Thanksgiving to the average American is the National Day of Mourning to many Native Americans and those that sympathize with the struggle of the Native people, for the arrival of the Pilgrims in what is now called America meant the death and destruction of the Native people of the land.
Many Americans celebrate Thanksgiving without knowing the true history behind the holiday.No thought is given to the genocide of the Native Americans and the hardships they had to endure by the European settlers.
According to a Huffington Post article titled “Why Thanksgiving is a ‘National Day of Mourning for Some Americans,” Mahtowin Munro, a co-leader of United American Indians of New England said, “The real underlying issue is the mythology; there’s a view that we’re this big melting pot country, or there’s a view that the Natives and the Pilgrims lived happily ever after and the Native people just evaporated into the woods or something to make way for the Pilgrims and all of the other aspects of the European invasion.”
Though claiming to be religious, it was not in the nature of the
Pilgrims to simply live in peace with the Native Americans. Very few
Natives actually went to what is considered the first Thanksgiving
feast, and soon afterwards, in 1637, a Pilgrim army led by Governor
Bradford, who was the one to declare a Thanksgiving Day, invaded a
village by the Pequot Tribe.
According to a plaque erected by the town of Plymouth in Massachusetts,
to many Native Americans, Thanksgiving Day “is a reminder of the
genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the
relentless assault on their culture.”
Though the origins of Thanksgiving Day is not all that it’s cracked up to be, in and of itself, it’s not wrong to have a day based on giving thanks.
But shouldn’t we give thanks everyday?
