And yes, I know, it is also about being thankful for something. Like the Pilgrims, who, because they were grateful for not having been slaughtered by their savage neighbors, and for having been fed a whole winter by them, actually invited and treated them to a free meal - one thing very close to total bliss in contemporary America-!!
Yes, Sitting Bull, I know, it sounds unbelievable and yet, it happened. In 1621, in Plymouth, very far from where you lived and before your time, anyway. So, here they are, the lucky "Indians", arriving in the colonists' hamlet, not sure that they would eat anything edible -I don't blame them- but too polite anyway to say anything like that. They seat -on benches or on the ground?-. Do they mingle with the colonists? Do men and women eat together? Do they toast? Does the colonist-in-chief make a speech for them? In Wampanoag or is it translated by a native American who would understand some English? Do they really eat Turkey with cranberry sauce? And some pumpkin pie for dessert?
And after, well, after, I guess they all went back to their cabins and huts and did it...
I meant AFTER?
After, that's the part I still don't understand. How can you be thankful one day to your neighbor for having fed you and the next day, just decide that you had had enough with his peace calumet and savage dances and ugly face-painting and praise of nature and all that crap and just go on your little business and "kill them all"?!
How come during Thanksgiving people always remember to be thankful to a bunch of do-good Indians that saved the first colonists from starvation but are completely oblivious to the fate of thousands of other Native Americans Indians who were slaughtered, raped, deported, parked, whose children were taken from them, forced to become good Americans by living far away from their parents in prison-type boarding schools, forced to cut their hair, wear White-man clothes, speak English, pray to Christ and so forth?
How come at Thanksgiving nobody ever seems to remember to apologize for all the crimes committed by the colonists and pioneers after the first Thanksgiving meal?
I wonder if tomorrow, in their reservations, Lakotas, Navajos, Nez-perces, Apaches, Hopis, Comanches, Blackfeet, will celebrate Thanksgiving as well. If their kids would have had to dress up at school in Pilgrims' clothes with black hats and white Henri-the-fourth kind of collars like my daughter did last year.
P.S: In fact, I just learned that each year, some Native Americans from different tribes gather in Alcatraz Island to celebrate an Unthanksgiving Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unthanksgiving_Day) in remembrance of all their sufferings and of their occupation of this island between 1969 and 1971, when they fought for more civil rights and a fairer place in the American society.
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