A hot August sun was beginning its climb up the south Texas sky when she arrived at school. As Steph walked through the front doors into her new school, her jaw dropped in amazement. There, painted on the wall right in front of her, were many tipis and cartoon Indians with red faces and big noses. In her fifth grade classroom she learned that the school mascot was the “warriors.” Steph was soon being told to “sit like an Indian” and “walk in line like an Indian.” The school store was called the “trading post” and everything seemed to be related to Indians.

Stephanie is Huastec, Zapotec, and adopted Cherokee. She dances at powwows and at Cherokee “stomp” dances, and lived for a while on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation. Looking around, she thought “boy, these people don’t know anything about Indians.” The misinformation and stereotyping bothered her tremendously, and eventually her concerns progressed all the way up to the Assistant Superintendent of the school district. After meeting with Steph’s father and a representative of the U.S. Justice Department, the administrators decided to remove all Indian mascots from their district.

What does Stephanie’s experience have to do with the Thanksgiving holiday?

Steph is my daughter and she knows how the use of Indian mascots perpetuates inaccurate and demeaning stereotypes. She has experienced it. That same misinformation was and is evident in the myths and legends associated with Thanksgiving, or, as one of our friends calls it, Thankstaking. Most of us grew up with the image of generous Pilgrims sharing a bounteous harvest with their good Indian friends. God had been good to them, so they inaugurated a new holiday to remember the joyous occasion.

What’s wrong with this picture? Just about everything. The Puritans were not innocent, simple people seeking a peaceful place to build new lives away from persecution. They were political revolutionaries who had sought to overthrow the English government. Fully intending to take the land away from its native inhabitants and establish a “Kingdom of God,” Puritans saw themselves as God’s “Elect” and were willing to use any means necessary to achieve their goals, including treachery, war, torture and genocide.

This attitude is illustrated in the text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by "Mather the Elder." He gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox which killed the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their benefactors. Mather praised God for destroying the young men and children, “the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth.”

The Indians were not invited to the 1621 feast out of the goodness of the Pilgrims' hearts in a demonstration of Christian love and interracial unity. The Wampanoag were members of a large confederacy known as the League of the Delaware. For six hundred years they had been defending themselves from the Iroquois, and for a hundred years they had also been encountering European slavers raiding coastal towns. Even though the Pilgrims viewed the Indians as instruments of the Devil, they were powerful and therefore needed to be courted until more Pilgrim colonists arrived. The Wampanoag were invited to that feast in order to negotiate a treaty that would secure land for the Pilgrims. The Indians, however, ended up bringing most of the food. They had already taught the Puritans how to hunt, fish, build houses, and survive.

Several years later, in 1637, 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Nation gathered for their annual Green Corn Ceremony in the area now known as Groton, Connecticut. While there, they were surrounded and attacked by mercenaries of the English and Dutch. Ordered out of the building, the Indians were shot as they exited. The rest were burned alive in the building. The next day, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "a day of thanksgiving" praising God that they had killed over 700 men, women and children.

For the next 100 years, every "thanksgiving day" ordained by a Governor or President was to honor that victory. As the balance of power shifted, “King Phillip’s War” left most of the New England Indians either dead, exiled in Canada, or sold into slavery in the Carolinas by the Puritans. So successful was this early trade in Indian slaves that Puritan ship owners in Boston began raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa for slaves to sell to the colonies of the South, thus founding the American-based slave trade.

For thousands of years Indians had held thanksgiving ceremonies. Not long after the Puritans’ arrival, these were replaced with gatherings for mourning. In 1970, a Wampanoag spoke at a ceremony marking the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim's arrival:

"Today is a time of celebrating for you -- a time of looking back to the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end. That before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people. Although our way of life is almost gone, we, the Wampanoags, still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed. But today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important."

Jonathan B. Hook, Ph.D.
Citizen of the Cherokee Nation