Sermon: A Thoughtful Gathering of Thanks
Good morning, and thank you for being here. When I think of gratitude, my mind goes to this community and this space. Back in Florida, I’m a member of the largest congregation in the state, at a bit over 300 members. I am grateful to it as well, but here I feel more of a sense of home. I love this simple space that we beautify when we come together with flowers and candles and slides and smiles. There is something special about gathering in a smaller group of people as we can get to know each other better, and I especially love this humble gathering space we have knowing that Maison Verte does so much for those in need.
For many of us, Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. Lacking the commercialism that has become Christmas, it is a time we think of to gather with family and friends to enjoy a special meal together and celebrate our love for one another. Many of us only eat turkey on that one day in the year. I think you can even get some kind of vegan replacement turkey these days!
Most of us also have memories of school activities when we made turkeys by tracing our hands and created paper pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses. We heard the story that our children heard and our grandchildren hear now of how Pilgrims invited the Native Americans to come together with them in 1621 to give thanks for a good harvest.
As is the case for many national holidays, the nice stories we heard in elementary school promote an inaccurate version of history in which the white settlers are the benevolent superior people who kindly invited some members of an Indian tribe to share in their bounty. You can see how American Indians were depicted in early paintings. They are fewer in number than the Pilgrims, and they tend to be in the background, not standing in the foreground of the paintings.
Since we’re Unitarian Universalists, and as a group we tend to seek out truth rather than rely on mythology, you may already know much of this. To begin, archives show that the first Thanksgiving feast occurred in Saint Augustine, Florida, when Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his expedition gave thanks for their safe arrival in 1565. This predates the Massachusetts feast by over 50 years. There are also records indicating that Native Americans celebrated harvest festivals or days of thanksgiving long before Europeans ever set foot on American soil.
Records from the time indicate that the Wampanoag tribe brought most of the food to this three-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, feast in 1621. They were known to hold a harvest feast. It is unlikely that turkey was served, though there would have been other wild fowl and venison. Sweet potatoes were not yet a crop in North America, but there would have been corn, white potatoes, beans, and pumpkin. It is also likely that there twice as many Native Americans at the feast than settlers, in spite of the paintings’ portrayals.
And that is the good part of the story! The Pilgrims were overwhelmed facing the wilderness conditions they found in the New World. The Wampanoag tribe taught them important farming, fishing, and hunting skills. For instance, they taught them that crops would grow better if planted with a fish head under the seeds and plants – fertilizer.
The tribe was rewarded for its efforts by suffering terrible plagues and death associated with an Old World bacteria carried onto the ships by rats.
Because of their exposure to large-scale epidemics, and their regular contact with large mammals, many Europeans built up immunities to smallpox, flu, and other illnesses. As a result, when English settlers came to New England in the early 17th century, they brought bacterial and viral diseases that wiped out more than 90 percent of the native population of New England. The impact of the Pilgrim’s plague was enormous. For fifty years, the Pilgrims faced no challenge from the Native Americans. Long afterwards, European-originating diseases continued to devastate the Native American population, clearing a path for European conquest.
In the King James charter, it is written about in this way:
within these late Yeares there hath by God’s Visitation reigned a wonderfull Plague, together with many horrible Slaugthers, and Murthers, committed amoungst the Savages and brutish People there, heertofore inhabiting, in a Manner to the utter Destruction, Deuastacion, and Depopulacion of that whole Territorye, so that there is not left for many Leagues together in a Manner, any that doe claime or challenge any Kind of Interests therein, nor any other Superiour Lord or Souveraigne to make Claime. “hereunto, whereby We in our Judgment are persuaded and satisfied that the appointed Time is come in which Almighty God in his great Goodness and Bountie towards Us and our People, hath thought fitt and determined, that those large and goodly Territoryes, deserted as it were by their naturall Inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed by such of our Subjects and People as heertofore have and hereafter shall by his Mercie and Favour, and by his Powerfull Arme, be directed and conducted thither.
Not exactly a declaration of friendship. As journalist Grace Donnelly wrote,
The celebration in 1621 did not mark a friendly turning point and did not become an annual event. Relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated, leading to the Pequot War. In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man the settlers believed the Wampanoags killed, they burned a nearby village, killing 5-600 men, women, and children. Following the massacre, William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for “the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”
It is painful to realize that White settlers in North America have a long history of invoking God both to judge and to justify terrible acts of inhumanity against others, including Black Americans and immigrants. We see it now with over 540 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures.
As we know, this was just the beginning of white settlers attacking, killing, enslaving, and forcibly displacing indigenous people in North America. According to History.com, “From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier — the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world — became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people.”
And this says nothing of all the treaties brokered and then broken or all the grabbing of land removing populations, including the most famous removal of natives: the Trail of Tears. Beginning in 1831, tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced to relocate from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. Many died along the way.
You know, I didn’t learn about any of this until I was working on my Ph.D.! I took a course on the education of minority populations in the US where I learned of General Wm Pratt and his experiment at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, FL, in the 1860s, in which he worked to de-culturalize American Indian prisoners to become servants for White people. Considered ahead of his time, his motto was , “Kill the Indian, save the man,” referring to destroying the indigenous culture to be saved by a Christian god. A couple years ago, I visited Fort Marion. I found a narration about General Pratt that described him as a “human rights leader.” True, he didn’t advocate for mortally killing the native population, but I’d hardly call him a human rights leader. Of course, I wrote to the director of Fort Marion, but I don’t know if they made any changes.
Pratt was also the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, explicitly founded to strip indigenous children of their native culture and language. The school operated between 1879 and 1918, attended by 10,000 children from 142 tribes. In the fall, the US militia would literally go to reservations and round the children up to take them away from their parents and put them in the boarding school, where they would be punished for speaking their native language or wearing any traditional clothing. During summers these children were typically farmed out to white families to work for them as servants or farm workers.
Native Americans living in Plymouth, MA commemorate a different holiday on Thanksgiving Day—a National Day of Mourning. Professor Amy Adams explained that it was started by Wamsutta James, a Native American man who was asked to speak at a community Thanksgiving Day event in the Plymouth area in 1970. When event organizers saw what he had written and was going to say about how Native American people had been treated, they did not let him speak.
That year, he and hundreds of other Native Americans and supporters established Mourning Rock in Plymouth and the Day of Mourning, commemorated on Thanksgiving Day to give a voice to the hardships Native Americans have suffered.
James’s son still leads the Day of Mourning with members of the United American Indians of New England, a group James formed.
In 1863, President Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday to be held the last Thursday of November. In part he did this hoping that the holiday would help to unify people in the United States. In August of 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt moved the date to the third Thursday of November. He did this, by the way, at the urging of retailers in order to create an extra week of Christmas shopping! It was hugely controversial at the time, and thousands of protest letters arrived at the White House. University professors stated their academic calendars had already been printed. Even turkey sellers complained that it would be a problem with their delivery schedules. That year, half of American celebrated what was dubbed “Franksgiving” on the third Thursday, while half stuck to the last Thursday of November.
Texas, Colorado, and Mississippi celebrated both dates.
OK, you’re saying now. Stop, Jody, just stop! You’re ruining my cornbread and pumpkin pie!
I used to teach in the College of Education, and I would have my students read the chapter on Thanksgiving by James Louwen in his famous book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. After we discussed it, I asked them how many would teach Thanksgiving differently based on their new knowledge. What do you think? At least 90% would say, No. Sticking to our story!
Isn’t there a way that we can be thoughtful and reflective about this complex past, given that “sticking to the myth” is frankly racist and contributes to the ongoing problem we have in the US with a kind of superiority way of thinking?
An enlightened look at this history could open up so much compassion, for instance. I have worked for over 20 years with refugee and migrant research. I wonder if we recognized our ancestors’ role as pretty cruel conquerors if we might not have a bit more empathy for migrants. Our ancestors were migrants. Current migrants are NOT trying to kill off current US populations (though some politicians would have you believe that), They’re just trying to find ways to a better life and want to contribute to the country. Could it help us find ways to honor and respect the indigenous US population, recognizing all of their accomplishments, the beauty of their cultures, and the need to protect their heritage?
And by being honest about the real story of Thanksgiving, can it not also allow us a more genuine way to be truly grateful for all that we have and for one another by recognizing the great sacrifices made to bring us to where we are today?
As an adult, Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. It’s not mixed in with the challenges I have with religious holidays or holidays commemorating wars. As an adult, I don’t think of those myths about the goodness of Pilgrims, but rather of the joy I have to be among dear friends and family still, though the numbers have diminished over the years. The holiday makes me think of love and kindness and sharing.
We can love this very American holiday while acknowledging its problematic past.
I urge you to set aside some time this week – and I know that the week of Thanksgiving is often a very busy one, as many prepare to serve a beautiful meal and entertain family and friends. But find a space of time, maybe even the first minutes as you wake up every morning – to really consider what you are grateful for. There is so much to be grateful for. Currently, many of us are struggling with sadness at world events. And this is important. But reminding ourselves of what is beautiful and important and what we treasure can also help us keep hope in our hearts.
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And so, may we all have a thoughtful gathering of thanks at this year’s Thanksgiving.
[References]
Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen, https://www.litcharts.com/lit/lies-my-teacher-told-me/chapter-3-the-truth-about-the-first-thanksgiving
Make Your Thanksgiving More Meaningful with History You Never Knew, https://www.iup.edu/news-events/news/2021/11/make-your-thanksgiving-more-meaningful-with-history-you-never-knew.html
The Charter of New England: 1620, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass01.asp
The Horrible History of Thanksgiving, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/opinion/thanksgiving-history.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap
Washington Post, Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a Week to Goose the Economy. Chaos ensued. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/11/24/franskgiving-fdr-moved-thanksgiving/