Robert Jensen is pushing the usual hack propaganda. That’s his personal speculation. I own the planting logs and diaries and the validity of these accounts was reinforced by documentation at the Yale Peabody collection.
The Pequots had been decimated by disease and war with The Oneida about ten years prior to the arrival of even the first Dutch, let alone English colonialist. They only had periodic trade meetings with fur traders from New France/Canada and more complex trade and treaty arrangements with tribes along The Connecticut River.
Is it tragic that remaining members of illness decimated tribes felt they had to reach out to alien arrivals to secure their own survival with the back-up of population numbers working to navigate harsh “New England” winters? Yes.
As for prayers of thanksgiving, the colonialists were being attacked by opportunistic, warrior tribes from the north who long preyed on more trade oriented tribes in the region long before they attacked the vulnerable colonialists. Their initial gripe was actually with “economically” competing tribes they’d celebrated being eliminated through disease, who were trade competition, suddenly securing a trade region again by joining-up with settlers.
They would raid and murder entire settlements, babies and all. It wasn’t until settler men started putting warrior heads on pikes outside of settlements that the tribes backed off.
Was there understandable resentment about these newcomers squatting on land they weren’t native to? I can see that (though the earliest English settlers actually shared some of the Nordic ancestry lines of the viking settlers of Labrador and those settlers actually arrived in Massachusetts on scoping expedition temporary settlements 200 years prior evidence of the first Pequot but that’s a touchy subject in academic circles bent on “White Man = Bad” cultural indoctrination narratives.)
But if you wouldn’t accept, for instance, today’s White European Californians murdering entire communities of illegal alien migrants from Central America, that have settled on land in was purchased from Mexico as a settlement following a war in the mid 1800’s, you shouldn’t defend the raids of English settlements in the 1600’s, either. Tribal anger and resentment at settlers being opportunistic is understandable but genocide is a moral wrong then as it is now. We shouldn’t glamorize that.
Instead of giving indigenous people credit for being the dominant players in treaties and trade arrangements in the region their ancestors dominated for many years, “compassionate intellectuals” would rather infantilize indigenous peoples and act like they were dim and trusting enough to just walk into White Man traps.
Many if the first contacts were from sophisticated tribal diplomats who didn’t just have a history of interacting with European traders up north but also if being like a diplomatic representative for tribes in trade centers at compunds along The Mississippi. These trade regions for indigenous tribes were like enormous shopping malls.
The first Thanksgiving was legitimately a thanksgiving within a tribe and settler hybrid community that survived through indigenous strategy (knowing the politics of regional tribes) and expertise and mutual cooperation to produce food and defense.
It’s a legit politically neutral American holiday about very different people working together for mutual survival and even to thrive. No American should be ashamed of it.
:
www.bitchute.com
