A day to give thanks?

[dcsmart]

THE THANKSGIVING myth is intertwined with this country's origin myth.

Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 in search of freedom. Indians helped them plant corn and survive. They made a compact that is the basis of our first constitution, and they held a feast, together with some Indians, to celebrate and give thanks to God for their first bounteous harvest.

The story has elements of truth, but not much more than elements. What children learn is the overarching message--that Pilgrims were everything good about America: European, Christian, sober, democratic, generous, God-fearing, and so on and so forth.

True, an Indian named Squanto did teach the Pilgrims how to plant corn and saved the invaders from total starvation. What we aren't told is that Squanto learned English because he had been abducted and made a slave in Europe some years before, and the place where he taught the new settlers to plant corn was the village he had grown up in, Patuxet, now depopulated by the impact of European diseases.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/25/day-to-give-thanks

[amyrose2712]

1. +1

[Berry Cool]

2. Oh boy, another Thanksgiving-basher.

Holidays are what YOU make of them, regardless of their history. -1

[Igel]

3. That's okay.

The origin of the idea of putting fish in with the corn seed is a bit of a mystery.

There's no evidence of it's being a traditional Native American thing. None at all. In fact, there are few places that did it. One is an area on the Iberian Peninsula. But, you may comment, that's surely unrelated.

Well, no.

Because this particular Native American had the ill-luck of not being captured just once. Once he was taken by the British. Another time he was held by either the Portuguese or the Spanish. Coincidentally, he was likely held in the area on the Iberian Peninsula where small fish were put in the holes when the villagers planted seeds.

So the wonderful "Native American" idea that saved the English Pilgrims was most likely something that the Indian in question learned from a set of Europeans that the English were usually at war with. Native American wisdom, indeed.