![]() Many died along the way.Learn More History at “Decolonizing Your Thanksgiving” Beginning in 1831, tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced to relocate from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people.”Īnd this says nothing of all the treaties brokered and then broken or all the grabbing of land removing populations, including the most famous removal of natives: the Trail of Tears. There would be other massacres and many wars.Īccording to, “From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier - the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world - became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. This was just one of the earliest episodes in which settlers and colonists did something horrible to the natives. Just 16 years after the Wampanoag shared that meal, they were massacred. Following the massacre, William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for “the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man the settlers believed the Wampanoags killed, they burned a nearby village, killing as many as 500 men, women, and children. Relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated, leading to the Pequot War. The celebration in 1621 did not mark a friendly turning point and did not become an annual event. ![]() Some friends.īut many of those native people not killed by disease would be killed by direct deed.Īs Grace Donnelly wrote in a 2017 piece for Fortune: King James’s patent called this spread of disease “ a wonderfull Plague” that might help to devastate and depopulate the region. This weakening of the native population by disease from the new arrivals’ ships created an opening for the Pilgrims. He continued: “Modern scholars have argued that indigenous communities were devastated by leptospirosis, a disease caused by Old World bacteria that had likely reached New England through the feces of rats that arrived on European ships.” John Smith in the early 1600s, “a terrible illness spread through the region” among the Native Americans. Mancall further explained that after the visits to the New World by Samuel de Champlain and Capt. ![]() William Bradford would say in his book “Of Plymouth Plantation,” which he began to write in 1630, that the Puritans had arrived in “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Mancall, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote for CNN on Wednesday, Gov. That does not appear to be true.Īs Peter C. The second myth is that the Wampanoag were feasting with friends. The Pilgrims had been desperate and sick and dying but had finally had some luck with crops. Indeed, two of the most famous paintings depicting the first Thanksgiving - one by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe and the other by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris - feature the natives in a subservient position, outnumbered and crouching on the ground on the edge of the frame. This is counter to the Pilgrim-centric view so often presented. The Native Americans even provided the bulk of the food, according to the Manataka American Indian Council. This is the first myth: that the first Thanksgiving was dominated by the Pilgrim and not the Native American. What is widely viewed as the first Thanksgiving was a three-day feast to which the Pilgrims had invited the local Wampanoag people as a celebration of the harvest.Ībout 90 came, almost twice the number of Pilgrims.
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