Let the Truth be Known about Thanksgiving!

It’s amazing how people go on generation after generation never knowing the depth of what Thanksgiving is all about. In schools’ textbooks, this holiday is treated with very careful fluffy wording. It makes sense because if young children knew the truth—how brutally Thanksgiving came about, it may haunt them in such a way that would not only impede their future learning but some children may not see Thanksgiving as a cause for celebration.  In the American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy, it is simply stated that the Wampanoag chieftain Massasoit signed a treaty with the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1621 and helped them celebrate the first Thanksgiving after the autumn harvests that same year. In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States from 1492-Present, he leaves no stone unturned and all his information came from documented sources. According to Zinn’s documents, black slaves were the answer to the colonists’ food problem considering amongst them were survivors from the “starving time”. Many starved to death during the winter of 1609-1610, the “starving time”. Those that survived did so by living in cavelike holes dug into the ground, roaming the woods for nuts and berries, digging up graves to eat the corpses and many died reducing the five hundred colonists to sixty. When the Pilgrims arrived in New England in the winter of 1620 they encountered the same fate and lost many lives to starvation and illnesses. Since they failed to prove their superiority by killing the Indians, torturing them, burning their villages and cornfields, they were unable to grow enough corn on their own so they imported black slaves to labor and grow enough food for them to stay alive. The next autumn of 1621 brought plentiful harvests and a cause for celebration—the first Thanksgiving Day in New England along with a “temporary” peaceful treaty with the Indians in the territory.