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The fact is that the beloved story of the pilgrims is the story of one of the first little seeds of genocide planting itself on this continent and beginning its germination. A group of people was pushed out of Europe and sailed West to the shores of North America, where they were so pitifully helpless and unable to provide for themselves that a group of Native Americans took pity on them and compassionately taught them how to survive in their new home. The story told in schools is that at the end of their first successful growing season and harvest in the New World, the pilgrims had a large feast and invited all their Native American friends to thank them.

The truth is that the meal was held because it was an English tradition at the time to hold large community feasts. The Native Americans were present because it was their own land that had produced the bounty, and their own food from their seeds and their knowledge and talent that turned crops into a harvest. They were present because it was their home and the pilgrims had not yet told them what their true intentions were as an invasion force seeking to conquer new lands for themselves, cutting down the trees and plowing up the Earth and spreading the poison of Puritan religious teachings as far as they could. The Indians were there because at that point it was still clear that the Native Americans had more a right to be there in the pilgrim settlement and anywhere else on the continent than the Europeans did - not because they were "invited."

At this meal of Thanksgiving the deeply religious pilgrims had the audacity to thank - not the Native Americans who had made it possible for them to survive and reap a harvest in their new surrounding; nor even the Mother Earth or Great Spirit of life that the natives would have attributed their thanks to - but instead in reality they thanked their own God, unseen in the sky and a complete stranger to the Natives, without thanking the natives themselves or so much as acknowledging native spirituality.

The first year or two of the Plymouth colony's existence could not have happened without the help of the local natives. In return, as soon as the Plymouth colony was firmly established and had a foothold in the New World, its occupants began genocide against the natives; which was easy to do with their misplaced thanks going to God rather than the fellow human beings they were.

One must remember that there were people here already when Europeans came to this continent, and any hostilities between the two groups were arising out of Europeans coming uninvited to live in someone else's home and attempting to push the people who already lived there out.

Today, we annually celebrate many of the symbolic and actual origins of this genocide which eventually killed several million people on this continent, even by the lowest possible estimates. Thanksgiving is one of them. Columbus day is another. There were an estimated 3 million natives calling themselves Arawaks on the island of Hispanola when Columbus landed there and "discovered it." Within a few short years the settlement established and presided over by Christopher Columbus had virtually eliminated them as a people by enslaving and/or murdering the entirety of their population. Today the group does not exist at all; there are no native people left in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Today in the United States there is an annual celebration of both Thanksgiving and "Columbus Day." The difference between the United States and Nazi Germany is that the United States didn't lose. If Germany had won, they might just as easily be celebrating "Hitler Day" every year.

Learn more about this author, Matthew Tyler Funk.
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