Biscuit of the Week

While pretty much everyone with a brain in America enjoyed family and friends and a feast of turkey with all the trimmings, there are always those who simply cannot be satisfied unless they are miserable. I give you an article from where else, the Communist News Network, talking about the more honest thing: The national day of mourning that Thanksgiving really should be. SMGDH:

There’s little similarity between the actual harvest feast in 1621 that eventually inspired Thanksgiving and the event’s commemoration in popular culture.Historians doubt that anyone ate turkey. The Wampanoags’ alliance with the Pilgrims was less about forging community than about ensuring survival at a time of tremendous change. And, initially, the pious newcomers didn’t even invite the Wampanoags to the revelry.

More sobering still, the yarn often spun in the US doesn’t mention the fact that Indigenous people’s encounter with English colonists was marked by incalculable loss from everything from genocide to disease and theft of land.

“As a holiday, Thanksgiving began in 1637 when it was proclaimed by governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to celebrate the safe return of the men who had gone to fight against the Pequot in Mystic, Connecticut,” journalist Matt Ruhl noted in 2014.

Juul explained, “The fighting led to the enslavement and massacre of over 700 men, women and children from the New England-based tribe, a bloody precursor to what would be centuries of strife for Native peoples in the US.”For a long time now, Indigenous people have been fighting to set the record straight.Established in 1970, National Day of Mourning turns the fourth Thursday of November into something more honest. Many Indigenous people use the day not only to remember the suffering inflicted in the 1620s but also to point out the struggles that Indigenous people continue to face today in the form of, on top of so much else, and violence against women and girls.

(Continue to face today? Really?)

The day came about unexpectedly. In 1970, coordinators for the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower landing asked a respected Aquinnah Wampanoag activist named Wamsutta Frank James to speak at the banquet they were planning. (There are two federally recognized tribes of Wampanoag people: the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe.) But the invitation hinged on one condition: He had to hand over a copy of the speech in advance.”It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts, James wrote. “This is a time of celebration for you — celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the White man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.” The speech, which recalled horrors such as Europeans’ enslavement and murder of Indigenous people, left the planners stunned.”I think that they wanted a token Native, and I think that they were expecting him to sing the praises of the Pilgrims — to thank them for bringing ‘civilization’ to these shores,” Kisha James, Wamsutta Frank James’ granddaughter, told CNN. “They said that he couldn’t give that speech because it was too inflammatory and that they’d write him a new one. But he refused to have words put in his mouth.”Deciding that this history was too significant for the country to ignore, Wamsutta Frank James joined with other Native people to create a “National Day of Mourning” as an Indigenous response to the Thanksgiving holiday.”Really, what we’ve been doing on National Day of Mourning every year since 1970 is telling the truth, explaining why we don’t give thanks for what happened in the 1620s or afterward, up until the present day,” said Mahtowin Munro, who is Lakota and the co-leader of the United American Indians of New England.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll just be thankful for what I have and what is. What’s the old saying? God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.