving Day.

Sadly, wherever they went be it the Americas, China, Japan or Africa, the Christian missionaries took their hatred and bigotry against LGBT individuals with them and caused the elimination  of long cultural acceptance of same sex love.  Just as is the case today, for the "godly folk," religious freedom has always meant depriving others of their rights and freedoms.  Selfishness and hypocrisy are two words that spring to mind.