The academic and Religious Left believe that Western
Civilization, especially America, is uniquely contaminating to an
otherwise pristine world. So celebrations of the European
settlement of the Western Hemisphere are always problematic.
Thanksgiving is no exception.
Just in time for the holiday was an anti-Thanksgiving
column in Jim Wallis’ Sojourners. “I’ve been checking my
heart for years why I can’t just go with the flow and to see the
‘redemptive’ aspect of present day Thanksgiving,” declared the Rev.
Eugene Cho, pastor of a Seattle church.
America’s Thanksgiving, of course, traces to the English
Separatists known as Pilgrims who quit the Church of England, and
England, to create their own promised land in the American
wilderness. Only about half of the original 100 settlers had
survived their first winter in what became Massachusetts. In the
fall of 1621 they reputedly celebrated a harvest festival that
included about a hundred members of the local Indian tribe, which
had been very helpful to their survival.
“Most are in agreement that the Indians were invited
simply because the Pilgrims knew that they would have died had it
not been for the help of the local Indians,” Rev. Cho
unsentimentally recalled. “Those that we would now categorize as
‘illegal aliens,’” i.e. the Pilgrims, “not only came without
invitation but they came to take over,” the clergyman grimly
alleged. “In fact, beyond the first joint ‘Thanksgiving,’ there
were no further meals of mutual peace, dependence, and friendship.”
In Cho’s telling, Thanksgiving was just a last sort of last meal
for the Indians who would later succumb to an ongoing “genocide” by
Europeans of America’s native peoples.
Thanksgiving is darkly the “celebration” of the
“colonists’” eventual “oppression” of their “heathen captives,” Cho
charges. “The early arrivals of European invasion resulted in the
deaths of 10 to 30 million native Indians.” These figures, an
unconfirmable estimate of the number of native peoples who died
because of European settlement, covers several centuries, from
Christopher Columbus’ 1492 arrival up through, presumably, the late
19th century. The vast majority were victims of diseases brought by
Europeans for which the native peoples had no immunity. In the
several years prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival at Cape Cod, the local
tribe had lost perhaps 90 percent of its people because of possible
transmission of bubonic plague by European fishermen.
Cho bemoans the European settlement of America as “one of
the worst human injustices” ever that entailed the “suppression,
oppression, and near annihilation of the Native Indians,” i.e.
“genocide.” The pastor urges Thanksgiving’s “repeal” because “no
matter how we want to re-tell or re-write that story, we are
marking an event of injustice.” In eliminating this day of infamy,
Cho wants the “whole country to express sorrow for such a grave
injustice to the Native Indians and create events and various forms
of curriculum in parallel” that would include “gratitude and
celebration of the story and legacy of the native Indian people.”
He also wants “reparation for every single descendant of Native
Indians” that, “just for starters,” would “guarantee 100% funding
to college for any descendants of Native Indians.”
We can only speculate what may come after that “just for
starters.” But Cho concludes that any celebration of Thanksgiving
is the “pinnacle of historical revisionism.” It’s a little odd that
the first Thanksgiving, a moment of multicultural comity, however
fleeting, between Pilgrims and native people, should be so defamed.
Wouldn’t a true multi-culturalist herald this early Thanksgiving as
a model rather than a charade?
The English Separatists and others who arrived on the
Mayflower in 1620 did not arrive with any secret master plan to
liquidate the Indians and conquer a continent. They were a tiny
band fleeing persecution by their nation’s state church. Many of
them had initially fled to relatively religiously tolerant Holland,
though agents of the English king had tormented them even there.
They eventually decided they could only worship and live as they
saw fit in a distant, barren wilderness, far from king and state
church. Their expedition was funded by exploitative entrepreneurs.
And various mishaps meant their arrival in America would be at the
near onset of winter, with no initial shelter, and minimal stores,
even assuming they survived a two-month journey across the stormy,
cold Atlantic. Two died on the journey, half would die before
spring.
How to contort such a benign little group into the first
wave of a genocidal invasion? Their intent was considerably
different from the Spanish conquistadors who, seeking gold and
glory, had bloodily subdued native civilizations to the south a
century before. Native peoples in what later became the United
States would suffer many terrible and tragic injustices across
several centuries. But genocide? This modern term describes the
deliberate and systematic extermination of a people such as
Hitler’s mass murder of the Jews, Stalin’s starving of the kulaks,
or Pol Pot’s mass liquidation of all perceived foes.
By Rev. Cho’s wide definition, the native tribes of North
America, of which there were thousands, had been committing
“genocide” against each other for millennia, conquering,
exterminating, despoiling and absorbing each other in an unceasing
miasma of perpetual conflict. When my Scots-Irish ancestors arrived
in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the early 1700s, it was
unpopulated, the original natives having been displaced or
exterminated by northern tribes who only visited the valley as
their hunting ground. My ancestors were attacked by raiding
warriors in Southwest Virginia during the French and Indian War,
the wives taken captive to Ohio, one baby smashed to death, another
spared because of her smile. These Presbyterian women captives were
marched to Ohio, singing the 137th Psalm, which the Hebrews had
sung during their Babylonian captivity. They were later rescued by
a raiding party from Virginia. Were these Scots-Irish families who
had fled mistreatment by the English to settle on wild, empty land
already depopulated by distant, “genocidal” native people
themselves practicing “genocide” simply by living where they
were?
In the previous century, there were two attempts at
genocide in Virginia under the modern definition of deliberate and
systematic extermination. Pocahontas’ father, who had formed the
Powhatan Confederacy in the 16th century by his own conquests and
perhaps genocide of rival tribes, had initially tolerated the
Jamestown colony because it was on worthless swampland. His
surviving brother, Opechancanough, was less indulgent and, after
years of relative peace, orchestrated mass attacks in 1622 on the
English settlements of Virginia, aiming to kill every man, woman
and child. Ostensibly friendly tribesmen arrived on a Friday
morning at farms and villages only to slaughter their welcoming
hosts. A warning the night before from an Indian boy living with an
English family outside Jamestown prevented consummation of the
genocide. But about 25 percent of the colony was slaughtered in a
few hours. Amazingly, Opechancanough attempted another mass
slaughter 22 years later, with similar grizzly but unsuccessful
results.
The typical lifespan of these early colonists was only a
few years, or less, after arrival, more from starvation and
sickness than from conflict. Were they victims of a “genocide”?
Remarkably, they were replaced by many times their numbers, who
knew the grim odds, but still preferred their remote chance in the
New World to continued squalor and oppression in the old. Their
sins were numerous. But their courage and perseverance founded a
great civilization that, unlike the racially homogenous tribal
societies that once sparsely dotted the continent, was
multicultural and welcoming to millions of immigrants seeking
opportunity and freedom.
Rev. Cho identifies himself as a second generation
Korean-American who risks being seen as “angry Asian man.” Is he
the beneficiary of “genocide”? History for all nations and peoples
is the chronicle of human depravity. But the Pilgrims, with many
Americans still today, believed that God is redeeming the world,
with sinful people as His instruments. The first Thanksgiving of
Pilgrims and Indians offered a small glimmer of that divine
redemption, as did many events that followed, for which we all can
be grateful.
