You’rewelcomesgiving
Sam Sykes ~ 11/28/2024
Thanksgiving is constantly being attacked and paraded around as a terribly racist and horrible holiday, but its origins are incredibly peaceful. From the first harvest feast between colonists and the indigenous in 1621 to Abe Lincoln’s attempts to unify a country healing after a civil war, Thanksgiving is a miraculous concept. People with vast differences come together to enjoy the nourishment of a meal. For modern assholes to reduce it to nothing more than a celebration of cultural destruction and genocide is a complete misinterpretation of the holiday’s inspiration. Indians should be giving thanks to the colonizers for ending the barbaric violence and constant death that plagued North America.
The Wheel
Indians are always being applauded for having such an amazing and rich culture. I will admit, the animal spirits and the glorifications of warriors is pretty badass. Living off the land to attack enemies as one with nature is fucking cool. But the incredibly senseless violence consistently carried out on just about everyone (we’ll get to that later) is not the only major issue tribal communities endured. Besides building houses made of mud bricks by a select tribe of Pueblos, engineering was not a strong suit of the indigenous people. In fact, most North American tribes were so unevolved that they never invented the wheel or any other basic innovations. This left many vulnerable, especially children and the elderly, to the whims and destruction of mother nature.
Real Medicine
When the west began to colonize North America they may have brought some new and evolved illnesses, but ultimately they brought the discipline, bravery, and perseverance of science. Once we realize that the smallpox blankets myth is bullshit, we can start to understand that the Western explorers brought amazing cures and medical treatments to the new world. Blankets were never dispersed as a bioweapon meant to kill indians. The opposite is true, natives who were fortunate enough to be near colonists would have otherwise died from illness or infected wounds, but were given a new lease on life. Instead of sweating your balls off in a sweat lodge and praying to the great spirit while hallucinating, they were given practical and effective ways of healing themselves.
Tribe v. Tribe
The constant battles between tribes before and during European colonization were unfathomably violent. It was not uncommon to fight until an enemy was completely destroyed, even if it meant that both sides would take unlimited casualties. For the winning tribe, enemies children were kidnapped, tortured, slaughtered, and the women brutally raped and taken slave. There were over 600 tribes within modern America’s borders, all featuring war and pillaging as an integral part of their cultures. So-called “experts” will say that the colonists brought violence, but they were actually the ones stopping it.
The Beaver Wars are a great example of the immense intertribal violence that plagued North America. For the last 70 years of the 17th century, much of the American Northeast and the Eastern Great Lakes region were embroiled in fierce battles between tribes. So much generational violence, torture, and horrors of war over beaver pelts. The casualties are so hard to estimate because of the voracity for mutually assured destruction. Bloodshed and destruction everywhere, it’s no wonder they didn’t have five minutes to sit down and invent a wheel.
A Day That Changed Everything
On August 30th, 1813, during the height of the war of 1812, a group of roughly 1000 Red Sticks Indians attacked Fort Mims in what would eventually become Alabama. The fort was manned almost entirely by non-military men looking to band together to defend their families, not exactly trained soldiers. Every woman was killed, or raped and killed besides two that were able to escape, and only one child managed to get out. Leaving out the 36 people that escaped the horror, 517 people, consisting of men, women, and children as young as infancy were slaughtered, with 250 being scalped alive. Don’t worry though, the slaves living at Fort Mims were liberated, but subsequently enslaved by the tribe. We always hear about the Indians' respect for nature and the animal spirit, using every part of the buffalo. That didn’t stop them from senselessly killing over 5,000 heads of cattle surrounding the fort.
Future president Andrew Jackson was the leader of a massive and racially-diverse militia and recovering from a gunshot wound in Nashville, Tennessee when he heard of the massacre at Fort Mims. He was so enraged at the loss of innocent settler lives, that he gathered his army and began a scorched-earth campaign against the Red Sticks. He suffered few defeats in his hard-charging Creek War that took him less than a year to complete. A great man that saved the Manifest Destiny.
Assimilation and Compensation
During the 19th century, the horrors that natives were bringing to innocent settlers became a serious and publicly known issue throughout the United States. There was no other way about it, indians were welcome to peacefully assimilate into a western society that embraces law and order, or face removal from areas they could not stop raping and killing. Assimilation was the only way to ensure that the society moved away from the constant violence of 600 tribes fighting over invisible lines and an antiquated sense of honor, to a world that believed in peace and progress. Integrated educational opportunities for Indian children, land allotments, and citizenship pathways were all attempts to help the natives assimilate. Assimilation was the only way to stop the barbaric violence of the old world and usher in an era of peace.
Let’s not forget that in America, it pays to be even slightly indigenous. Indians basically never need to pay for anything, and some tribes trust fund native children millions before they turn 18. Not bad pay for what was essentially nomadic tribes that were asked to fuck off 200 years ago.
YOU’RE WELCOME
Thanksgiving is a day to sit back and reflect on the people and things that we are so lucky and grateful to have in our lives. For the people turning it into a holiday of mourning and contemplation of past injustice, go fuck yourself. They should be giving thanks for the peace and prosperity brought on by the western world, even if there were some growing pains. It’s time for the west to stop apologizing to natives, and start saying “You’re Welcome!”.
