The Other Thanksgivings Americans Never Celebrate Or Hear About But Should

Although most people are familiar with the feel-good stories of what was allegedly America’s First Thanksgiving, there’s many others kinds of thanksgivings which are just as significant, if not more so. In fact, a case can be made that the rhetoric of freedom and democracy contained in the U.S. Constitution actually stemmed from its First Nations. The same goes for The Ages of Reason and Science and other movements such as Transcendentalism, Environmentalists, and Civil Disobedience.

Giving Thanks For America’s First, First Nations', Constitution
Before discussing what many get wrong about the First Thanksgiving, the freedoms and rights that many Americans enjoy today were heavily borrowed from the democratic structures and forms of government practiced by the Iroquois Confederacy and Great Law of Peace. Established in 1142, seventy-three years before the Magna Carta and seven-hundred years before the U.S. Constitution, it’s the oldest consensual form of government in the world. It also regards “consensus” and a “balloted referendum” as social ideals.

Many First Nations negotiated other treaties with the English as well. Not only did the English use the native protocols until around 1800, but so did the founding fathers. Impressed with the Iroquois Confederacy’s democratic and republican values, specifically as compared to the many rigid monarchies in Europe, they borrowed significantly from its principles to design the U.S. government’s structure and constitution. The same went for the Albany Plan of Union (1754) and Articles of Confederation (1781).

Thanking First Nation’s For Many Other Revolutions
Americans can also give thanks for how the Iroquois Confederacy influenced Thomas Paine. Observing its members “enjoyed infinitely greater degrees of happiness than those who live under European governments,”(1) he later included these and other ideals of liberty in “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man,” and “Age of Reason.” He moreover reasoned that: “To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of such as the natural state of man Indians of North America.”

Contact with indigenous peoples of the Americas led to many Europeans challenging the Church’s “autocracy of knowledge” too. Arguing the Bible might not after all give an accurate and scientific explanation of the mechanics of the universe, or that there may be other peoples and histories “outside” of Europe’s religious constructs, helped lead to reason and reform. Introducing new goods, medicines, rubber, transportation, astronomy, and different ways of thinking about the world, also helped ignite a scientific revolution.

Giving Thanks For Many Other Movements
Other revolutionary movements Americans can thank the First Nations for is Environmentalism and Transcendentalism. Indeed, the American Indian has always served as a foil to the West’s emphasis on wealth and property ownership as the basis of personal worth and equality. The same goes for its anti-Nature ideologies like materialism and consumerism and rapacious mentality towards resources. This led American writers like Walt Whitman to explore the importance of nature in relation to the human spirit.

Henry David Thoreau, who embraced Naturalism and Transcendentalism, spent much time seeking “Indian wisdom” as well. Their religious truths gleaned from nature, and their realization of the divine in creation, impacted his “Walden” and “The Dial.” So did their sense of fierce independence which he mentioned in “Civil Disobedience.”(2) Meanwhile, he lauded Native Americans for letting Nature be their guide while criticizing the Puritans’ “laziness” and lack of agricultural and forestry knowledge.

A Thankless And Eurocentric Continent
This is not to say that Native Americans didn’t manipulate their environments. Not only were the great eastern forests an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak, but the first English settlers noticed how they resembled English parks.(3) They also found trees so widely spaced that they could either drive carriages through them or herd animals-something that Native Americans did quite often and as far as the Great Plains.

Consequently, it’s always dangerous to judge a civilization based solely on one society’s narrow definition of technological advancement. It’s also dangerous not to be aware of ethnocentrism. Native Americans were far from being primitive or technologically inferior to the English. Their bows and arrows were more efficient and powerful than the musket. They also had access to over seventy types of foods. In some ways, they saved a continent which was bankrupt politically, economically, socially, and environmentally.

No Thanks Intended At First Thanksgiving
Another thing that’s bankrupt is what most Americans think about the First Thanksgiving Feast. Not only was Tisquantum (Squanto) hoping to persuade the Pilgrims to join what was left of his Nation, but the motive of Massasoits and some 90 braves to share a feast with the Pilgrims was to try and incorporate them into the web of his native politics. If not for disease and a series of plagues that devastated both tribes and many others, either one would have more than likely achieved their political goals.(4)

Besides, the real First Thanksgiving Celebration was a promise to pay back Massasoit’s Tribe for the losses caused by the Pilgrim’s earlier survival techniques: the tendency to rob freshly dug Native American graves for food and goods. By fall, the settlers’ situation was finally secure enough that they held a thanksgiving feast. But later when area tribes stopped trading with them, something they greatly depended on to supplement their poor harvests, the Pilgrims went to war.(5) Total war that is.

A People’s Humanity In The Balance
Americans should also know that the First Thanksgiving led to a series of brutal conflicts. Meanwhile, historians attribute part of the Pilgrim’s-and other settlers’-victories to Indian unwillingness to match the European tactic of massacring whole villages. William Loren Katz wrote, “If you believe people have no history worth mentioning, it’s easy to believe they have no humanity worth defending.” Sadly, it’s clear to see that Indians do have a history worth mentioning. It’s the Pilgrim’s and Europeans’ humanity that’s in question.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.

(1) Jacobs, Don Trent. Teaching Truly. New York, New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2013., p. 141.
(2) Netzley, Patricia. Environmental Literature: An Encyclopedia of Works, Authors, and Themes. Denver, Colorado: ABD-CLIO, 1999., p. 271.
(3)Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus. New York, New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 2005., p. 251.
(4) Ibid., p. 59.
(5) Ibid., p. 60-61.