VDARE.com, Unlike The NEW YORK TIMES, Wishes Happy Thanksgiving To All Our Readers!

11/25/2020

Earlier by Ann Coulter: Have a Historically Accurate Thanksgiving!

Most Americans will not be having a traditional family Thanksgiving this year, because of travel restrictions, large gathering restrictions and so on. But at the New York Times, the War On Thanksgiving goes on — because the War On Thanksgiving is a War on White America.

The NYT recently ran an article featuring a picture of an Indian hunter with a modern rifle, uttering “traditional” Indian prayers before a hunt [The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year | For many Native Americans, the Covid-19 toll and the struggle over racial inequity make this high time to re-examine the holiday, and a cruel history, by Brett Anderson, November 17, 2020] (Many Indian “traditions” of this kind are really 20^th century inventions — the late David Yeagley, himself a Comanche, pointed out that modern Indians are almost all Christians, really).

The hunt that followed took place on Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch, 27,000 acres of rolling pasture on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Every stage of the hunt was marked by a ceremony to give thanks for a buffalo that descends from animals killed to near-extinction by white settlers in the late 19th century.

The mass killing was part of a government-approved effort to seize land from Native Americans who depended on the animal to survive. The brutality of settlers’ expansion into the Great Plains and American West has been drastically underplayed in popular myths about the founding and growth of the United States.

Arguably the best-known of those myths is the story of the first Thanksgiving, a holiday Robert Magnan, who led the buffalo hunt at Fort Peck, does not observe. “Thanksgiving is kind of like Columbus Day for Native people,” he said. “Why would we celebrate people who tried to destroy us?”[Links in original]

Of course White people too might ask that about Indians: why should we celebrate a people who tried to destroy us? But we do, as Ann Coulter just pointed out, we “name our sports teams and military armaments after Indians”.

The New York Times’ Anderson quotes an Indian woman who hates Thanksgiving — and white America;

Lyz Jaakola, 52, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, recalls the catharsis she felt as a young woman watching the movie “Addams Family Values,” a dark comedy released in 1993.

In one scene, the Wednesday character, cast as Pocahontas in a children’s Thanksgiving play, goes off script to take violent revenge on the Pilgrims. “You have taken the land which is rightfully ours,” she calmly seethes. “Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs.”

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, other people get it, too,’” said Ms. Jaakola.

You can watch the clip below, and it is funny. But it doesn’t mean “other people get it” — it means that Hollywood (as personified here by Addams Family Values writer Paul Rudnick and director Barry Sonnenfeld) hates America:

Life on Indian reservations is pretty bleak, but it’s not because anyone is “forced” to live there — they’re subsidized by white peoples’ taxes to live there, and any bleakness is caused by living with other Indians. (I don’t know if writers even knew that Indians shouldn’t drink highballs, for mostly genetic reasons — alcoholism is a major contributor to reservation bleakness.)

Here are some principles for remembering the first American Thanksgiving:

The land wasn’t “rightfully” owned by the Indians, ownership of land being a civilized invention; they were only wandering around on the top of it.
There were no “Indians” before the discovery of America by Europeans — there were indigenous tribes who hated each other, and warred constantly in Hobbesian fashion.
There was also no America, as we know it today — the land was there, but the country is a creation of the Historic American Nation.
The Wampanoag Indians who allied with the Pilgrims against the Iroquois — happy to have allies with firearms — had 50 years of peace. But Indians in general were, as Thomas Jefferson was to write 155 years later, when the British were encouraging the Indians to make war on the American patriots, “merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
The Indians (not the Wampanoag) tried to destroy America at its birth, and tried, by massacring women and children, to prevent the settlement of the American West.
The fact that they failed, and America exists — still! — is what we Give Thanks for.

Happy Thanksgiving from VDARE.com!

Previous Thanksgiving Columns (And see our War On Thanksgiving tag)

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VDARE.com, Unlike The NEW YORK TIMES, Wishes Happy Thanksgiving To All Our Readers!

11/28/2019 — 2019 War on Thanksgiving Report: Leftist Lauding Tradition-Slayer David J. Silverman, Coming For Your Turkey … And Your Country