A Pensee on the Thanksgiving Day

A Pensee on the Thanksgiving Day
November 25, 2004

“History will be kind to us, Gentlemen, for I plan to write it.” Winston Churchill

A majority of Christians around the globe are taught at their Sunday school about the Thanksgiving Day as follows: in early 1630s the English Pilgrims, who escaped from the religious persecution, arrived in “New World” sailing aboard the Mayflower from Holland and settled in Plymouth Rock (Massachusetts) where the Pequot Indians called it home for hundreds of years.
And the Pilgrims thanked God for divine favors and goodness feasting and celebrating with the native Indians as the day was first officially proclaimed a National Holiday by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637.

It is said that history is largely a one-sided record composed by the victor….this is well demonstrated by the sanitized, filtered, and falsified history of triumph of the Western Civilization, as we termed the invasion of European colonists toward America a “discovery” and our sense of the past is manufactured for us mostly by history’s winners.
Worst, when this filtered history becomes a mainstream, orthodox, or conventional ones that carried through a process of repetition by “expert, historians, and other reputed institutes”, people readily accept it as true and legitimate description of the past.

As human history is written and marketed such a politically constructed way that we are effected not to enlighten ourselves in understanding the past but to solidify the current political, social, cultural, and religious climate.
When, however, someone gives a revisionistic and dissident views on the mainstream myths, people who were given a steady diet of orthodoxy become more alert and interested on unlearning the dis-information that they have been exposed during their entire life.
Heterodoxy always offers more diversified prospect in life than orthodoxy, as pagan religion is more generous and tolerant toward other religion than a monotheistic religion like Christianity.

In this perspective, you never lose anything but surely gain some truth about the origin of the Thanksgiving Day as you lend your ear toward my following spiel, though your pastor or teacher definitely cry wolf.

As we learned at school that Columbus was a great Navigator who “discovered” Americas, omitting an atrocities that he gave to the Arawak Indians in return for their kindness and tributes, Christians were encouraged to know only the good half of what took place in the Pequot Indian village in 1630s.
They were not told that the Thanksgiving Day was celebrated to commemorate the massacre of 700 men women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance—Thanksgiving Day to them—in their own house.

Indians were ordered by the English Puritan Christians and Dutch mercenaries come out from their home and were shot down, while others were burned alive in their wigwams.
Irony is these Indians were saviors for their Puritan attackers who were starving to death when they arrived in the land, and the Indians taught the Puritans how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables, and brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims.
How did the Puritan Christians justify the killing of their saviors, the Pequot Indians?

They appealed to their sacred Bible: Romans 13: 2 “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
Psalms 2:8 “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”
The book of Romans was said to be written by Apostle Paul who counseled the total obedience to the very state, Rome, that crucified his savior Jesus…his apologia is that since there exists no authority sans an act of God, it follows that those who do not submit to earthly rulers are in effect resisting celestial authority and shall receive to themselves damnation.

The Puritan Christians also believed that they were entitled to possess the whole land and property on earth and celestial space sanctioned by the Great Real Estate Agent as if the Zionist state of Israel has been rampaging through the Palestine, killing, maiming and massacring innocent Arabs men, women, and children.
As Jews cite the words of the Pentateuch as the guide to their conscience and early Christian Fathers supported the state power of Roman Emperor like Nero as a necessary tool to survive, Puritan Christians justified the massacring of Indians as a divine instruction from the heaven.

In Europe, both before and after the Reformation, whether in Protestant or Catholic countries, the established ecclesiastics sided with the princes against peasantry, the established powers no matter whether it is despotic, marauding, or exploitative ones, showing little or any sympathy for commoners, as we can see with Paul, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al.
That is, contrary to conventional belief that Christianity ameliorated the plight of the poor, the Christian Church always stood behind the state powers collaborated with Kings and Emperors as a “minister of God” and supported class oppression, slavery, sexism and ecclesiastical autocracy.

Recently, in his apologia on the issue of supporting and praying for Bush fils, a Korean pastor (Lim Hyeonsoo) at the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Toronto (www.lkpc.org) assured his congregation that it is a Christian duty to bless President Bush for his endeavors no matter what, if he is not against our Christian power.
It is not surprise for him to quote the same verses of Romans 13:2 in his sermon that early Puritan Christians employed in massacring 700 innocent men, women, and children…if Bush is with us Christians, he is a minister of God no matter what he does, invading other sovereign country, destroying the property, killing innocent civilians, and torturing prisoners of war…all are sanctioned by God that we should pray and support for his power.
“Torquemada Lim” seems to be calling for a warrior Christ whose fire and brimstone breathe on the necks of infidels as a squadron of Apache helicopters of US invading forces drops a dozen of phosphorous bombs on the fleeing Muslims.

In sum, history has been kind to the Christians because the keepers of faith were also the keepers of records in the past human history as commoners remained illiterate and were not even allowed to possess the Bible, and clergy had monopoly over the written words educating laymen a predominantly dogmatic theological nature and the book burning at the libraries was one of early Christian Father’s task to suppress the heterodoxy.
To term “a real history” a revisionism is a pap to whitewash the silenced, hidden part of mainstream history, and it is also important to relay a real history with the standard history in order to see a broad social implication.
Did I give you a bitter taste for your feast of turkey at the Thanksgiving Day?



Dear Pepe

I was born, raised, and grew up in the predominantly Christian environment studying the social sciences in post-graduated level, so I have eventually become a life-time Christian by default.
And now I shudder in shame and degradation that I was not aware of “a real history” until I happened to visit this website today and read your eye-popping story about the Thanksgiving Day saga.

I had a good turkey dinner with my friends of choir members from the Presbyterian Church last night, thanking our God for his benevolent gift without knowing that the Day was originated from the celebration in which the English Christian Puritans safely returned from their sortie of massacring 700 Indian men, women, and children.
I am sure neither one at the party would have known the real history nor care about it even if one ever knows about it.

I would like to add one more real history about the ship “May flower”…it was re-named as the Meijbloom (Dutch for May flower), continued to make history,
It reached Africa and became one of the first European ships to chain and carry enslaved African men, women and children to the Americas.
By the way, you briefly mentioned that Christianity supported the slavery system…would you elaborate on this matter, ‘cause I always believed that Jesus my God stands behind the indigent, powerless, and sick people.

Thanks

Connie


To Connie:
November 28, 2004

Thanks for your addendum on my article about the ‘Mayflower’, the Pilgrim Ship that had later renamed ‘Meijbloom’ and engaged in the slave transportation from African Continent, which I was totally unaware of the real history of the Ship.

On your query about my suggestion that Christianity sanctioned the slave system, I am not surprised to find your consternation, since there has been a wide currency that Christianity challenged whole institution of slavery with the brotherhood of love.

I also gather that you have never opened and perused the Book of Old Testament (Numbers 31:17-18) or you have never heard from your pastor about the New Testament (Col. 3-22) that urged the slaves to obey their master.
During early Christianity, entire Dark Age, the Protestant Reformation, and American Civil War, the verses in the Bible, especially Apostle Paul’s words, were accepted as the inerrant words of God that have been used throughout history to justify the slavery system.

Beginning with Paul, St. Augustine considered slavery divinely ordained and the prime cause of slavery is sin, that is, the sins of the enslaved not the enslaver.
In the late sixth century, the church owned hundreds of thousands of slaves, who worked its immense holdings in Gaul, Italy, Greece, Syria, Egypt, and northern Africa, and the papacy was the preeminent feudal overlord who keeps many heathen slaves.
In the time of Martin Luther, he was a champion for the cause of his rich and powerful patrons, the German Princes and vehemently denounced the half-starved, overtaxed peasants who dared to rebel.

In America, Christianity was the main pillar of Black slavery, interpreting the Bible view of slavery as follows: the Almighty, for-seeing the total degradation of Negro race, ordained them to servitude or slavery under the descendants of Shem and Japeth, doubtless because he judged it to be their fittest condition.
Even in North Africa, the Christian missionaries were involved in the slave trafficking with the European slave traders.
In sum whether during the late Roman Empire or in the antebellum United States, Christian teaching offered an ideological justification for the worldly interests of an atrocious slaveholders.

Few of us were taught such things that I mentioned above in Sunday school or any other academia, and I have been spending most of my time unlearning what I had learned from the established institutions.
It is mind-boggling to see that, in the twenty-first century of the evangelical Bible belt of the US and in some Korean Christian Community, the biblical literalists are clinging tightly to the verses that meant for the first century people and leading us to believe Paul’s words are the words of God.

Finally, I would like to close the article with an episode you might have interested in: the well-known and much-loved gospel hymn ‘Amazing Grace’: this hymn was penned on the deck of a slave ship with its human cargo chained both legs and hands below deck by the ship’s captain named John Newton who later became an ordained minister of the England Church.
And many black people love to sing in the Church in order to console their desolate fate without knowing that the hymn was the product of the slaveholder’s jeremiad in the rough sea for the safe voyage of their slave ancestors.

Life is full of ironies.

Pepe
November 28, 2004


November 15, 2000A day to give thanks?by Ward ChurchillThanksgiving is the day the United States celebrates the fact that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony successfully avoided starvation during the winter of 1620-21.
But from an American Indian perspective, what is it we're supposed to be so thankful for?
Does anyone really expect us to give thanks for the fact that soon after the Pilgrim Fathers regained their strength, they set out to dispossess and exterminate the very Indians who had fed them that first winter?
Are we to express our gratitude for the colonists' 1637 massacre of the Pequots at Mystic, Conn., or their rhetoric justifying the butchery by comparing Indians to "rats and mice and swarms of lice"?
Or should we be joyous about the endless series of similar slaughters that followed: at St. Francis (1759), Horseshoe Bend (1814), Bad Axe (1833), Blue Water (1854), Sand Creek (1864), Marias River (1870), Camp Robinson (1878) and Wounded Knee (1890), to name only the worst?
Should we be thankful for the scalp bounties paid by every English colony -- as well as every U.S. state and territory in the lower 48 -- for proof of the deaths of individual Indians, including women and children?
How might we best show our appreciation of the order issued by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, requiring smallpox-infested items be given as gifts to the Ottawas so that "we might extirpate this execrable race"?
Is it reasonable to assume that we might be jubilant that our overall population, numbering perhaps 15 million at the outset of the European invasion, was reduced to less than a quarter-million by 1890?
Maybe we should be glad the "peaceful settlers" didn't kill the rest of us outright. But they didn't really need to, did they? By 1900, they already had 98 percent of our land. The remaining Indians were simply dumped in the mostly arid and unwanted locales, where it was confidently predicted that we'd shortly die off altogether, out of sight and mind of the settler society.
We haven't died off yet, but we comprise far and away the most impoverished, malnourished and disease-ridden population on the continent today. Life expectancy on many reservations is about 50 years; that of Euroamericans more than 75.
We've also endured a pattern of cultural genocide during the 20th century. Our children were processed for generations through government boarding schools designed to "kill the Indian" in every child's consciousness and to replace Native traditions with a "more enlightened" Euroamerican set of values and understandings.
Should we feel grateful for the disastrous self-concept thereby fostered within our kids?
Are we to be thankful that their self-esteem is still degraded every day on cable television by a constant bombardment of recycled Hollywood Westerns and television segments presenting Indians as absurd and utterly dehumanized caricatures?
Should we tell our children to find pride in the sorts of insults to which we are subjected to as a matter of course: Tumbleweeds cartoons, for instance, or the presence of Chief Wahoo and the Redskins in professional sports?
Does anybody really believe we should feel honored by such things, or by place names like Squaw Valley and Squaw Peak? "Squaw," after all, is the Onondaga word for female genitalia. The derogatory effect on Native women should be quite clear.
About three-quarters of all adult Indians suffer alcoholism and/or other forms of substance abuse. This is not a "genetic condition." It is a desperate, collective attempt to escape our horrible reality since "America's Triumph."
It's no mystery why Indians don't observe Thanksgiving. The real question is why do you feast rather than fast on what should be a national day of mourning and atonement.
Before digging into your turkey and dressing on Nov. 23, you might wish to glance in a mirror and see if you can come up with an answer.Ward Churchill is professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. He's the author of "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present" (City Lights Books, 1998) and "Struggle For the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Expropriation in Contemporary North America" (Common Courage Press, 1992).