Nov. 27th, 2003

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Mark Kleiman on what's wrong with the Medicare bill.

I'll be off to wait for the potato rolls to rise.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
It's a gift we have less of than freedom, though.

A couple of things you probably think you know about Thanksgiving:

We're remembering with gratitude that first meal the colonists shared with the natives who welcomed then, which they called a Thanksgiving celebration. The pilgrims wore black. The natives wore blankets and war bonnets. We've been doing it ever since.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

As with most things american, the truth is a little more complicated.

Actually, a lot more complicated.

George Washington declared our first Thanksgiving holiday (to celebrate our revolutionary victory over England), but it didn't take. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's Ladies Book, convinced Lincoln to declare a national day for giving thanks in the wake of Gettysburg. Franklin Roosevelt moved it to the third week of November under pressure from merchants to prolong the christmas season (it was ever thus). Then he moved it back. The holiday we currently celebrate with a day off dates all the way back to Nixon.

That first dinner, which lasted three days, was not a Thanksgiving celebration, which would have been a religious holiday and spent in church. It was a native harvest festival, one of anywhere from six to nine Thanksgiving celebrations the natives observed to mark the bounties of nature. The pilgrims wore red, brown, blue, violet, beige, green and grey. The Wampanoag wore deer, beaver, otter and bear skins, and a single feather in their hair (sometimes). Samoset, Squanto's partner in cooperative agriculture, was not Wampanoag but Wabanaki. Squanto was sold as a slave to the Spanish in the caribbean by a british slaver, but was returned home by a spanish priest and a british explorer.

His village had been destroyed by a disease his people caught from the slavers.

The menu included deer, fish and berries. The native women ate with their husbands. The pilgrim women stood by the table and waited for their husbands to finish.

The celebration was a one-time deal. The pilgrims wanted to negotiate land rights for the Plimouth Colony. By the time of the son of Prince Massasoit led the tribe, the Puritans were doing well enough on their own to stop looking at the natives as their benefactors and start looking at them as people who God didn't like because they weren't Puritans (and that was ever thus too).

So what are we commemorating here? The evil of the europeans who enslaved Squanto and the goodness of the europeans who helped him home. His own incomprehensible largeness of spirit in helping to feed the tribe of the men who killed his village. Great beginnings and dashed hopes. Growth and death. Remembering and forgetting. The triumphant end of wars and wounds that don't heal. The sons of plenty chasing the the sons of the people who gave them that plenty into the wilderness. Plenty, want, a celebration of history and a day to mourn our inability to learn from it.

Giving thanks for who we are and what we have, and lowering our heads at what we aren't and haven't done.

Also football and dry buxom mutant turkeys and pre-staled breadcrumbs.

Really, it's a very American story.

It would be nice if we told it right.

It would be nice if we understood it.

Since it's here, it would be nice if we celebrated it by giving thanks.

Take a minute and do that, 'k?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Now the time has come!
Hear us, Lord of the Sky!
We are here to speak the truth,
for you do not hear lies,
We are your children, Lord of the Sky.
...
Now in the beginning of all things
You provided that we inherit your creation
You said: I shall make the earth
on which people shall live
And they shall look to the earth as their mother
And they shall say, "It is she who supports us."
You said that we should always be thankful
For our earth and for each other
So it is that we are gathered here
We are your children, Lord of the Sky.

links:
Thanksgiving Information
Thanksgiving Information
Daily Life in 1621
Wampanoag Indians
Thanksgiving Information
Thanksgivingand the Wampanoag Indians
Mayflower Myths
Federal Holidays - Kids in the House
Thanksgiving Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln
Thanksgiving as a National Holiday
American Indians try to blend cultures
Pilgrims, No Thanks in Mohawk Country

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