THE WAMPANOAG TRIBE CORRECTS ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S MYTH OF THE FIRST THANKSGIVING

"As the story commonly goes, the Pilgrims who sailed from England on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock near 1620 and started a colony. 

The white pilgrims were in danger of starving to death since they were unfamiliar with how to grow things on the land until the Native Americans showed them what to do.   

Grateful to the Native Americans for keeping them from starving to death during their first winter, the white pilgrims invited the Native Americans to dinner for a feast.  This was the first Thanksgiving in what would later become the United States."

This is the nice little story taught in elementary schools everywhere for decades. And it's a lie.

I am guessing that it is mostly white children --and therefore white adults-- who have been allowed to continue believing this fiction beyond the 3rd or 4th grade.

The thing I didn't know until recently is that this is Abraham Lincoln's lie. It was he who made this story up. And he created this story many decades after the fact in order to calm things down during The Civil War.

According to the Wampanoag people, the specific Native Americans or "Indians" described in this age old, fictional tale of peaceful communion, this story that most of us recognize as 'The First Thanksgiving' isn't even in the same zip-code as the truth.

Feeling Rebloggy

THE WAMPANOAG TRIBE REPORT ON THE FIRST THANKSGIVING

So [Abraham Lincoln's First Thanksgiving Story] was a political thing?

Yes, it was public relations. It’s kind of genius, in a way, to get people to sit down and eat dinner together. Families were divided during the Civil War.

So what really happened?

We made a treaty. The leader of our nation at the time—Yellow Feather Oasmeequin [Massasoit] made a treaty with (John) Carver [the first governor of the colony]. They elected an official while they were still on the boat. They had their charter. They were still under the jurisdiction of the king [of England]—at least that’s what they told us. So they couldn’t make a treaty for a boatload of people so they made a treaty between two nations—England and the Wampanoag Nation.

What did the treaty say?

It basically said we’d let them be there and we would protect them against any enemies and they would protect us from any of ours. [The 2011 Native American copy coin commemorates the 1621 treaty between the Wampanoag tribe and the Pilgrims of Plymouth colony.] It was basically an I’ll watch your back, you watch mine’ agreement. Later on we collaborated on jurisdictions and creating a system so that we could live together.

What’s the Mashpee version of the 1621 meal?

You’ve probably heard the story of how Squanto assisted in their planting of corn? So this was their first successful harvest and they were celebrating that harvest and planning a day of their own thanksgiving. And it’s kind of like what some of the Arab nations do when they celebrate by shooting guns in the air. So this is what was going on over there at Plymouth. They were shooting guns and canons as a celebration, which alerted us because we didn’t know who they were shooting at. So Massasoit gathered up some 90 warriors and showed up at Plymouth prepared to engage, if that was what was happening, if they were taking any of our people. They didn’t know. It was a fact-finding mission....

~IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com 

Read more at 

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/11/23/what-really-happened-first-thanksgiving-wampanoag-side-tale-and-whats-done-today-145807


The old adage says, "Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it." 

And when you put that old saying in a cultural frame, you could rephrase it like this. "If we don't know the truth of our intermingled histories, we are collectively going to repeat the worst of our mistakes again and again."

And the struggle at Dakota Access Pipeline last year definitely seemed like the worst of U.S. history repeating itself. 

A broken treaty is at the heart of the battle over why this pipeline was moved from going through a predominantly white town to being put very close to native American lands -- where the inevitable pipeline failures and spills will run off. Environmental racism and regular racism has its fingerprints all over the DAPL struggle and the police brutality was icing on the cake.

If you never really followed what was happening to indigenous people in North Dakota, now is the time to learn.

Education is the first step toward stopping the cycle of abuse of indigenous people and/or black and brown people in general.

The second step is figuring out how you've indirectly benefited from the abuse of others (cheaper fuel costs etc).  

The third step is to be grateful for what you have at Thanksgiving while trying to find small ways to remove your tacit support for a government that abuses others. 

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