Thanksgiving. Turkey Day, Indigenous American Day, Pumpkin Day, National Day of Mourning, ‘Takesgiving.’
Depending on which cultural prisms you peer through, last Thursday’s federal holiday is viewed as either a day of commemoration, the country’s first example of multiculturalism—the essence of Christianity ‘agape love’ and harmony—or the genesis of new-world White Supremacy.
While only a minority of Americans hold on to the false narrative of Thanksgiving symbolizing friendship and fellowship, the overwhelming majority use the holiday for familial reunions, travel, or to tighten their shoelaces as they prepare to race out into the cold for ‘Negro’ Friday sales.
For Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a reminder of the penultimate betrayal, the beginning of their ‘American holocaust.’
It is the preamble to the great American lie conceived in the bowels of Manifest Destiny.
It also represents a betrayal of the Christian tenets the Pilgrims supposedly left England to practice.
Thanksgiving is based on scripted mythology, sold to public school students for 403 years, epitomizing the merging of two cultures and the genesis of American freedom and democracy (for white men ONLY!).
In truth, American Thanksgiving was the genesis of ‘American apartheid’—both for this country’s original inhabitants and the Africans who shared their pain.
Contrary to the ‘His-story’ I was taught in government schools, the local Native Americans (the Wampanoag tribe) were not invited to celebrate the first harvest but instead converged on the Pilgrim settlement when they heard gunshots.
Because they were carrying deer and other game (no turkey), they decided to join the settlement families for dinner (which they actually provided).
Local Native (Americans?) did indeed help the naïve Pilgrims survive their early occupation, teaching them how to plant corn and generic survival skills. However, the Wampanoag’s primary interest was securing an alliance to ward off attacks from a neighboring tribe.
That temporary alliance quickly melted as the English expanded their turf. When the ‘real Americans’ objected, they massacred them in various confrontations, including what was referred to as the King Philip War.
The few Wampanoags who survived the Pilgrim’s bullets were enslaved or succumbed to the diseases the Europeans brought with them from the ‘old world.’
By the way, two Pilgrim-chartered ships initially sailed across the Atlantic. The first sank during a torrid storm, many of its passengers joining the ocean floor gravesites of Africans stolen from their homes to supplement the failed use of Native Americans for the Pilgrim slave system.
His-story suggests the first African slaves left Africa at about the same time the Pilgrims were traveling the ocean blue.
The truth is the Spanish brought African slaves to the southeastern coast in 1526. Those Native residents, however, knew the White men spoke with forked tongues and sent them back into the sea. However, they allowed the African slaves the Spanish brought with them sanctuary. It’s too bad they didn’t have cell phones to warn their northern brothers what to expect.
The decade before the arrival of the Pilgrims, European exploitation, and slavery, it was disease that caused the death of upwards of four million Native Americans in what was called the ‘Great Death.’
Not by coincidence, the so-called righteous Christians justified their slaughter by asserting God had ordained their actions, ‘cleansing’ the land of the savage, uncivilized, and ungodly ‘injuns’.
Within a few years of their arrival in Plymouth, the Pilgrims had facilitated ‘God’s’ work, killing off three-quarters of their Wampanoag ‘benefactors.’
To cement their ‘conquest,’ the followers of Yeshua ended resistance by killing the Wampanoag leader, Metacomet. And under the sign of the cross, they beheaded and disemboweled him as an example (makes you wonder who the real ‘savages’ were).
And to leave no doubt as to their ‘true culture,’ they impaled his head on a pole, where it remained for 25 years!
Fortunately, today, only a tiny minority of Americans celebrate the racist myth of Thanksgiving, which didn’t become a national holiday for another two centuries.
Initially a ‘harvest fest,’ the first ‘commemoration’ was ‘designated’ in 1621, after the Pilgrims massacred more than 400 Pequot men, women, and children.
As you eat your turkey, consider the words of Governor Bradford, who decreed, “For the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a governor is in honor of the blood victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”
Armed with historical truth, most Americans use the day to celebrate family, or to give thanks to our God.
Thanksgiving is a secondary version of Kwanzaa, rooted in an African harvest festival.
Sustaining a tradition passed down by my ancestral queens, my wife spends three or four days preparing food, converting the house to a festival fall/winter sanctuary, and looking over her shoulder to make sure I’m doing my part—which can range from household chores to cleaning my guns in the event the Pilgrims and their cousins—the slave traders— show up with plates in hand.
All guests (family) form a circle and express what they are thankful for, leading up to my bonus mother providing a prayer for our blessings.
With that ceremony, we not only display an appreciation for each other and Nyame (God), but also carry on a tradition rooted in the Motherland (that’s Africa to the miseducated who should consider taking a ‘Critical Race Theory’—CRT—class).
Obviously, in our case, we dropped the mythological and deceitful lie of the original Thanksgiving eons ago, along with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and liberal ‘White Knights’ who gonna civilize us.
In fact, we forged a special kinship with the Native Americans who shared our suffering—our interrelated holocaust.
Also excluded from ‘His-story’ is that our indigenous cousins shared our fate of servitude and lynchings, both because of the color of our respective skins. Turn to page 213 of MY history book, and you’ll discover President Abe Lincoln ‘emancipated’ (lynched) 38 Native Americans for resisting colonization in 1862.
Given the conflicting facades around the ‘holiday’ and its misrepresentations of the ‘Good, Bad and Ugly,’ we should consider renaming the fourth Thursday to something we can more readily relate to.
How about the ‘Day of Recognition’? Naw, that opens the door for different interpretations.
What about ‘Turkey Day’? Nope, not only would that title give weight to the mythology around the ‘holiday,’ but moreover, with the price of food these days, many of us are forced to substitute wings or use mock chicken legs (processed and bread chicken) for drumsticks.
‘Day of Awakening’? Hmm… Seems appropriate, albeit open to interpretation, since, for many, Thanksgiving was a nightmare.
Likewise, ‘Pumpkin Day’ is inappropriate because Black folks prefer sweet potato pie and dressing instead of stuffing (make that ‘suffering’).
Now that I think about it, maybe we should focus on creating a new ‘holy day,’ one that brings clarity to the African/Original ‘American holocaust.’
If nothing else, we should be thankful that today, the ancestors of the turkey who escaped in 1621 were sacrificed last Thursday– instead of us.
Hotep.
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