At the end of the war, the Wampanoag were nearly exterminated. Infact, the son of Chief Massasoit, Metacom, was killed by the pilgrims, dismembered, beheaded, and his head impaled on a spear outside of Plymouth. These God-fearing Pilgrims, then send Metacom's young son to the West Indies as a slave, along with numerous other Wampanoag and people of nearby tribes. This ethnic cleansing and genocide was designed and calculated to seize Indian lands for the growing white British settler population.
A day of Thanksgiving was declared, and to celebrate, the pilgrims kicked the heads of dead indigenous peoples around like soccer balls. Today the REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING is of Indigenous peoples throughout America systematically and continually betrayed by European settlers, killed off by disease, germ warfare, hunted for bounties, kidnapped and forcibly shipped overseas as slaves, and ultimately pushed out of their homelands and onto de facto prison camps (now euphemistically known as reservations), few survived these brutal conditions.
After centuries of trauma, oppression and systematically being eradicated American Indians today have staggering rates of depression, plagued by mental health disparities, suicide, and deaths due to alcohol and drug abuse. The American Indian people continue to struggle to cope with that historical trauma, and to heal deeply imbedded social wounds that stem directly from American colonialism.
You cannot divorce the very real negative consequences of American homegrown colonialism from the mythical version of Thanksgiving Day. In its present form the narrative is a real, not imagined, ginned up and scrubbed version of events. It's a sordid story of land theft, betrayal, brutality, and genocide. This habit of whitewashing, lying and outright erasure of American Indigenous people's history is inhumane and oppressive. At its most insidious this told and retold mythical Thanksgiving Day story shortchanges our children and most Americans who stand to learn from this very tragic story.
The effects of American colonization on the Indigenous people reduced their populations and left generational wounds that still linger today -- stubborn and enduring. By propagating the mythical version of Thanksgiving, American children and adults become confused about history. Moreover, the Thanksgiving Day lie prevents and retards a genuine collective American understanding of the tragedy that is part of Native American history.
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