The First Thanksgiving

In this episode of Christian Mythbusters, Father Jared debunks the myth of the First Thanksgiving and American Christian complicity in the genocide of native people. You can hear Christian Mythbusters in the Grand Haven area on 92.1, WGHN, on Wednesdays at 10:30am and Sundays at 8:50am. The transcript of the episode is below, or you can listen to the audio at the bottom of the post. This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Tomorrow many families in our community will be finding ways to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. It will certainly be a Thanksgiving unlike many of us have had before. At least I hope it will, given that there is still a global pandemic killing thousands of people. Please, please make good decisions. Around this time, I’m always struck by posts on Facebook and social media of happy Native Americans giving large plates of food to kindly Puritan colonists, a kind of general nostalgia for a world now gone. And so, this week I would like to bust the myth of that original Thanksgiving. If you actually do want to know more about this story, I’d commend to you an excellent book by David Silverman, called This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. In it, Silverman lays out much that we have learned about that original Thanksgiving, much that had been covered up by myth and historical inaccuracy. He’s also clear about how the continued retelling of the Thanksgiving myth wounds not only the still existing Wampanoag Indians (and yes there are still some), but all Native people who see their history erased by quaint and invented stories. So, let’s start by clearing up a few things. First off, for at least 12,000 years, if not longer, the Native American people lived in this country. By the time the Mayflower arrived, this was not first contact. There had already been a century of contact between Native American people and the Europeans. And it wasn’t a kind and gentle engagement of brave explorers and Native People. Instead, it was more often bloody slave raiding by the Europeans. When the pilgrims arrived, some of the Wampanoag already spoke English and had even been to Europe and back. The Wampanoag reached out to the English at Plymouth in the hope of an alliance to help them in their ongoing battles with the Narragansett. They had already been decimated by a pandemic and this was one of their last hopes. Unfortunately, the Europeans responded to this kind overture by the Wampanoag by over the next fifty years by stealing Wampanoag land, spreading European disease, and exploiting their natural resources. As tensions increased, the Europeans insisted that the Wampanoag surrender all their guns. They hung three members of the Wampanoag tribe on accusations of murder, raids began, and before long the differences between the Narragansett and Wampanoag were erased as both found themselves fighting for their lives in what became known as King Philip’s war, a war so named because the Wampanoag chief, Metacom, adopted Philip as an English name when relationships were friendlier, long, long ago. By the end of King Philip’s war, 1,000 colonists had died, but 3,000 Indians were killed. Many that survived, including Metacom’s son, were enslaved and sent to Bermuda. Several of the smaller tribes were entirely destroyed, including almost all of the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags. And Rhode Island itself was devasted, its principal city of Providence destroyed… all because European Chr...