THANKSGIVING would seem to commemorate misplaced thanks. Our thanks are not for the bounty of the New World, or for receiving aid from the indigenous peoples, or for being bequeathed stewardship over their gardens and farms, or God forbid for their joining us for supper. American white folk give thanks that the North American indigenous resistance quite unwisely didn’t massacre our settlers to the last man and refute at least symbolically the European invasion of their continent. How many acts of turning the other cheek have been rewarded with a victor’s treachery? It’s become fashionable among environmentalists to think of mankind as a parasitic scourge soon to overrun the Earth its host, but that’s only Western Man isn’t it? Indigenous anarchist man has led a sustainable existence for longer than we celebrate our HAPPY history.
Not My Tribe
The Myth of Middle Ground
Some of the Indians in Virginia did a pretty good job of starving out the first English settlement. All they had to do was resist the natural human temptation to help others in need, which was what got the Massaquoit in trouble. If their unseaworthy ships had come back the next year and found nothing but a hulled out settlement, a bunch of graves and a cryptic word like “Kroatoa” carved into a tree… that might have been the end of the game at least for the English.
They proved they were poor navigators, thought they were landing in Virginia which is far south of New York but were instead in Massachussetts which is considerably north. They were piss-poor farmers, mostly merchant class.
If the Ayn Rand Elitist “hero” class wants to see what actually happens to their form of governance when faced with their Capitalist Economy suddenly being non-existent, Look To Roanoke, Ask Virginia Dare except for all anybody knows she was either killed, died in infancy or died eventually as a captive of the local tribes.
Or the Uber-Kapitalischt example of the first American Corporation, the Mayflower Compact signers, FAILING to thrive until being rescued by a tribe which had the Economic and Political Model of a hippie commune. They tried to teach the Pilgrims to bathe too, but that was an event for a later century.
As a history conscious Caucasian, it is impossible to ignore the travesties and horrors placed on the American Indian (or Native American, whichever term is more appropriate) by my genetic ancestors. I can only liken the feeling it to what the modern Japanese must feel like when reminded of the Rape of Nanking. Although a great deal of the death was accidental, an gut wrenching amount of the death and repression was intentional. I myself cannot imagine the drive or stimulant that it would require in myself to treat another person as such an animal.
I haven’t seen much hardship in my life, being born here in the states, so if there is such a level of greed or madness for that matter that would drive a whole peoples to such acts–I don’t think I have the capacity to understand it.
But I ask myself, what is that I do? If indeed it is my race that is the problem–then am I too the problem? I’m not a terribly empirical person but if the problem is my race (and history sure implies that it is), then I too am a unit of the “scourge” Mr. Verlo speaks of. I’ve usually been able to solve problems in my life because I adopt a strategy to improve myself as a friend, and a love to my significant other, as a son to my mother, and as a person in the community—but I don’t know what to do when the problem is my own existence.
The biggest thing is to step back and see, look at what you personally do that creates or celebrates either righteousness, or the problems. The preblems don’t start or end with any one race but with entire systems of governance including economies.
Systems which limit individual ambitions of control over other people, or those which encourage control of the many by the few.
Some events are commercially exploited, and that exploitation allows the repetition or growth of the systems of greed, arrogance and concentrated power.
Sometimes simple modifications of how the events are described, for instance, The Pilgrims at Plymouth were upper middle class, not poor. They signed the Mayflower Compact, the first corporation in what’s now the United States, as a “Gentleman’s Agreement”, in an era when the term Gentleman meant social elite.
They had Religious Freedom in Holland.
Many of their doctrines would upset the most fervent celebrants of Thanksgiving, for instance not celebrating Christmas. The King did, they didn’t, big source of problems.
The oppressed and oppressors were both Christian groups, until it got transferred onto the Indians. The English Crown was eager to get colonies going partly as a war strategy against Holland, which owned the colony directly south, and France and Spain who were colonizing to the west, south and north.
The Indians saved them with an economic model rather than religious, one that looked a whole lot like Socialism.
The English economy still worked on a model that included owning other human beings.
There’s a christian manifesto written by a Jewish lawyer who became one of the “church fathers”
Keep that which is good, discard that which isn’t. accompanied by many admonishments and refinements on that theme, the dude talked and wrote even more verbosely than I do.