Beacon of hope

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Beacon of hope

(Wednesday 26 November 2008)

DEREK WALL






DEREK WALL looks at how the struggles of indigenous people are leading the way towards ecological sanity.



MANY scholars have been mystified as to why Karl Marx studied indigenous peoples in his later years rather than finishing Das Kapital or updating the Communist Manifesto.

But I believe that Marx's fascination was justified and that all socialists and ecologists should find out more about indigenous people.


It's not about patronising rainbow warrior clichés or being stuck in the past.


Marx and Friedrich Engels were well aware that indigenous peoples generally practised "primitive communism," showing that market relations are far from inevitable in human societies.


In an excellent review of Marx's work on indigenous peoples, my friend John Riddell writes that Marx notes that "the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman etc societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies."


Today, indigenous people are at the militant cutting edge of the Latin American left. In just about every Latin American state, they have been organising for democracy, a break with US elites, for socialism and for ecology.


Riddell notes the following story from the great Peruvian revolutionary leader Hugo Blanco.


"A member of his community, he tells us, conducted some Swedish tourists to a Quechua village near Cuzco. Impressed by the collectivist spirit of the indigenous community, one of the tourists commented: 'This is like communism.'


"'No,' responded their guide, 'Communism is like this'."


I personally have been lucky enough to work with Blanco, who has a long-standing interest in ecology and Marxism, developed after spending time with the Zapatistas in Mexico.


Blanco led a rebellion in 1962 to liberate Peruvian peasants who were then so oppressed that they could be physically branded by landlords.


He was threatened with execution, imprisoned and exiled. He is still active today - very active indeed - and back in Peru.


About a month ago, I received a call from his son Oscar, who told me that his father had been jailed at the behest of a landowner after supporting a struggle by local peasants to take back land that had been seized illegally.
He has been released following international protests.


Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is famously interested indigenous people too. He suspended coal mining in north Venezuela following protests from indigenous groups, which are protected under Venezuela's constitution. Chavez has also given cheap oil to Native Americans in the United States.


Blanco, Chavez and Marx are far-sighted revolutionary socialists who have been passionate about the importance of indigenous peoples.


Latin American indigenous movements are keen to build socialist economies that work. A near universal demand from Argentina to Canada is traditional communal control of land.


They are not "Luddites" or "primitives." They are generally keen to embrace modernity when it brings real benefits and their political organisations are just as reliant on mobile phones or the internet as any other political organisation.


Indigenous people are at the forefront of real action on climate change because they don't want to see the rainforests destroyed by logging, mining or oil exploration.


In West Papua, for example, indigenous communities see the forest as the basis of their economy and society. Without it, they will die.


Less well known than their Latin American counterparts, the indigenous Free West Papua movement is led by Benny Wenda, who was exiled to London after escaping from the Indonesian military.


Indigenous people are also highly active in ecological struggles to preserve forests in much of India and parts of Africa.


However, in Latin America, they have won some big victories recently.


Blanco founded the newspaper Lucha Indigena (Indigenous Fight), which chronicles many of these struggles and the political debates of indigenous people. I imagine it being sold, Morning Star-style, on picket lines and protests in the Amazon.


If you can't get to the Amazon to buy a copy, regular articles will soon be appearing at hugoblancogaldos.blogspot.com


As Marx found, you need a whole second lifetime to explore indigenous society, given its huge diversity, but two particularly important struggles are worth flagging up.


Peruvian President Alan Garcia recently signed the country up to a free trade agreement with the US. It was accompanied by an attempt to open Peru to foreign corporations for oil extraction.


As part of the agreement, the Peruvian government tried to pass a law that would have made it easier to buy up communally owned indigenous land.


It would have allowed a huge increase in damage to Amazonian rainforests and accelerated climate change through oil extraction and deforestation.
But, in September, more than 50 very different indigenous ethnic groups united to fight the law with direct action.


They were well aware that corrupt deals would have led to their land been stolen and devastating ecological consequences. Their protests rocked the country, they defeated the plan and Garcia's poll ratings are now down to 18 per cent.


The people best suited to preserving the Amazon are indigenous people who live in it, but, rather than supporting them, many environmental NGOs are calling for debt-for-nature swaps and carbon offset schemes that would essentially privatise the forests and displace indigenous people.


In Colombia, right-wing death squads are clearing indigenous people so that tropical forests can be cut down for biofuel.


The right-wing government of Alvaro Uribe is planning a huge expansion of biofuels with the support of the EU, which is insisting on creating a market in biofuel.


In the US, Barack Obama wants to press ahead with biofuel plans too.

If we care about socialism and ecology, we have to support the struggles of indigenous people. Groups such as the Colombia Solidarity Campaign need our active involvement. Indigenous people provide a beacon of hope in the struggle for ecological sanity.


Bolivian President Evo Morales, a leader with indigenous origins, said it all when he described indigenous peoples as "called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life."

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

!

thanks for publishing my article...its also up here on my personal blog with some extra Hugo blanco and more thoughts links.

http://another-green-world.blogspot....n-of-hope.html

I have some disagreements sometimes with morning star but they are a great newspaper an real support those on the left in the UK!

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

thanks for publishing my article...its also up here on my personal blog with some extra Hugo blanco and more thoughts links.

http://another-green-world.blogspot....n-of-hope.html

I have some disagreements sometimes with morning star but they are a great newspaper an real support those on the left in the UK!

You'll find a few of yours in here, comrade. Thanks for all you do. Next time you have a problem with the star, just think...Mail....Express....Telegraph...... keeps things in perspective!

ps

Your 'blog is linked into your name in the original post. Workers of all lands UNITE!

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

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Thanksgiving: A National Day of Mourning for Indians

Published Nov 24, 2008 9:19 PM
Following are excerpts from a statement written by Mahtowin Munro (Lakota) and Moonanum James (Wampanoag), co-leaders of United American Indians of New England. Read the entire statement at www.uaine.org.


Mahtowin Munro

Every year since 1970, United American Indians of New England have organized the National Day of Mourning observance in Plymouth at noon on Thanksgiving Day. Every year, hundreds of Native people and our supporters from all four directions join us. Every year, including this year, Native people from throughout the Americas will speak the truth about our history and about current issues and struggles we are involved in.
Why do hundreds of people stand out in the cold rather than sit home eating turkey and watching football? Do we have something against a harvest festival?

Moonanum James

Of course not. But Thanksgiving in this country—and in particular in Plymouth—is much more than a harvest home festival. It is a celebration of pilgrim mythology.

According to this mythology, the pilgrims arrived, the Native people fed them and welcomed them, the Indians promptly faded into the background, and everyone lived happily ever after.

The pilgrims are glorified and mythologized because the circumstances of the first English-speaking colony in Jamestown were frankly too ugly (for example, they turned to cannibalism to survive) to hold up as an effective national myth.

The pilgrims did not find an empty land any more than Columbus “discovered” anything. Every inch of this land is Indian land. The pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims) did not come here seeking religious freedom; they already had that in Holland.

Leonard Peltier

They came here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and -gay bigotry, jails and the class system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when they arrived on Cape Cod—before they even made it to Plymouth—was to rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians’ winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry.

They were no better than any other group of Europeans when it came to their treatment of the Indigenous peoples here. And, no, they did not even land at that sacred shrine called Plymouth Rock, a monument to racism and oppression which we are proud to say we buried in 1995.

The first official “Day of Thanksgiving” was proclaimed in 1637 by Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had gone to Mystic, Conn., to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children and men.

About the only true thing in the whole mythology is that these pitiful European strangers would not have survived their first several years in “New England” were it not for the aid of Wampanoag people. What Native people got in return for this help was genocide, theft of our lands and never-ending repression. We are either treated as quaint relics from the past or are, to most people, virtually invisible.

When we dare to stand up for our rights, we are considered unreasonable. When we speak the truth about the history of the European invasion, we are often told to “go back where we came from.” Our roots are right here. They do not extend across any ocean.

National Day of Mourning began in 1970 when a Wampanoag man, Wamsutta Frank James, was asked to speak at a state dinner celebrating the 350th anniversary of the pilgrim landing. He refused to speak false words in praise of the white man for bringing civilization to us poor heathens. Native people from throughout the Americas came to Plymouth where they mourned their forebears who had been sold into slavery, burned alive, massacred, cheated and mistreated since the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620.

But the commemoration of National Day of Mourning goes far beyond the circumstances of 1970.

Can we give thanks as we remember Native political prisoner Leonard Peltier, who was framed up by the FBI and has been falsely imprisoned since 1976? Despite mountains of evidence exonerating Peltier and the proven misconduct of federal prosecutors and the FBI, Peltier has been denied a new trial.

To Native people, the case of Peltier is one more ordeal in a litany of wrongdoings committed by the U.S. government against us. While the media in New England present images of the “Pequot miracle” in Connecticut, the vast majority of Native people continue to live in the most abysmal poverty.

Can we give thanks for the fact that, on many reservations, unemployment rates surpass 50 percent? Our life expectancies are much lower, our infant mortality and teen suicide rates much higher than those of white Americans. Racist stereotypes of Native people, such as those perpetuated by the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves and countless local and national sports teams, persist. Every single one of the more than 350 treaties that Native nations signed has been broken by the U.S. government. The bipartisan budget cuts have severely reduced educational opportunities for Native youth and the development of new housing on reservations, and have caused cause deadly cutbacks in healthcare and other necessary services.

Are we to give thanks for being treated as unwelcome in our own country?

When the descendants of the Aztec, Maya and Inca flee to the U.S., the descendants of the wash-ashore pilgrims term them “illegal aliens” and hunt them down.

We object to the “Pilgrim Progress” parade and to what goes on in Plymouth because they are making millions of tourist dollars every year from the false pilgrim mythology. That money is being made off the backs of our slaughtered Indigenous ancestors.

Increasing numbers of people are seeking alternatives to such holidays as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. They are coming to the conclusion that if we are ever to achieve some sense of community, we must first face the truth about the history of this country and the toll that history has taken on the lives of millions of Indigenous, Black, Latin@, Asian, and poor and working-class white people.

The myth of Thanksgiving, served up with dollops of European superiority and manifest destiny, just does not work for many people in this country. As Malcolm X once said about the African-American experience in America, “We did not land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.” Exactly.


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[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Published on Thursday, November 27, 2008 by The Wisconsin State Journal
Thanksgiving A Loaded Holiday for Many Native-Americans
by Melanie Conklin



When Bobbi Webster, a member of the Oneida Nation, talks about being thankful, she mentions the strawberry harvest, tapping maple trees for syrup, the summer solstice and seasonal change. Feasting, family and giving thanks are the root of multiple thanksgiving celebrations spread throughout the year for the Oneida and other American Indians.

Mark Anthony Rolo, left, and his nephew Nick Rolo pick out a bagged turkey at Sentry Hilldale for their Thanksgiving family gathering. (Wisconsin State Journal)
And on this fourth Thursday in November, Webster, like millions of Americans, will gather with her family for a feast, make her mother's recipes for chocolate cake and cranberries, talk about gratitude and celebrate Thanksgiving.

"This time of year we all celebrate Thanksgiving, but we have 13 ceremonies of thanksgiving ongoing throughout the year," Webster said. "Sometimes you have to take the best of the worlds around you, draw from all the cultures. Thanksgiving is a time we see what we have in common."


But because of the roots of today's holiday in the early encounters between European settlers and native populations, there's a multiplicity of viewpoints among American Indians about Thanksgiving.


"Some see it with hostility. Some celebrate it with guilt, while others see it as an opportunity to educate and get in touch with our Americana," said Patty Loew, a historian, journalist and member of the Bad River Ojibwe.


She's in the latter camp. If you entered her kitchen, she said, "you would probably mistake me for any other American celebrating a day of food, friends and family." Her family table includes red cabbage from her German ancestors and Korean kimchee from her brother who loves spicy foods.


But Loew understands why some American Indians choose to fast or protest the holiday because it is rooted in a mythical image of the 'first' Thanksgiving feast in 1621 as a "hands across the waters, friendly, wonderful experience." Squanto, she noted, learned English as a slave. And by the time Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, tribes were already decimated by diseases likely brought by earlier European settlers.


So she uses Thanksgiving, and November's National American Indian Heritage Month, as a chance to correct that image and replace it with a deeper understanding of native culture.


"In mainstream America, sometimes we just give thanks for our football teams and the extra notch on our belts," Loew said. "But this one time of year is a real chance for me to share the native spirit and talk about thanksgiving in a broad, spiritual way."


Loew cited an Iroquois thanksgiving prayer as embodying Indian sentiment on thanks. It gives thanks to the waters, birds, plants, moon, people, teachers, the creator and more, beginning:


"Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people."


Prayers of thanks to the creator are said every day of the year, said Anne Thundercloud, public relations officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation.


"We're a very spiritual people who are always giving thanks," Thundercloud said. "The concept of setting aside one day for giving thanks doesn't fit.
We think of every day as Thanksgiving." She added that her family, and many Ho-Chunk, have adopted today's Thanksgiving holiday as well, drawn to another chance to gather for a feast with family. And the celebration continues Friday, which is Ho-Chunk Day, celebrated in Black River Falls with a large community event.


Mark Anthony Rolo, a member of the Bad River Band of Ojibwe and a UW-Madison lecturer in the School of Human Ecology, counts Thanksgiving as one of his favorite holidays, despite its challenges for American Indians.


"It's hard to figure out how to be," Rolo said. "So I don't want to talk about Native American politics on Thanksgiving Day."


He stressed that not all American Indians "view Thanksgiving as a downer" but said conflicting expectations from non-Indians can be exhausting. So he focuses on enjoying the time with his brothers, avoiding people who might want to overanalyze the holiday's meanings.


"Liberals want us to mourn and be angry or feel bad about commemorating our own cultural death," Rolo said. "Meanwhile conservatives blame us for our condition. Can you imagine having to sit around a Thanksgiving table with those folks telling us how to be while trying to digest a meal?"


Rolo spends much of the rest of the year wrestling with such topics as he writes and speaks about the plight of American Indians.
Thanksgiving is a day of rest.


"Now Thanksgiving dinner is such an easy meal to make, even for a lousy cook like me," Rolo joked. "You have cranberries in a can that actually taste good, heat-up pumpkin pie and turkey that comes preseasoned that bastes right in its bag. Native people are very grateful. And I'm thankful for turkey in a bag."


The food most Americans have on their table today has Native American origins. Dana Jackson, education director for the Bad River Band Ojibwe and an American Indian language teacher, cited turkey, pumpkin, corn, cranberries and wild rice as providing a cultural connection.


Each year Jackson asks his students at Northland College in Ashland to write a Thanksgiving oration or prayer in the Ojibwe language. Some students give thanks for things like their cats or dogs, but he encourages a broad world view.


"The speaker at our feasts is speaking for everyone," Jackson said. "We thank the turkey or deer for dying, for sacrificing its life to feed us. We don't ask for much for ourselves. This isn't a chance to ask for a new Corvette."


Students find much to be thankful for as they write the orations, he said. And Jackson hopes other cultures will adopt the American Indian tradition of multiple thanksgiving ceremonies throughout the year.


"I would personally encourage people to do it more often," Jackson said. "Please, borrow that. Feel free."

© 2008 The Wisconsin State Journal


Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/27-1

[Nostalgia]

Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving

Revolutionary Worker #883, November 24, 1996
Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists--and of the ruthless ways of capitalism.

* * * * *

In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 Puritan exiles. The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there. When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely.

The Puritans landed and built their colony called "the Plymouth Plantation" near the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They ate from abandoned cornfields grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet named Squanto had survived--he had spent the last years as a slave to the English and Spanish in Europe. Squanto spoke the colonists' language and taught them how to plant corn and how to catch fish until the first harvest. Squanto also helped the colonists negotiate a peace treaty with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit.

These were very lucky breaks for the colonists. The first Virginia settlement had been wiped out before they could establish themselves. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the Puritans not only survived their first year but had an alliance with the Wampanoags that would give them almost two decades of peace.

John Winthrop, a founder of the Massahusetts Bay colony considered this wave of illness and death to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a friend in England, "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection."

The deadly impact of European diseases and the good will of the Wampanoag allowed the Puritans to survive their first year.

In celebration of their good fortune, the colony's governor, William Bradford, declared a three-day feast of thanksgiving after that first harvest of 1621.
How the Puritans Stole the Land

But the peace that produced the Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that the Puritans would have 15 years to establish a firm foothold on the coast. Until 1629 there were no more than 300 Puritans in New England, scattered in small and isolated settlements. But their survival inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that soon established growing Massachusetts towns north of Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10 years, boatloads of new settlers came.

And as the number of Europeans increased, they proved not nearly so generous as the Wampanoags.

On arrival, the Puritans discussed "who legally owns all this land." They had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon traditions, but because their particular way of farming was based on individual--not communal or tribal--ownership. This debate over land ownership reveals that bourgeois "rule of law" does not mean "protect the rights of the masses of people."

Some Puritans argued that the land belonged to the Indians. These forces were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts Governor Winthrop declared the Indians had not "subdued" the land, and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common Law, be considered "public domain." This meant they belonged to the king. In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the representative of the crown (meaning the local governor).

The Puritans embraced a line from Psalms 2:8. "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." Since then, European settler states have similarly declared god their real estate agent: from the Boers seizing South Africa to the Zionists seizing Palestine.

The European immigrants took land and enslaved Indians to help them farm it. By 1637 there were about 2,000 British settlers. They pushed out from the coast and decided to remove the inhabitants.
The Birth of
"The American Way of War"

In the Connecticut Valley, the powerful Pequot tribe had not entered an alliance with the British (as had the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Massachusetts peoples). At first they were far from the centers of colonization. Then, in 1633, the British stole the land where the city of Hartford now sits--land which the Pequot had recently conquered from another tribe. That same year two British slave raiders were killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who killed the slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused.

The Puritan preachers said, from Romans 13:2, "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation." The colonial governments gathered an armed force of 240 under the command of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: "Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective."

The colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village on the Mystic River. At sunrise, as the inhabitants slept, the Puritan soldiers set the village on fire.

William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, wrote: "Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire...horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them."

Mason himself wrote: "It may be demanded...Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But...sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.... We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings."

Three hundred and fifty years later the Puritan phrase "a shining city on the hill" became a favorite quote of Ronald Reagan's speechwriters.
Discovering the
Profits of Slavery

This so-called "Pequot war" was a one-sided murder and slaving expedition. Over 180 captives were taken. After consulting the bible again, in Leviticus 24:44, the colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured women and their children. Only 500 Pequot remained alive and free. In 1975 the official number of Pequot living in Connecticut was 21.

Some of the war captives were given to the Narragansett and Massachusetts allies of the British. Even before the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples of North America had widely practiced taking war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves.

The remaining captives were sold to British plantation colonies in the West Indies to be worked to death in a new form of slavery that served the emerging capitalist world market. And with that, the merchants of Boston made a historic discovery: the profits they made from the sale of human beings virtually paid for the cost of seizing them.

One account says that enslaving Indians quickly became a "mania with speculators." These early merchant capitalists of Massachusetts started to make genocide pay for itself. The slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant capitalism.
Thanksgiving in the
Manhattan Colony

In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first "scalp bounty"--his government paid money for the scalp of each Indian brought to them. A couple years later, Kieft ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword.

A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and friendship.
The Conquest of New England

By the 1670s there were about 30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in the United New England Colonies--6,000 to 8,000 able to bear arms. With the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonists turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved them in 1620 and probably joined them for the original Thanksgiving Day.

In 1675 a Christian Wampanoag was killed while spying for the Puritans. The Plymouth authorities arrested and executed three Wampanoag without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip.

As Mao Tsetung says: "Where there is oppression there is resistance." The Wampanoag went to war.

The Indians applied some military lessons they had learned: they waged a guerrilla war which overran isolated European settlements and were often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan soldiers. The colonists again attacked and massacred the main Indian populations.

When this war ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men of the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle. Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But the colonists won.

In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The "Praying Indians" who had converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops during battles with "hostiles." They were enslaved or killed. Other "peaceful" Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts--and were sold onto slave ships.

It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this campaign, 500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died from battle, massacre and starvation.

After King Philip's War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan's New York colony: "There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts."

In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a "day of public thanksgiving" in 1676, saying, "there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled."

Fifty-five years after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring tribes. The Wampanoag chief King Philip was beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth, where the skull still hung on display 24 years later.

The descendants of these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson of Massasoit, the Pilgrim's original protector, was sold into slavery in Bermuda.
Runaways and Rebels

But even the destruction of Indian tribal life and the enslavement of survivors brought no peace. Indians continued to resist in every available way. Their oppressors lived in terror of a revolt. And they searched for ways to end the resistance. The historian MacLeod writes: "The first `reservations' were designed for the `wild' Irish of Ulster in 1609. And the first Indian reservation agent in America, Gookin of Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen service in Ireland under Cromwell."

The enslaved Indians refused to work and ran away. The Massachusetts government tried to control runaways by marking enslaved Indians: brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were tattooed into their foreheads and cheeks.

A Massachusetts law of 1695 gave colonists permission to kill Indians at will, declaring it was "lawful for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall find any Indians traveling or skulking in any of the towns or roads (within specified limits), to command them under their guard and examination, or to kill them as they may or can."

The northern colonists enacted more and more laws for controlling the people. A law in Albany forbade any African or Indian slave from driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set up; Africans and Indians were forbidden to have evening get-togethers. On Block Island, Indians were given 10 lashes for being out after nine o'clock. In 1692 Massachusetts made it a serious crime for any white person to marry an African, an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a slave revolt.
Celebrate?

Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to celebrate.

A little known fact: Squanto, the so-called "hero" of the original Thanksgiving Day, was executed by the Indians for his treacheries.

But the ruling powers of the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That's why they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).

Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the "bounty of the American way of life," while covering up the brutal nature of this society.
http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/883/thank.htm