Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts

Thursday, November 27, 2025

405 Years Ago (Part II)

They say history is written by the victors, but sometimes it is rewritten, and rewritten. The latest rewrite occurred in the 1950s.
Time
By OLIVIA B. WAXMAN 
November 21, 2019


On a recent Saturday morning in Washington, D.C., about two dozen secondary-and-elementary-school teachers experienced a role reversal. This time, it was their turn to take a quiz: answer “true” or “false” for 14 statements about the famous meal known as the “First Thanksgiving.”

Did the people many of us know as pilgrims call themselves Separatists? Did the famous meal last three days? True and true, they shouted loudly in unison. Were the pilgrims originally heading for New Jersey? False.

But some of the other statements drew long pauses, or the soft murmurs of people nervous about saying the wrong thing in front of a group. Renée Gokey, Teacher Services Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, waited patiently for them to respond. The teachers at this Nov. 9 workshop on “Rethinking Thanksgiving in Your Classroom” were there to learn a better way to teach the Thanksgiving story to their students, but first, they had some studying to do. When Gokey explained that early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son, attendees gasped audibly.

[…]

But some of the other statements drew long pauses, or the soft murmurs of people nervous about saying the wrong thing in front of a group. Renée Gokey, Teacher Services Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, waited patiently for them to respond. The teachers at this Nov. 9 workshop on “Rethinking Thanksgiving in Your Classroom” were there to learn a better way to teach the Thanksgiving story to their students, but first, they had some studying to do. When Gokey explained that early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son, attendees gasped audibly.
But when you tread on history you have to walk lightly because some people hold on to tradition and don’t like the facts.
What really happened back in the fall of 1621 is documented in only two primary sources from colonists’ perspectives. Edward Winslow’s account of the bountiful harvest and the three-day feast with the Wampanoag people runs a measly six sentences, and Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford’s later account is about the same length—evidence, argues historian Peter C. Mancall, that neither colonial leader considered the event worth more than a paragraph. As Plymouth became part of Massachusetts and Puritans gave way to the Founding Fathers, nobody thought much about that moment. When George Washington declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789, his proclamation of gratefulness made no mention of anything related to what happened in Plymouth. Then, around 1820, a Philadelphia antiquarian named Alexander Young found Winslow’s account. He republished it in his 1841 Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a fateful footnote: “This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.”
Let us wave the Red, White, and Blue… this is what makes us great! We have Thanksgiving! Lets have parades and marching bands dressed up like Yankee-doodle, pumpkin pie and turkey dinners with all the fixings!
But that’s not what was included in the classroom materials about Thanksgiving that began to be developed in the wake of Lincoln’s proclamation, especially between the 1890s and 1920s, according to former Plimoth Plantation historian James W. Baker’s Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. The settlers were re-branded the “pilgrims.” An 1889 novel Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims by Jane G. Austin, which described “The First Thanksgiving of New England” as an outdoor feast, became a best-seller. In 1897, an illustration by W.L. Taylor of a meal like the one Austin described accompanied a piece in Ladies Home Journal that was presented as a factual article about the first Thanksgiving; thanks in part to the growth of the advertising industry at this time, variations of this image spread quickly.
In 1941 Thanksgiving was made a national holiday. Before then it was celebrated at different days in November. The National Archives writes;
To end the confusion, Congress decided to set a fixed-date for the Thanksgiving holiday. On October 6, 1941, the House passed a joint resolution declaring the last Thursday in November to be the legal Thanksgiving Day. 

The Senate amended the resolution establishing the holiday as the fourth Thursday, which would take into account those years when November has five Thursdays. The House agreed to the amendment, and President Roosevelt signed the resolution on December 26, 1941, establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the federal Thanksgiving Day holiday. The law went into effect the following year.
And so the Christmas shopping season was created!

*****

A heartwarming 1950s holiday film about the virtues of capitalism
The Atlantic
By Kathy Gilsinan
November 26, 2014


The Johnsons, a fictional Midwestern family, are in for a letdown one Thanksgiving in the 1950s. Expenses were high the previous month, and while the kids are getting stoked for turkey, it falls to their mom to tell them the truth: There will be no turkey this year. Little Tommy is incredulous: "No turkey for Thanksgiving?" Dick, the oldest, notes that everyone else on the block will have a turkey. "A fat lot we're gonna have to be thankful for," he sulks.

[…]

A Day of Thanksgiving came out in 1951, in the context of the early Cold War, with American troops battling communists in Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy kicking his investigations of suspected American communists into high gear. As such, the film extolls the virtues of capitalist democracy—even, as in the Johnsons' case, when you can't afford turkey. After all, Thanksgiving, as O. Henry pointed out at the turn of the 20th century, "is the one day of the year that is purely American." And America, per Mr. Johnson, is a set of freedoms and privileges that, by the 1950s, has produced abundance beyond the pilgrims' imaginings. "Do you know," Johnson asks his kids, "that there are some places in the world today where you have to get along without just about everything else" besides life itself?
Without Thanksgiving what would Norman Rockwell have to paint? Without Thanksgiving what would Macy's do?

Of all magazines to write about Thanksgiving, Science News had an interesting take on it.
Memory often favors a tidy narrative over the messier reality of history
By Sujata Gupta
Social Sciences Writer
November 21, 2023


Ask someone in the United States to name five events important to the country’s foundation and there’s a good chance they’ll mention the Pilgrims.

That’s what researchers found a few years ago when they put that question to some 2,000 people. The Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas and the Civil War topped the list. But coming in seventh place were the Pilgrims, the team reported in 2022 in Memory Studies.

The “Thanksgiving myth” is part of that tale, says coauthor and cognitive psychologist Henry Roediger, also at Washington University. The shorthand for that story, he says, goes like this: In 1621, the Pilgrims and Native Americans “had this peaceful meal and powwow [while] singing kumbaya.”

The two groups did engage in a peaceful harvest celebration in the fall of 1621, history suggests. But historians are quick to point out that the tidy tale ignores context, particularly the deadly diseases and bloody wars that devastated Indigenous populations both before and after the occasion.

[…]

Origin stories like the Thanksgiving one are particularly sticky as they underpin a group’s raison d’être. Fixing or changing the story risks muddying the plot and tearing apart the group, says Van Engen. “The Pilgrims just become right for telling [the] stories … that we want to tell about ourselves.”

[...]

But scholars are starting to grapple with how nations should contend with difficult pasts. “How do you keep a strong national identity and patriotism while at the same time acknowledging the more negative aspects of your history?” Roediger asks. The answer, as evidenced by increasing calls for racial reckonings in the United States and elsewhere, is very much a work in progress.
We must learn from the past! Not only from our roots but from global history, especial from the events in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
For that 1621 Thanksgiving, the complex historic arc goes like this. Up to 90 percent of the Wampanoag population had died from an epidemic brought by a previous wave of European explorers by the time the Pilgrims arrived in December 1620 in what’s now Massachusetts. The weakened community faced threats from an encroaching neighboring tribe. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims, unaccustomed to the new environment and climate, were dying of starvation and disease.
That got the right-wingers howling and started this whole “Woke” business.

The right-wingers picture Thanksgiving as “over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house...” and anyone who tampers with their fantasies watch out.
My thoughts:
Thanksgiving is a rough holiday for some and we have to keep that in mind, for the “haves” it is family, a table overflowing with food, and laughter. For the “have-nots” it can be a lonely time, it can be a time famine and empty plates. We need to be aware of these two diametrical opposites.


Thanksgiving might have been created with an ulterior motive to unify the country and build patriotism but it has warped into something else a time to be with family. But the harvest celebrations are found throughout history and in all different cultures.

So enjoy your leftovers. (That is also part of the tradition)   
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405 Years Ago! (Part I)

This is a reprint from last year; I figured it was fitting as I drive home today...

The Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod, and most of the history that we learned about it is wrong.

The New York Post has this article about the Pilgrims…
Pilgrims’ descendants defend their ancestors — and the history of America
By Peter W. Wood
November 21, 2020


Rebecca Locklear, 64, a 12th-generation Cape Codder, is a descendant of four of the families who arrived on the Mayflower in November 1620. She worries that society today, “is put into groups that are supposedly in a struggle against one another, rather than looking for commonality” — a view that opposes “the more open, inclusive society that the signers of the Mayflower Compact envisioned.”
[…]
Locklear and Whitaker both wrote to me after they read my recent New York Post essay, “This American Lie.” In it, I argued that The New York Times’ 1619 Project — which links the beginning of our country to the arrival of the first slaves on our shores in 1619 — is completely wrong. Instead, the Pilgrims’ signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 is a more accurate root of our nation, which is built on the idea that “all men are created equal.” Even before the Pilgrims and dozens of non-Pilgrims (or “Strangers” as the Pilgrims called them) stepped ashore in Plymouth, they set aside their deep divisions and voluntarily joined together to sign the Compact, agreeing to govern themselves with “just and equal laws.” After settling in Plymouth, this group lived in peace alongside their Native American neighbors, the Wampanoags, in a treaty that was unbroken for more than 50 years. In 1621, the autumn harvest meal between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoags marked the first ever Thanksgiving feast in America.

Yes, the Mayflower Compact was an important document, but they brought over slaves and indentured servants. And they didn’t live in peace with the indigenous population… Did you ever hear of King Philip’s War and the Pequot War?

First off, the Mayflower wasn’t just carrying Pilgrims; there were also Brownists or Separatists who were fleeing England on board the Mayflower.

The Mayflower compact is a significant historical document, the "wave-rocked cradle of our liberties", as one historian evocatively put it. Signed by the Pilgrims and the so-called Strangers, the craftsmen, merchants and indentured servants brought with them to establish a successful colony, it agreed to pass "just and equal laws for the good of the Colony" 1
The Mayflower first stopped in the “New World” (which was really only the “New World” if you came from Europe because the indigenous peoples lived here for tens of thousands of years.) It wasn’t Provincetown; they first stopped in Newfoundland to resupply, probably at Renews in Newfoundland. And they were actually heading for the Hudson River, where they had a charter from the Virginia Colony to settle.

The Pilgrims had slaves and indentured servants (a fancy word for slaves).
Just as their brutality has traditionally been downplayed, the Puritans' embrace of slavery has been ignored. Not only did the colonists import African slaves, they exported Native Americans. By the 1660s, half of the ships in Boston Harbour were involved in the slave trade. At least hundreds of indigenous Americans were enslaved. 1
Provincetown was a known harbor; fishing fleets from England, France, Portugal, and Spanish ships all stopped there to resupply and get fresh water. The Grand Banks are only a couple of hundred miles offshore.

In an article in the Cape Cod Times they write....
Myth: The Pilgrims were the first Europeans to land in Southern New England and to interact with the Native people.
The commonly told version of the 1620 Mayflower landing is that the Pilgrims were the first Europeans to step onto the shores of Massachusetts. According to historic accounts, however, Europeans had been visiting New England since at least the late 1400s. The Basques, English and French had a thriving fishing industry off the coast of Maine and New England. The first documented European to make contact with either the Narragansetts or the Wampanoags in Southern New England was Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano, who, in 1524, while sailing for the French, traveled up Narragansett Bay and traded with the Native people he found there. 6
The BBC article also mentioned earlier contacts with Europeans:
It's also a mistake to view the arrival of the Mayflower as the first interaction between white settlers and indigenous North Americans. Contact with Europeans had been going on for at least a century, partly because slave traders targeted Native Americans. When the pilgrims came ashore, a few members of the Wampanoag tribe could even speak English. 1
While sitting out in Provincetown harbor for over a month, they realized that they didn’t have a charter to settle there and that there were no laws governing them. So they got this idea… the Mayflower Compact.
Quickly, the Pilgrim leadership drafted a rudimentary constitution to “combine our selves together into a civil body politick”—which would, through democratic process, enact “just and equal laws…for the general good of the Colony.”
[…]
In reality, the signing was probably more of an informal affair, Pickering says. “The document was carried from person to person: ‘Here—sign this!’ There was also a bit of coercion involved. You weren’t getting off the boat until you signed.” 2
And they were not good neighbors… They stole the Wampanoag food!

Oh look somebody buried corn in clay pots!
To narrow it down to the outermost areas of Cape Cod, the Nauset tribe, which was part of the Wampanoag Nation, would likely have been watching and wondering what the intentions of the Mayflower occupants were, Peters said.
[…]
“Certainly the Nausets didn’t write down (that) they were watching the Mayflower come ashore, but we absolutely know that they would have. You can’t pull that boat up to the coast and people not notice,” he said. “And for them, it must have been such an odd sight to all of a sudden see women and children step off the ship …”
[…]
The text also describes how the exploring party came across “heaps of sand” under which they found baskets of “fair Indian corn” and ears of corn of varying colors. The Englishmen dug up the food stores and stole them.
After stealing their food the Nausets said enough…
“I think they would have thought about that very carefully, and I think they were careful in how they responded,” he said. “Ultimately, they did respond in the ‘first encounter’... you know, shoot some arrows at them to say, ‘OK, time for you to move along. We don’t want to take the risk of having Europeans hanging around here.’ That ultimately pushed them over to Plymouth, which was just a short ride in the shallop for them to get there.” 3
The Wampanoag tells their story for the 400 anniversary of the Mayflower…
The Wampanoag have lived in southeastern Massachusetts for more than 12,000 years. They are the tribe first encountered by Mayflower Pilgrims when they landed in Provincetown harbor and explored the eastern coast of Cape Cod and when they continued on to Patuxet (Plymouth) to establish Plymouth Colony.
[…]
Chapter 1: Captured: 1614
In 1614, a European explorer kidnapped twenty Wampanoag men from Patuxet (now Plymouth) and seven more from Nauset on Cape Cod to sell them as slaves in Spain. Only one is known to have returned home: Tisquantum, who came to be known as Squanto. This tragic and compelling backstory to the colonization of Plymouth has been long overlooked comes to life in the exhibit’s dramatic images and video impact statements.
[...]
Chapter 3: The Great Dying – 2016
God’s Will or Unfortunate Circumstance?

Between 1616 and 1619 Native villages of coastal New England from Maine to Cape Cod were stricken by a catastrophic plague that killed tens of thousands, weakening the Wampanoag nation politically, economically and militarily. 5
And then came the Mayflower.

As for the first "Thanksgiving" the indigenous peoples were not invited but can a running.
Myth: The Pilgrims and Wampanoags came together in November 1621 for a Thanksgiving feast.
There’s a lot to unpack with this one, and not just because it forms the basis of our country’s Thanksgiving Day story.

First, while the Puritans did have “days of Thanksgiving” they were literally the opposite of a big, fun, family feast. They were usually days of fasting and prayer that maybe would be broken with a larger meal.

Edward Winslow, in his writing about the first few years in Plymouth titled “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims in Plymouth,” does mention a celebration marking the settlement’s first successful harvest, probably held around October 1621. Given the context, it certainly wasn’t a huge deal but it would later become one in modern America.

According to Winslow, despite the fact that the Wampanoags had allowed the Pilgrims to live on their land, provided them with aid and taught them how to successfully grow native crops, the Wampanoags were not invited to this celebration. They arrived only after the Pilgrims started shooting their guns into the air. Believing themselves to be under attack, the Wampanoags head sachem, Massasoit, showed up at the settlement with about 90 warriors expecting war. Instead, they found a celebration and they decided to stay, with their hunters bringing in five deer as a contribution. Rather than a happy celebration of camaraderie and partnership, the feast that would serve as the basis of the traditional Thanksgiving myth was actually quite a tense affair, fraught with political implic
The Pilgrims and the Mayflower have been romanticized, and the truth has been swept under the rug and glossed over, and now on the 400th anniversary of their landing in the “New World,” history is still being whitewashed, and Trump’s creation of the 1776 Commission continues to whitewash history.


 
A new Part 2 will be posted this afternoon.
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Friday, November 29, 2024

404 Years Ago (Part II)

PART 2
They say history is written by the victors, but sometimes it is rewritten, and rewritten. The latest rewrite occurred in the 1950s.
Time
By OLIVIA B. WAXMAN 
November 21, 2019


On a recent Saturday morning in Washington, D.C., about two dozen secondary-and-elementary-school teachers experienced a role reversal. This time, it was their turn to take a quiz: answer “true” or “false” for 14 statements about the famous meal known as the “First Thanksgiving.”

Did the people many of us know as pilgrims call themselves Separatists? Did the famous meal last three days? True and true, they shouted loudly in unison. Were the pilgrims originally heading for New Jersey? False.

But some of the other statements drew long pauses, or the soft murmurs of people nervous about saying the wrong thing in front of a group. Renée Gokey, Teacher Services Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, waited patiently for them to respond. The teachers at this Nov. 9 workshop on “Rethinking Thanksgiving in Your Classroom” were there to learn a better way to teach the Thanksgiving story to their students, but first, they had some studying to do. When Gokey explained that early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son, attendees gasped audibly.

[…]

But some of the other statements drew long pauses, or the soft murmurs of people nervous about saying the wrong thing in front of a group. Renée Gokey, Teacher Services Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, waited patiently for them to respond. The teachers at this Nov. 9 workshop on “Rethinking Thanksgiving in Your Classroom” were there to learn a better way to teach the Thanksgiving story to their students, but first, they had some studying to do. When Gokey explained that early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son, attendees gasped audibly.
But when you tread on history you have to walk lightly because some people hold on to tradition and don’t like the facts.
What really happened back in the fall of 1621 is documented in only two primary sources from colonists’ perspectives. Edward Winslow’s account of the bountiful harvest and the three-day feast with the Wampanoag people runs a measly six sentences, and Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford’s later account is about the same length—evidence, argues historian Peter C. Mancall, that neither colonial leader considered the event worth more than a paragraph. As Plymouth became part of Massachusetts and Puritans gave way to the Founding Fathers, nobody thought much about that moment. When George Washington declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789, his proclamation of gratefulness made no mention of anything related to what happened in Plymouth. Then, around 1820, a Philadelphia antiquarian named Alexander Young found Winslow’s account. He republished it in his 1841 Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a fateful footnote: “This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.”
Let us wave the Red, White, and Blue… this is what makes us great! We have Thanksgiving! Lets have parades and marching bands dressed up like Yankee-doodle, pumpkin pie and turkey dinners with all the fixings!
But that’s not what was included in the classroom materials about Thanksgiving that began to be developed in the wake of Lincoln’s proclamation, especially between the 1890s and 1920s, according to former Plimoth Plantation historian James W. Baker’s Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. The settlers were re-branded the “pilgrims.” An 1889 novel Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims by Jane G. Austin, which described “The First Thanksgiving of New England” as an outdoor feast, became a best-seller. In 1897, an illustration by W.L. Taylor of a meal like the one Austin described accompanied a piece in Ladies Home Journal that was presented as a factual article about the first Thanksgiving; thanks in part to the growth of the advertising industry at this time, variations of this image spread quickly.
In 1941 Thanksgiving was made a national holiday. Before then it was celebrated at different days in November. The National Archives writes;
To end the confusion, Congress decided to set a fixed-date for the Thanksgiving holiday. On October 6, 1941, the House passed a joint resolution declaring the last Thursday in November to be the legal Thanksgiving Day. 

The Senate amended the resolution establishing the holiday as the fourth Thursday, which would take into account those years when November has five Thursdays. The House agreed to the amendment, and President Roosevelt signed the resolution on December 26, 1941, establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the federal Thanksgiving Day holiday. The law went into effect the following year.
And so the Christmas shopping season was created!

*****
A heartwarming 1950s holiday film about the virtues of capitalism
The Atlantic
By Kathy Gilsinan
November 26, 2014


The Johnsons, a fictional Midwestern family, are in for a letdown one Thanksgiving in the 1950s. Expenses were high the previous month, and while the kids are getting stoked for turkey, it falls to their mom to tell them the truth: There will be no turkey this year. Little Tommy is incredulous: "No turkey for Thanksgiving?" Dick, the oldest, notes that everyone else on the block will have a turkey. "A fat lot we're gonna have to be thankful for," he sulks.

[…]

A Day of Thanksgiving came out in 1951, in the context of the early Cold War, with American troops battling communists in Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy kicking his investigations of suspected American communists into high gear. As such, the film extolls the virtues of capitalist democracy—even, as in the Johnsons' case, when you can't afford turkey. After all, Thanksgiving, as O. Henry pointed out at the turn of the 20th century, "is the one day of the year that is purely American." And America, per Mr. Johnson, is a set of freedoms and privileges that, by the 1950s, has produced abundance beyond the pilgrims' imaginings. "Do you know," Johnson asks his kids, "that there are some places in the world today where you have to get along without just about everything else" besides life itself?
Without Thanksgiving what would Norman Rockwell have to paint? Without Thanksgiving what would Macy's do?

Of all magazines to right about Thanksgiving, Science News had an interesting take on it.
Memory often favors a tidy narrative over the messier reality of history
By Sujata Gupta
Social Sciences Writer
November 21, 2023


Ask someone in the United States to name five events important to the country’s foundation and there’s a good chance they’ll mention the Pilgrims.

That’s what researchers found a few years ago when they put that question to some 2,000 people. The Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas and the Civil War topped the list. But coming in seventh place were the Pilgrims, the team reported in 2022 in Memory Studies.

The “Thanksgiving myth” is part of that tale, says coauthor and cognitive psychologist Henry Roediger, also at Washington University. The shorthand for that story, he says, goes like this: In 1621, the Pilgrims and Native Americans “had this peaceful meal and powwow [while] singing kumbaya.”

The two groups did engage in a peaceful harvest celebration in the fall of 1621, history suggests. But historians are quick to point out that the tidy tale ignores context, particularly the deadly diseases and bloody wars that devastated Indigenous populations both before and after the occasion.

[…]

Origin stories like the Thanksgiving one are particularly sticky as they underpin a group’s raison d’être. Fixing or changing the story risks muddying the plot and tearing apart the group, says Van Engen. “The Pilgrims just become right for telling [the] stories … that we want to tell about ourselves.”

[...]

But scholars are starting to grapple with how nations should contend with difficult pasts. “How do you keep a strong national identity and patriotism while at the same time acknowledging the more negative aspects of your history?” Roediger asks. The answer, as evidenced by increasing calls for racial reckonings in the United States and elsewhere, is very much a work in progress.
We must learn from the past! Not only from our roots but from global history, especial from the events in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
For that 1621 Thanksgiving, the complex historic arc goes like this. Up to 90 percent of the Wampanoag population had died from an epidemic brought by a previous wave of European explorers by the time the Pilgrims arrived in December 1620 in what’s now Massachusetts. The weakened community faced threats from an encroaching neighboring tribe. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims, unaccustomed to the new environment and climate, were dying of starvation and disease.
That got the right-wingers howling and started this whole “Woke” business.

The right-wingers picture Thanksgiving as “over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house...” and anyone who tampers with their fantasies watch out.
My thoughts:
Thanksgiving is a rough holiday for some and we have to keep that in mind, for the “haves” it is family, a table overflowing with food, and laughter. For the “have-nots” it can be a lonely time, it can be a time famine and empty plates. We need to be aware of these two diametrical opposites.

Thanksgiving might have been created with an ulterior motive to unify the country and build patriotism but it has warp into something else a time to be with family. But the harvest celebrations are found through out history and in all different cultures.

So enjoy your leftovers. (That is also part of the tradition) 


The first Trump administration tried to stop the federal recognition of Mashpee Wampanoag tribe claiming that they were not a tribe! Boston.com wrote...
“The claim that the Tribe of the First Light, the Tribe of the First Thanksgiving was not an original Native American Tribe has always been disingenuous,” U.S. Rep Bill Keating said in a statement. “And the Trump Administration’s sudden attempt to remove their land from trust last March — in the midst of a pandemic — was heartless."
Here is is tribe that sat down whit the pilgrims and have lived on the Cape Cod since before the 
Europeans set foot on North America.

Cultural Survival wrote about Trump back then,,,
On March 27, 2020, in the midst of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Chairman Cedric Cromwell was informed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that the Tribe’s reservation will be “disestablished” as ordered by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, David Bernhardt.

The Mashpee Wampanoag, the People of the First Light, have occupied the same region for over 12,000 years and have faced diminishment of their homelands since colonization. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts, the very tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims exactly 400 years ago in 1620, is at risk of losing what is left of their homelands due to a determination made by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The latest decision is a blow to Tribal sovereignty and undermines the future and sustainability of the Tribal Nation.
 If you look at their land you can see why Trump wanted it. You could build hundreds of 1 million dollar+ homes on it, it is on the south shore of Cape Cod in Mashpee MA

It was federally recognized by the Obama administration and out of spite Trump undid it!
The land in question, which includes 150 acres in the town of Mashpee, Massachusetts and another 170 acres in the neighboring city of Taunton, had been established into trust as of September 2015 by the Obama administration, after years of advocacy work by the Mashpee Tribe. The Obama decision was threatened by the Trump administration in September 2018. The recent Bureau of Indian Affairs order removes the entirety of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s 320 acres of reservation land.
The Boston.com article went on to write that the judge...
A federal judge in 2020 blocked the U.S. Interior Department from revoking the tribe’s reservation designation, saying the agency’s decision to do so was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law.” The Trump administration appealed the decision, but the Interior Department on Friday moved to dismiss the motion.
Now we know Trump has a heart of gold and would never do anything "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion" No, he would do it out of meanness, revenge, and vindictiveness, but never capricious. 
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404 Years Ago (Part 1)

This is a reprint from last year, I figured it was fitting as I drive home today...


The Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod and most of the history that we learned about it is wrong.

The New York Post has this article about the Pilgrims…
Pilgrims’ descendants defend their ancestors — and the history of America
By Peter W. Wood
November 21, 2020


Rebecca Locklear, 64, a 12th-generation Cape Codder, is a descendant of four of the families who arrived on the Mayflower in November 1620. She worries that society today, “is put into groups that are supposedly in a struggle against one another, rather than looking for commonality” — a view that opposes “the more open, inclusive society that the signers of the Mayflower Compact envisioned.”
[…]
Locklear and Whitaker both wrote to me after they read my recent New York Post essay, “This American Lie.” In it, I argued that The New York Times’ 1619 Project — which links the beginning of our country to the arrival of the first slaves on our shores in 1619 — is completely wrong. Instead, the Pilgrims’ signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 is a more accurate root of our nation, which is built on the idea that “all men are created equal.” Even before the Pilgrims and dozens of non-Pilgrims (or “Strangers” as the Pilgrims called them) stepped ashore in Plymouth, they set aside their deep divisions and voluntarily joined together to sign the Compact, agreeing to govern themselves with “just and equal laws.” After settling in Plymouth, this group lived in peace alongside their Native American neighbors, the Wampanoags, in a treaty that was unbroken for more than 50 years. In 1621, the autumn harvest meal between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoags marked the first ever Thanksgiving feast in America.
Yes, the Mayflower Compact was an important document but they brought over slaves and indentured servants. And they didn’t live in peace with the indigenous population… Did you ever hear of the King Phillip War and the Pequot War?

First off the Mayflower wasn’t just carrying Pilgrims, there were also Brownists or Separatists who were fleeing England on board the Mayflower.
The Mayflower compact is a significant historical document, the "wave-rocked cradle of our liberties", as one historian evocatively put it. Signed by the Pilgrims and the so-called Strangers, the craftsmen, merchants and indentured servants brought with them to establish a successful colony, it agreed to pass "just and equal laws for the good of the Colony" 1
The Mayflower first stop in “New World” (which was really only the “New World” if you came from Europe because the indigenous peoples lived here for tens of thousands of years.) wasn’t Provincetown, they first stopped in Newfoundland to resupply, probably at Renews in Newfoundland. And they were actually heading for the Hudson River where they had a charter from the Virginia Colony to settle.

The Pilgrims had slaves and indentured servants (a fancy word for slaves).
Just as their brutality has traditionally been downplayed, the Puritans' embrace of slavery has been ignored. Not only did the colonists import African slaves, they exported Native Americans. By the 1660s, half of the ships in Boston Harbour were involved in the slave trade. At least hundreds of indigenous Americans were enslaved. 1
Provincetown was a known harbor, fishing fleets from England, France, Portugal, and Spanish ships all stopped there to resupply and get fresh water. The Grand Banks are only a couple of hundred miles offshore.
In an article in the Cape Cod Times they write...
Myth: The Pilgrims were the first Europeans to land in Southern New England and to interact with the Native people.
The commonly told version of the 1620 Mayflower landing is that the Pilgrims were the first Europeans to step onto the shores of Massachusetts. According to historic accounts, however, Europeans had been visiting New England since at least the late 1400s. The Basques, English and French had a thriving fishing industry off the coast of Maine and New England. The first documented European to make contact with either the Narragansetts or the Wampanoags in Southern New England was Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano, who, in 1524, while sailing for the French, traveled up Narragansett Bay and traded with the Native people he found there. 6
The BBC article also mentioned earlier contacts with Europeans,
It's also a mistake to view the arrival of the Mayflower as the first interaction between white settlers and indigenous North Americans. Contact with Europeans had been going on for at least a century, partly because slave traders targeted Native Americans. When the pilgrims came ashore, a few members of the Wampanoag tribe could even speak English. 1
While sitting out in Provincetown harbor they realized that they didn't have a charter to settle there and there were no laws governing them. So they got this idea… The Mayflower Compact.
Quickly, the Pilgrim leadership drafted a rudimentary constitution to “combine our selves together into a civil body politick”—which would, through democratic process, enact “just and equal laws…for the general good of the Colony.”
[…]
In reality, the signing was probably more of an informal affair, Pickering says. “The document was carried from person to person: ‘Here—sign this!’ There was also a bit of coercion involved. You weren’t getting off the boat until you signed.” 2
And they were not good neighbors… They stole the Wampanoag food!

Oh look somebody buried corn in clay pots!
To narrow it down to the outermost areas of Cape Cod, the Nauset tribe, which was part of the Wampanoag Nation, would likely have been watching and wondering what the intentions of the Mayflower occupants were, Peters said.
[…]
“Certainly the Nausets didn’t write down (that) they were watching the Mayflower come ashore, but we absolutely know that they would have. You can’t pull that boat up to the coast and people not notice,” he said. “And for them, it must have been such an odd sight to all of a sudden see women and children step off the ship …”
[…]
The text also describes how the exploring party came across “heaps of sand” under which they found baskets of “fair Indian corn” and ears of corn of varying colors. The Englishmen dug up the food stores and stole them.
After stealing their food the Nausets said enough…
“I think they would have thought about that very carefully, and I think they were careful in how they responded,” he said. “Ultimately, they did respond in the ‘first encounter’... you know, shoot some arrows at them to say, ‘OK, time for you to move along. We don’t want to take the risk of having Europeans hanging around here.’ That ultimately pushed them over to Plymouth, which was just a short ride in the shallop for them to get there.” 3
The Wampanoag tells their story for the 400 anniversary of the Mayflower…
The Wampanoag have lived in southeastern Massachusetts for more than 12,000 years. They are the tribe first encountered by Mayflower Pilgrims when they landed in Provincetown harbor and explored the eastern coast of Cape Cod and when they continued on to Patuxet (Plymouth) to establish Plymouth Colony.
[…]
Chapter 1: Captured: 1614
In 1614, a European explorer kidnapped twenty Wampanoag men from Patuxet (now Plymouth) and seven more from Nauset on Cape Cod to sell them as slaves in Spain. Only one is known to have returned home: Tisquantum, who came to be known as Squanto. This tragic and compelling backstory to the colonization of Plymouth has been long overlooked comes to life in the exhibit’s dramatic images and video impact statements.
[...]
Chapter 3: The Great Dying – 2016
God’s Will or Unfortunate Circumstance?

Between 1616 and 1619 Native villages of coastal New England from Maine to Cape Cod were stricken by a catastrophic plague that killed tens of thousands, weakening the Wampanoag nation politically, economically and militarily. 5
And then came the Mayflower.

As for the first "Thanksgiving" the indigenous peoples were not invited but can a running.
Myth: The Pilgrims and Wampanoags came together in November 1621 for a Thanksgiving feast.
There’s a lot to unpack with this one, and not just because it forms the basis of our country’s Thanksgiving Day story.

First, while the Puritans did have “days of Thanksgiving” they were literally the opposite of a big, fun, family feast. They were usually days of fasting and prayer that maybe would be broken with a larger meal.

Edward Winslow, in his writing about the first few years in Plymouth titled “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims in Plymouth,” does mention a celebration marking the settlement’s first successful harvest, probably held around October 1621. Given the context, it certainly wasn’t a huge deal but it would later become one in modern America.

According to Winslow, despite the fact that the Wampanoags had allowed the Pilgrims to live on their land, provided them with aid and taught them how to successfully grow native crops, the Wampanoags were not invited to this celebration. They arrived only after the Pilgrims started shooting their guns into the air. Believing themselves to be under attack, the Wampanoags head sachem, Massasoit, showed up at the settlement with about 90 warriors expecting war. Instead, they found a celebration and they decided to stay, with their hunters bringing in five deer as a contribution. Rather than a happy celebration of camaraderie and partnership, the feast that would serve as the basis of the traditional Thanksgiving myth was actually quite a tense affair, fraught with political implic
The Pilgrims and the Mayflower have been romanticized and the truth has been swept under the rug and glossed over and now on the 400 anniversary of their landing in the “New World” is still trying to be whitewashed and the Trump is creating of the 1776 Commission to continue to whitewash history.


 
A new Part 2 will be posted this afternoon.
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Thursday, November 28, 2024

Happy Thanksgiving!

For many people Thanksgiving and the Holidays are an especially lonely time, they might have been estranged from their family since they came out to them or their families and children have disowned them and for them Thanksgiving is a time when they feel their loss the greatest. Thanksgiving is a time where we reflect on all that we have been thankful for the year but for those of us it could also be a time a great sadness while they see others around them celebrating during the holiday seasons. So let us open our hearts and doors to them and invite them to the table.

I want to thank all the military men and women who are away from their loved ones this holiday... thank you for your service.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

On the lighter side... I leave you with some Thanksgiving cartoons and what would Thanksgiving be without "Alice's Restaurant" and "WKRP" turkey drop.














 


And of course the two favorites!

What would Thanksgiving be without Alice's Restaurant!
Sadly...


And WKRP's turkey drop!










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Thursday, November 30, 2023

403 Years Ago (Part 2)

They say history is written by the victors, but sometimes it is rewritten, and rewritten. The latest rewrite occurred in the 1950s.
Time
By OLIVIA B. WAXMAN 
November 21, 2019


On a recent Saturday morning in Washington, D.C., about two dozen secondary-and-elementary-school teachers experienced a role reversal. This time, it was their turn to take a quiz: answer “true” or “false” for 14 statements about the famous meal known as the “First Thanksgiving.”

Did the people many of us know as pilgrims call themselves Separatists? Did the famous meal last three days? True and true, they shouted loudly in unison. Were the pilgrims originally heading for New Jersey? False.

But some of the other statements drew long pauses, or the soft murmurs of people nervous about saying the wrong thing in front of a group. Renée Gokey, Teacher Services Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, waited patiently for them to respond. The teachers at this Nov. 9 workshop on “Rethinking Thanksgiving in Your Classroom” were there to learn a better way to teach the Thanksgiving story to their students, but first, they had some studying to do. When Gokey explained that early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son, attendees gasped audibly.

[…]

But some of the other statements drew long pauses, or the soft murmurs of people nervous about saying the wrong thing in front of a group. Renée Gokey, Teacher Services Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, waited patiently for them to respond. The teachers at this Nov. 9 workshop on “Rethinking Thanksgiving in Your Classroom” were there to learn a better way to teach the Thanksgiving story to their students, but first, they had some studying to do. When Gokey explained that early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son, attendees gasped audibly.
But when you tread on history you have to walk lightly because some people hold on to tradition and don’t like the facts.
What really happened back in the fall of 1621 is documented in only two primary sources from colonists’ perspectives. Edward Winslow’s account of the bountiful harvest and the three-day feast with the Wampanoag people runs a measly six sentences, and Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford’s later account is about the same length—evidence, argues historian Peter C. Mancall, that neither colonial leader considered the event worth more than a paragraph. As Plymouth became part of Massachusetts and Puritans gave way to the Founding Fathers, nobody thought much about that moment. When George Washington declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789, his proclamation of gratefulness made no mention of anything related to what happened in Plymouth. Then, around 1820, a Philadelphia antiquarian named Alexander Young found Winslow’s account. He republished it in his 1841 Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a fateful footnote: “This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.”
Let us wave the Red, White, and Blue… this is what makes us great! We have Thanksgiving! Lets have parades and marching bands dressed up like Yankee-doodle, pumpkin pie and turkey dinners with all the fixings!
But that’s not what was included in the classroom materials about Thanksgiving that began to be developed in the wake of Lincoln’s proclamation, especially between the 1890s and 1920s, according to former Plimoth Plantation historian James W. Baker’s Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. The settlers were re-branded the “pilgrims.” An 1889 novel Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims by Jane G. Austin, which described “The First Thanksgiving of New England” as an outdoor feast, became a best-seller. In 1897, an illustration by W.L. Taylor of a meal like the one Austin described accompanied a piece in Ladies Home Journal that was presented as a factual article about the first Thanksgiving; thanks in part to the growth of the advertising industry at this time, variations of this image spread quickly.
In 1941 Thanksgiving was made a national holiday. Before then it was celebrated at different days in November. The National Archives writes;
To end the confusion, Congress decided to set a fixed-date for the Thanksgiving holiday. On October 6, 1941, the House passed a joint resolution declaring the last Thursday in November to be the legal Thanksgiving Day. 

The Senate amended the resolution establishing the holiday as the fourth Thursday, which would take into account those years when November has five Thursdays. The House agreed to the amendment, and President Roosevelt signed the resolution on December 26, 1941, establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the federal Thanksgiving Day holiday. The law went into effect the following year.
And so the Christmas shopping season was created!

*****

The Meaning of Thanksgiving, as Told Through Cold War Propaganda
A heartwarming 1950s holiday film about the virtues of capitalism
The Atlantic
By Kathy Gilsinan
November 26, 2014


The Johnsons, a fictional Midwestern family, are in for a letdown one Thanksgiving in the 1950s. Expenses were high the previous month, and while the kids are getting stoked for turkey, it falls to their mom to tell them the truth: There will be no turkey this year. Little Tommy is incredulous: "No turkey for Thanksgiving?" Dick, the oldest, notes that everyone else on the block will have a turkey. "A fat lot we're gonna have to be thankful for," he sulks.

[…]

A Day of Thanksgiving came out in 1951, in the context of the early Cold War, with American troops battling communists in Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy kicking his investigations of suspected American communists into high gear. As such, the film extolls the virtues of capitalist democracy—even, as in the Johnsons' case, when you can't afford turkey. After all, Thanksgiving, as O. Henry pointed out at the turn of the 20th century, "is the one day of the year that is purely American." And America, per Mr. Johnson, is a set of freedoms and privileges that, by the 1950s, has produced abundance beyond the pilgrims' imaginings. "Do you know," Johnson asks his kids, "that there are some places in the world today where you have to get along without just about everything else" besides life itself?
Without Thanksgiving what would Norman Rockwell have to paint? Without Thanksgiving what would Macy's do?

Of all magazines to right about Thanksgiving, Science News had an interesting take on it.
Memory often favors a tidy narrative over the messier reality of history
By Sujata Gupta
Social Sciences Writer
November 21, 2023


Ask someone in the United States to name five events important to the country’s foundation and there’s a good chance they’ll mention the Pilgrims.

That’s what researchers found a few years ago when they put that question to some 2,000 people. The Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas and the Civil War topped the list. But coming in seventh place were the Pilgrims, the team reported in 2022 in Memory Studies.

The “Thanksgiving myth” is part of that tale, says coauthor and cognitive psychologist Henry Roediger, also at Washington University. The shorthand for that story, he says, goes like this: In 1621, the Pilgrims and Native Americans “had this peaceful meal and powwow [while] singing kumbaya.”

The two groups did engage in a peaceful harvest celebration in the fall of 1621, history suggests. But historians are quick to point out that the tidy tale ignores context, particularly the deadly diseases and bloody wars that devastated Indigenous populations both before and after the occasion.

[…]

Origin stories like the Thanksgiving one are particularly sticky as they underpin a group’s raison d’être. Fixing or changing the story risks muddying the plot and tearing apart the group, says Van Engen. “The Pilgrims just become right for telling [the] stories … that we want to tell about ourselves.”

[...]

But scholars are starting to grapple with how nations should contend with difficult pasts. “How do you keep a strong national identity and patriotism while at the same time acknowledging the more negative aspects of your history?” Roediger asks. The answer, as evidenced by increasing calls for racial reckonings in the United States and elsewhere, is very much a work in progress.
We must learn from the past! Not only from our roots but from global history, especial from the events in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
For that 1621 Thanksgiving, the complex historic arc goes like this. Up to 90 percent of the Wampanoag population had died from an epidemic brought by a previous wave of European explorers by the time the Pilgrims arrived in December 1620 in what’s now Massachusetts. The weakened community faced threats from an encroaching neighboring tribe. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims, unaccustomed to the new environment and climate, were dying of starvation and disease.
That got the right-wingers howling and started this whole “Woke” business.

The right-wingers picture Thanksgiving as “over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house...” and anyone who tampers with their fantasies watch out.
My thoughts:
Thanksgiving is a rough holiday for some and we have to keep that in mind, for the “haves” it is family, a table overflowing with food, and laughter. For the “have-nots” it can be a lonely time, it can be a time famine and empty plates. We need to be aware of these two diametrical opposites.


Thanksgiving might have been created with an ulterior motive to unify the country and build patriotism but it has warp into something else a time to be with family. But the harvest celebrations are found through out history and in all different cultures.

So enjoy your leftovers. (That is also part of the tradition)   
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403 Years Ago (Part 1)

This is a reprint from last year, I figured it was fitting as I drive up to Cape Cod today...


The Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod and most of the history that we learned about it is wrong.

The New York Post has this article about the Pilgrims…
Pilgrims’ descendants defend their ancestors — and the history of America
By Peter W. Wood
November 21, 2020


Rebecca Locklear, 64, a 12th-generation Cape Codder, is a descendant of four of the families who arrived on the Mayflower in November 1620. She worries that society today, “is put into groups that are supposedly in a struggle against one another, rather than looking for commonality” — a view that opposes “the more open, inclusive society that the signers of the Mayflower Compact envisioned.”
[…]
Locklear and Whitaker both wrote to me after they read my recent New York Post essay, “This American Lie.” In it, I argued that The New York Times’ 1619 Project — which links the beginning of our country to the arrival of the first slaves on our shores in 1619 — is completely wrong. Instead, the Pilgrims’ signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 is a more accurate root of our nation, which is built on the idea that “all men are created equal.” Even before the Pilgrims and dozens of non-Pilgrims (or “Strangers” as the Pilgrims called them) stepped ashore in Plymouth, they set aside their deep divisions and voluntarily joined together to sign the Compact, agreeing to govern themselves with “just and equal laws.” After settling in Plymouth, this group lived in peace alongside their Native American neighbors, the Wampanoags, in a treaty that was unbroken for more than 50 years. In 1621, the autumn harvest meal between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoags marked the first ever Thanksgiving feast in America.
Yes, the Mayflower Compact was an important document but they brought over slaves and indentured servants. And they didn’t live in peace with the indigenous population… Did you ever hear of the King Phillip War and the Pequot War?

First off the Mayflower wasn’t just carrying Pilgrims, there were also Brownists or Separatists who were fleeing England on board the Mayflower.
The Mayflower compact is a significant historical document, the "wave-rocked cradle of our liberties", as one historian evocatively put it. Signed by the Pilgrims and the so-called Strangers, the craftsmen, merchants and indentured servants brought with them to establish a successful colony, it agreed to pass "just and equal laws for the good of the Colony" 1
The Mayflower first stop in “New World” (which was really only the “New World” if you came from Europe because the indigenous peoples lived here for tens of thousands of years.) wasn’t Provincetown, they first stopped in Newfoundland to resupply, probably at Renews in Newfoundland. And they were actually heading for the Hudson River where they had a charter from the Virginia Colony to settle.

The Pilgrims had slaves and indentured servants (a fancy word for slaves).
Just as their brutality has traditionally been downplayed, the Puritans' embrace of slavery has been ignored. Not only did the colonists import African slaves, they exported Native Americans. By the 1660s, half of the ships in Boston Harbour were involved in the slave trade. At least hundreds of indigenous Americans were enslaved. 1
Provincetown was a known harbor, fishing fleets from England, France, Portugal, and Spanish ships all stopped there to resupply and get fresh water. The Grand Banks are only a couple of hundred miles offshore.
In an article in the Cape Cod Times they write...
Myth: The Pilgrims were the first Europeans to land in Southern New England and to interact with the Native people.
The commonly told version of the 1620 Mayflower landing is that the Pilgrims were the first Europeans to step onto the shores of Massachusetts. According to historic accounts, however, Europeans had been visiting New England since at least the late 1400s. The Basques, English and French had a thriving fishing industry off the coast of Maine and New England. The first documented European to make contact with either the Narragansetts or the Wampanoags in Southern New England was Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano, who, in 1524, while sailing for the French, traveled up Narragansett Bay and traded with the Native people he found there. 6
The BBC article also mentioned earlier contacts with Europeans,
It's also a mistake to view the arrival of the Mayflower as the first interaction between white settlers and indigenous North Americans. Contact with Europeans had been going on for at least a century, partly because slave traders targeted Native Americans. When the pilgrims came ashore, a few members of the Wampanoag tribe could even speak English. 1
While sitting out in Provincetown harbor they realized that they didn't have a charter to settle there and there were no laws governing them. So they got this idea… The Mayflower Compact.
Quickly, the Pilgrim leadership drafted a rudimentary constitution to “combine our selves together into a civil body politick”—which would, through democratic process, enact “just and equal laws…for the general good of the Colony.”
[…]
In reality, the signing was probably more of an informal affair, Pickering says. “The document was carried from person to person: ‘Here—sign this!’ There was also a bit of coercion involved. You weren’t getting off the boat until you signed.” 2
And they were not good neighbors… They stole the Wampanoag food!

Oh look somebody buried corn in clay pots!
To narrow it down to the outermost areas of Cape Cod, the Nauset tribe, which was part of the Wampanoag Nation, would likely have been watching and wondering what the intentions of the Mayflower occupants were, Peters said.
[…]
“Certainly the Nausets didn’t write down (that) they were watching the Mayflower come ashore, but we absolutely know that they would have. You can’t pull that boat up to the coast and people not notice,” he said. “And for them, it must have been such an odd sight to all of a sudden see women and children step off the ship …”
[…]
The text also describes how the exploring party came across “heaps of sand” under which they found baskets of “fair Indian corn” and ears of corn of varying colors. The Englishmen dug up the food stores and stole them.
After stealing their food the Nausets said enough…
“I think they would have thought about that very carefully, and I think they were careful in how they responded,” he said. “Ultimately, they did respond in the ‘first encounter’... you know, shoot some arrows at them to say, ‘OK, time for you to move along. We don’t want to take the risk of having Europeans hanging around here.’ That ultimately pushed them over to Plymouth, which was just a short ride in the shallop for them to get there.” 3
The Wampanoag tells their story for the 400 anniversary of the Mayflower…
The Wampanoag have lived in southeastern Massachusetts for more than 12,000 years. They are the tribe first encountered by Mayflower Pilgrims when they landed in Provincetown harbor and explored the eastern coast of Cape Cod and when they continued on to Patuxet (Plymouth) to establish Plymouth Colony.
[…]
Chapter 1: Captured: 1614
In 1614, a European explorer kidnapped twenty Wampanoag men from Patuxet (now Plymouth) and seven more from Nauset on Cape Cod to sell them as slaves in Spain. Only one is known to have returned home: Tisquantum, who came to be known as Squanto. This tragic and compelling backstory to the colonization of Plymouth has been long overlooked comes to life in the exhibit’s dramatic images and video impact statements.
[...]
Chapter 3: The Great Dying – 2016
God’s Will or Unfortunate Circumstance?

Between 1616 and 1619 Native villages of coastal New England from Maine to Cape Cod were stricken by a catastrophic plague that killed tens of thousands, weakening the Wampanoag nation politically, economically and militarily. 5
And then came the Mayflower.

As for the first "Thanksgiving" the indigenous peoples were not invited but can a running.
Myth: The Pilgrims and Wampanoags came together in November 1621 for a Thanksgiving feast.
There’s a lot to unpack with this one, and not just because it forms the basis of our country’s Thanksgiving Day story.

First, while the Puritans did have “days of Thanksgiving” they were literally the opposite of a big, fun, family feast. They were usually days of fasting and prayer that maybe would be broken with a larger meal.

Edward Winslow, in his writing about the first few years in Plymouth titled “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims in Plymouth,” does mention a celebration marking the settlement’s first successful harvest, probably held around October 1621. Given the context, it certainly wasn’t a huge deal but it would later become one in modern America.

According to Winslow, despite the fact that the Wampanoags had allowed the Pilgrims to live on their land, provided them with aid and taught them how to successfully grow native crops, the Wampanoags were not invited to this celebration. They arrived only after the Pilgrims started shooting their guns into the air. Believing themselves to be under attack, the Wampanoags head sachem, Massasoit, showed up at the settlement with about 90 warriors expecting war. Instead, they found a celebration and they decided to stay, with their hunters bringing in five deer as a contribution. Rather than a happy celebration of camaraderie and partnership, the feast that would serve as the basis of the traditional Thanksgiving myth was actually quite a tense affair, fraught with political implic
The Pilgrims and the Mayflower have been romanticized and the truth has been swept under the rug and glossed over and now on the 400 anniversary of their landing in the “New World” is still trying to be whitewashed and the Trump is creating of the 1776 Commission to continue to whitewash history.


 
A new Part 2 will be posted this afternoon.
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