Will the real Thanksgiving please step forward? 

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I really should have written this opinion column for last week’s edition. But, then again, I didn’t want to imagine all my readers retching and disgorging at their family feasts. There’s just something about the notion of a full-out, Thanksgiving Barf-a-Rama—and a really humiliated turkey—that seems a bit distasteful.

Like most American kids, I had been fascinated by the stories of the first Thanksgiving celebration—how Pilgrims and Indians shared a truly bounteous harvest, the warm bonds of friendship that had so quickly been formed, and how the Indians had been credited with the settlers’ salvation from starvation. I knew that Indians had taught them to maximize their crop yields with fertilizer—planting a fish with each corn plant. Turns out, there was plenty left-over for popcorn.

I was obviously white enough to land one of the starring pilgrim roles in our kindergarten Thanksgiving play—reverently showing the piety of an uber-Christian, clutching an oversized Bible in my hand and donning the appropriate coal-stacked hat, buckle-topped shoes and knee-length britches.

When all the parents were seated, the auditorium lights dimmed and the spotlight hit the stage. Our narrator—Miss Schnesselgard—read the charming story of the unity and brotherhood that had thrived between the Indians and their new buddies.

I swelled with pride as the epic account was told—how the Indians, upon receiving their Hallmark Card invitations, were overcome with happy emotion, contemplating the love and cooperation that would make them and their Pilgrim-brothers friends forever. I took the two steps forward—to stage-center—and embarked on my first venture toward stardom.

It was only a single line, but I enunciated properly and projected loudly toward the audience: “Welcome, our Indian brothers. Please, come share with us in our harvest.” I was pretty sure that I’d end up in Hollywood.

Actually, it had never occurred to me or my fellow kindergartners that our play might have diverged, just a bit, from the real history. And it would be years before my curiosity led me to read other accounts of the first Thanksgiving—and how the Native American tribes had united together in designating that very same day their official Day of Mourning.

It’s true that the Wampanoag Tribe and others had been an invaluable godsend to the Pilgrims, teaching them the finer points of corn cultivation and allowing a very productive 1621 harvest.

But other accounts of the feast suggest a different rationale for the “Indians” to have been there. Not all historians are in agreement, but several have asserted that the “guest” Wampanoags were actually part of a war party, dispatched in response to gunfire in the colony.

Of course, the discharge of muskets had merely been part of the festivities. But, because the warriors—believing that the settlers were under attack—had hastened to the aid of the Pilgrims, a few settlers suggested that they be allowed to stay and partake, extending a simple courtesy to their would-be saviors.

Like so many oversimplified and highly censored accounts of American history, the first Thanksgiving was a hodgepodge of truth, legend and the sanitizing of a truly horrible event in the European conquest of the Native Americans.

It isn’t that there weren’t a few of the eastern seaboard Indian tribes that had actually tried to get along with the conquering hoard of whites. During the very first years of Europeans migrating to the new world, the Indians had seen the new residents as an opportunity for trade and potential allies for defense against their enemies.

But that changed. As a sprinkling of settlers turned into a mass migration, the historic ancestral lands of the Indians were quickly being overrun, and the greed of settlers for more land and wealth turned much of the former Indian goodwill into a growing resentment.

Some of the whites were kidnapping natives, forcing them to servitude and even trying to create a slave trade. Some of the “red men” were taken back to Europe, paraded as spectacles and subjected to all manner of indignities. Whatever good feelings had existed in the early years of Jamestown and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were quickly compromised, and the taking of white-man scalps became a growing threat.

The Pequots were a tribe that numbered around 8,000 when the Pilgrims arrived, but that number was halved by a mysterious disease—no one knows which, but it’s believed to have been rodent-borne. The remainder struggled to deal with white encroachment on their farmland and hunting grounds, inspiring an occasional potshot at Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims, faced with a number of dead settlers, decided that enough was enough. In 1637, a large force of soldiers and settlers set out to teach their “Indian brothers” a lesson, attacking one of the Pequots’ biggest conclaves. Known as the “Fort Mystic Massacre,” the white forces torched the village.

Here’s an account, straight from Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor William Bradford’s journal: “Those that escaped the fire were [slain] with the sword; some hewed to [pieces], others [run] [through] with their rapiers, so as they were quickly [dispatched], and very few [escaped]…It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the [fire], and the streams of blood quenching the same, and 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, thus to [enclose] their [enemies] in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an [enemy].”

“God” had provided and, once again, the formula for white colonization of foreign lands had been planned and implemented. Only a few of the Pequots escaped death, and the settlers sold them as slaves in the West Indies. Over the course of years, “Thanksgiving” became a celebration of the destruction of indigenous Americans.

That, of course, is nothing new—just another reality of how colonization often employs the help of a mostly-friendly local population, and then employs genocide to take over their lands and wealth.

So, my friends, you can see why I waited until after the holiday feast—a new understanding of the greater significance of that wonderful, Christian, family holiday we know today as Thanksgiving.

The author is a retired businessman, novelist, columnist and former Vietnam-era Army assistant public information officer. He resides in Riverton with his wife, Carol, and their adorable and ferocious “Poppy.” comments@cityweekly.net