A Somewhat-Complicated Thanksgiving Story: Part 1

A look back at the First Thanksgiving...

According to the Washington Post (and I assume they’re currently working on a 3-part series revealing the World-Wide Santa Claus Hoax) the Thanksgiving story we’ve all been told is pretty much bullshit, which isn’t all that hard for me to believe because when I was taught about the Declaration of Independence, my teachers somehow managed to skip over the highly-inconvenient fact that the guy who wrote “All men are created equal” owned slaves.

Also (and I’m not making this up):

In 1828 the City of Philadelphia tried to sell the Liberty Bell for scrap (lucky for them nobody wanted it), but then in 1847 a guy named George Lippard published a book called Legends of the American Revolution and made up the story about the Bell and its role in the American Revolution and now it’s a National Icon which actually makes perfect sense if you consider how much Grade-A Bullshit has gone into the Foundations of Our Great Country.

But if we start debunking all the American History that has previously been bunked, we’ll be here all day, so let’s move on, but not before we hear from Napoleon Bonaparte and now that I say that out loud I can’t believe there isn’t a porn film with that title.

Anyway…

Napoleon once said: “What is history, but a fable agreed upon?” and to remind you of his historical importance, I’ve thoughtfully provided a picture of Napoleon with his best friend Pedro, right before the Battle of Waterloo, which as those of us who paid attention in 8th Grade History already know, was a talent contest where Napoleon freaked out his classmates with a weirdly compelling dance done while wearing moon boots.  

And to confuse matters even further, according to the internet, Napoleon didn’t actually say that thing about history; it was actually said by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle who was a French author, but most of us (meaning me) haven’t heard of de Fontenelle so why don’t we all agree that Napoleon said it because we already know who he is and his name has eight letters and Bernard’s has (I started to count, but then lost interest somewhere around “le Bovier”) let’s just say “too many” letters which means I’m not really into accuracy and is one of the many ways History turns into a game of “Telephone” and by the time a fact makes it around the circle Alexander Graham Bell invented the Hot Tub Time Machine.

And now let’s ruin Thanksgiving

You could read the Washington Post version – assuming you can find it – but I gotta warn you it’s short on jokes and these days journalists have to start stories about coal-mining accidents with soft leads, like: “When Bob Jones left for work that morning, he had no idea how his day would change by nightfall” and the writer who wrote the Post story felt it necessary to describe the road she took to conduct an interview because every reporter’s trying to sound like Walt Whitman so they can win awards which means the days of Jack Webb Journalism – “Just the facts, ma’am” – are pretty much over.

So here’s the CliffsNotes version, assuming Cliff is a stand-up comedian telling bad jokes on Open Mike Night at the Laugh Shack, conveniently located in downtown Portland, Maine, and looking back at these last two paragraphs, maybe you would be better off reading about a two-lane road, but I can’t believe the Post reporter failed to mention the Autumn leaves, so that’s it…no Pulitzer for her.

Moving on.

When the Pilgrims arrived, the Wampanoag Nation (who had 30,000 to 100,000 dues paying members and the numbers are a little imprecise because Anally-Retentive White People hadn’t forced the National Census on them yet) lived in an area that stretched from Southeastern Massachusetts to parts of Rhode Island.

In 1620 the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth after first making landfall in Provincetown, but after getting a look at Provincetown real estate prices, decided to move on to a more affordable neighborhood, so the Plymouth Rock story is most likely bullshit and there’s no mention of it in two first-hand accounts of the people who were actually there at the time and Plymouth Rock went “unidentified” for 121 years until the son of one of the Pilgrims (and the son wasn’t there at the time) reported the rock’s significance and they went down to the beach 121 years later and the son said, “Yup, it’s that rock right there” and here’s what Larry Bird, a curator in the National Museum of American History (and I’ve always wondered what he’s been up to since retiring from the NBA) had to say about Plymouth Rock:

“It is important because of what people have turned it into.”

Which to my ear sounds like someone saying the story is pretty much bullshit in the politest way possible, so maybe this guy isn’t the NBA Larry Bird because that Larry Bird was known for trash-talking like the time the Indiana Pacers assigned a rookie to guard him and Larry turned to the Pacers’ bench and said:

“I know you guys are desperate, but can’t you find someone who at least has a prayer?”

If you want to read more about Plymouth Rock (and you might need to get a hobby if you do) here’s a link:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-true-story-behind-plymouth-rock-639690/

OK, so the Wampanoags had run-ins with Europeans before and those hadn’t gone so well (the Europeans kidnapped some Indians and sold them as slaves in Spain) so this time they avoided the Europeans, but kept an eye on them and after their first winter, half the Pilgrims died of cold, starvation and disease.

Meanwhile, the Wampanoag chief or sachem or maybe it was CEO, Ousamequin, had a lot on his plate even though he didn’t actually own a plate.

His people were also dying of disease (and it sounds like they were diseases that Europeans brought with them and some of the Pilgrims refused to wear masks or get vaccinated so there’s yet another reason for American Indians not to like us) and he wanted to keep peace with the Narragansett Tribe (so the idea that American Indians were living in peace and harmony until us White Devils showed up is also bullshit because Indian tribes were fighting each other long before we arrived) and the Post story speculates that Ousamequin “probably” – their word not mine – figured the Pilgrims would make better allies than enemies because the Pilgrims had guns instead of bows and arrows so I guess you gotta give that one to the NRA.

In 1621 Ousamaquin made contact with the Pilgrims and eventually the Wampanoags showed the Pilgrims how to plant beans and squash and use fish remains for fertilizer.

The Post story is a little short on the “who” part of “who, what, when where” but I found yet another story that said the Indian who helped out the Pilgrims was Squanto – one of the Indians previously taken as a slave – and despite his good PR in the Anals of History and, yes, I intentionally misspelled “annals” because it sounds like Squanto was a bit of an asshole. Here’s here’s that link:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/squanto

In any case, by Fall the Pilgrims had their first harvest and decided to celebrate with a feast and being Insufferable European Dicks did not invite the Indians who showed them how to do it.

(Although, the Squanto story disagrees with the Post story and says the Pilgrims did invite the Indians, so your call on what you believe, but I started with the Post article and will stick with the idea that they didn’t invite the Indians because it makes a better story, which demonstrates just how quickly History can go off the rails and I haven’t even mentioned the flying saucer I was going to throw in to make this story even more interesting…yet.)

Anyway…

According to the Post, the Pilgrims had some morons along who shot off guns to celebrate (their moron descendants are still doing the same thing today to celebrate winning a Super Bowl, so New York Jets fans are safe for yet another year) and the Wampanoags came running because they thought a war had started because who would be so stupid to shoot off guns to celebrate when bullets have the nasty habit of coming back down and there isn’t a Bullets-R-Us in the neighborhood so you can buy more?

So 100 Wampanoag warriors showed up for a fight and when they were told it was actually a celebration feast they looked at the menu and said: “Jesus, you guys are vegetarians?” and brought five deer to share, which is way more than the Pilgrims planned to do when they decided to keep all those scrumptious beans and squash (or would it be squashes?) to themselves.

(The Squanto story says it was 90 Indians and they were invited and if you look at the illustration at the top of this post, a Pilgrim hottie is giving food to an Indian and not the other way around so apparently you can tell the story any way you like and if you want to say they got takeout from Whataburger be my guest.)

Anyway…

To thank the Wampanoag for all they’d done, the English settlers made it illegal and punishable by death to teach a Wampanoag Indian to read or write and pushed the Wampanoag off their land and forced some of them to convert to Christianity and eventually the Wampanoag had their children taken away and sent to boarding schools where they had to cut their hair, stop speaking their language and abandon their culture.

Google the quote, “No good deed goes unpunished” and it’s surprising Oscar Wilde said it and not a Wampanoag Indian.

The truth? We can’t handle the truth!

Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag activist, called his people befriending the Pilgrims “perhaps our biggest mistake” and created a “National Day of Mourning” after planners for the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower landing refused to let him debunk the Thanksgiving Day myths as part of their celebration.

So when you sit down to enjoy your Non-Traditional Thanksgiving turkey (sounds like it wasn’t actually on the First Thanksgiving Menu), remember some people aren’t giving thanks and are sorry they showed the rest of us how to grow squash.

OK, now that me and the Washington Post have done our best to ruin Thanksgiving, come back tomorrow…or maybe the next day because I still haven’t finished Part 2…and I’ll tell you why we should all be thankful anyway.