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cary@afone.as.arizona.edu (Cary Kittrell) wrote in
news:dlvva4$c30$1@onion.ccit.arizona.edu:

A day on which we -- unlike the rest of the world, which
merely holds generic harvest festivals, with all attendant
debauchery -- a day on which we remember those noble
Pilgrims, who invited their Indian brothers to share in
giving thanks for the upcoming opportunity to donate so
very much land to their new-found European brothers.

Or to quote, as I periodically must, from James Loewen:


Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays
the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in
their starched Sunday best next to their almost naked
Indian guests. As a holiday greeting card puts it, "`I'
is for the Indians we invited to share our food." The
silliness of all this reaches its zenith in the
handouts that schoolchildren have carried home for
decades, complete with captions such as, "They served
pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians
had never seen such a feast!" When the Native American
novelist Michael Dorris's son brought home this
"information" from his New Hampshire elementary school,
Dorris pointed out that "the Pilgrims had literally
never seen such a feast," since all foods mentioned are
exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been
provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.

(from James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me")

The same thing happened at Jamestown (not the thanksgiving
feast, but it was the pasty white "gods" who couldn't feed
themselves and were starving while the natives had plenty
of food.

Which is why some whites, on pain of death, deserted the
colony to go live with the natives. They were tired of
digging up and eating their own dead. Plus, if you were
among the lower classes, you found out that you had a lot
more personal freedom and autonomy living with the natives.

Of course, if the English recaptured them, they executed
them. The flow was pretty much one-way, pretty much like
the Berlin Wall, for pretty much the same reasons. Indians
never jumped at the chance to enjoy the benefits of English
civilization any more than West Berliners climbed the wall
to get into the socialist state utopia of East Germany.

Secret Squirrel

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