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HAPPY HIPSTER THANKSGIVING
PRETENSION: 8
IRONY: 9
OCCUPATION: TurkeyTaste Testers
Hipsters celebrate Thanksgiving just like the rest of us, but they do it in style. Fuck the family dinner table. Really cool people eat their turkey in smoke-filled bars, Preferably with a Strokes song blasting in the background.
via [Hipster Hunter]
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60-Second Centerpieces
Transform your table with these simple yet beautiful arrangements.
Natural:
The elements: Oversize dried leaves, like these from a magnolia; $8 for 10 leaves, the Depot, flowerdepotstore.com.
The container: A galvanized tub or any opaque container that hides the stems.
The tip: Make sure the stems aren’t all the same length. The arrangement should mimic the natural, free-flowing form of the leaves themselves.
Glowing
The elements: One dozen pillar candles of various heights and widths.
The container: A shallow platter, tray, bowl, or pan.
The tip: Make sure no candles of the same height sit side by side. This centerpiece also looks great on a coffee table.
Sunlit:
The elements: One dozen lemons (about $7), one pound hazelnuts (about $5), and three small branches of lemon leaves.
The container: Any glass bowl―preferably with a pedestal, for added drama―such as this clear glass compote.
The tip: Juxtaposing large, smooth, shiny objects (lemons) with smaller, textured ones (nuts) creates a compelling composition.
Fruitful:
The elements: Six pomegranates (about $1.50 each) and two dozen Italian plums (about $1.50 a pound) or fresh figs (about $4.50 apound).
The container: Any white bowl with a sensuous line.
The tip: When you mix two fruits, their size and shape should be different, but the tonality of the colors should be the same, as with these jewel-toned plums and pomegranates.
Bountiful:
The elements: Eight dozen red carnations (about $8.50 a dozen).
The container: A wooden salad bowl.
The tip: When working with mundane materials, the more the merrier. Cut stems to three or four inches, depending on the size of the bowl. Put a glass dish inside for water. Carnations are hardy, so if you change the water every few days, this arrangement should last two weeks.
Hipster Stuffing
by Caren Scott
via [Spectrum Culture]
Plane tickets are expensive. I can eat, drink, watch football and get fatter on my own, without losing several hundred dollars. It would be great to celebrate another pseudo-mythical holiday with family, but if you don’t live within a reasonable driving distance of home, and (like me) you’re in the student or starving artist demographic, then you don’t get home very often–I usually choose Christmas and a birthday.
So, during these times of transition, we gather with friends, frenemies, roommates, significant and insignificant others, and we form our own brief traditions. In most cases, our holidays are alcohol-soaked and a bit more inappropriate than those we’ve had with our families. Here’s hoping that one day we can merge the two.
I know the economy’s bad, but please stay away from the Stove Top and use of these stuffing recipes (regular, or cornbread-sausage); I’ve also added two easy drink recipes–brown, bourbon-based ones, because brown is the color of Thanksgiving, and bourbon suggests America and keeping it real.
First, a stuffing-related story from me: The picture above (not me) was from last year’s Thanksgiving. One of our desserts required its eggs to be at room temperature. We didn’t notice this until time was running out. A few of us did the only logical thing: stuffed the eggs into our bras and continued cooking. Now that’s holiday spirit.
Stuffing recipe #1 is from my dear friend Maggie Gunther, whom I have known since I was eight. This stuff is tasty, wholesome, and pilgrim-style easy. She claims it’s “like crack.”
Maggie’s Crack
- 2-3 loaves of bread
(White will do; whole wheat if you want to be healthy)
- Butter. Or Earth Balance spread for a vegan alternative…the vegan-ness of which will be negated by the chicken bouillon cubes.
- 2 or 3 Maggi Brand Chicken Bouillon Cubes
(Or whatever, I prefer Maggi because it’s my name and includes a snappy chicken logo.)
- 2 large Vidalia onions
- half a package of celery (at least ten stalks)
- a few garlic cloves
- salt & pepper
- a roasting pan
Tear the bread by hand and let it get a little stale. You can do this the morning you make the stuffing, or the night before. Next, cut up the onions, garlic, and celery in to smallish pieces, getting rid of the “yucky” parts of the vegetables (i.e. no celery leafy parts, or stalks that are too hard, or onion skins, or nasty corners of the garlic cloves). While we’re on garlic, you should use the Goodfellas method of cutting up garlic cloves: extremely thinly sliced, preferably with a razor blade, while you are serving time for the Lufthansa heist, or some other organized-crime charge. Sauté in butter until the onions and celery are tender. The celery will turn bright green. While everything is sautéing, add the bouillon cubes, salt and pepper (Not a lot of either. The chicken bouillon cubes will add significant salinity by themselves)
Place a layer of bread in the roasting pan, pour some of the butter/vegetable mixture over the bread, continue to layer in and mix by hand to ensure most bread gets some of the butter/veggie/yummy goodness mixture on it. Heat the stuffing in the oven, covered, at 350 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes. Remove the cover and broil it for a few minutes until the top starts to brown.
Yum! I can eat an entire pan of this stuff myself. It truly is the crack of Thanksgiving. It’s even good cold the next day, served with a slab of leftover cylindrical cranberry sauce out of the can!
Even if you spring for brand name items, the cost to make this stuffing is under $5 for a large enough quantity to put you into a coma until the last football game is played on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. $6 if you add the cylindrical cranberry sauce.
Here’s something from Becky in VA which suggests another option:
“A bunch of my hipster friends throw a yearly Festavus party with a huge feast, including a roasted duck with an oz. of weed baked into the stuffing. We do a really intense airing of grievances and then a gift exchange in which we randomly pass out gifts everyone brought. One year I gave a set of candles that looked like real pieces of sushi that I wrapped it in a Tupperware container and decorated with a picture of homeless people sleeping on a street. The gift I got that year was a broken Cindy Lauper record.”
The stuffing challenger is Joe Hall, who’s now in IN. This recipe is from Joe’s dad. Once, me, Joe, and Joe’s dad went to a Leon Russell concert. I think we were all double-fisting beer. Or maybe that was just me.
Corn Bread Sausage Stuffing
- 1.5 lbs sausage
- 4 onions, chopped
- 1 stalk celery, chopped
- 6 cups soft, white bread cubes
- 1 tbsp. salt
- 2 tsp. poultry seasoning
- 1 4oz. can hot jalapeno relish (you can use chopped jalapenos)
- 1 tbsp. cilantro leaves, minced or chopped
- 2 tbsp. Worchester sauce
- 2 eggs, slightly beaten
- 1 cup chicken broth
- 6 cups crumbled corn bread
- 2 tsp. red pepper
- 2 tsp. black pepper
Cook the sausage in a skillet, breaking it up with a fork. Remove the sausage to a mixing bowl. Sauté the onions and celery in a half-cup of sausage drippings. Add the celery and onions to the sausage; add the remaining ingredients. This yields enough dressing for a 12 to 14 pound turkey. If not to be stuffed into a turkey, place the mixture in a buttered baking dish; cover it, and bake it at 325 for 30 minutes.
Here’s a heartwarming, meaty tale from Lisa Andrews in VA:
“When I lived in Los Angeles, I spent three Thanksgivings at a gay bar in Pasadena. This was before I had a car, so I’d have to take the bus to the store, buy whatever I was contributing toward the meal, and catch another bus to the bar. And this was a holiday bus schedule–in Los Angeles–which has the worst public transportation system on Earth. One year I left the pumpkin pie on the bus.
Once I got there, it was awesome. It would be me, the owner (Steve), his partner, and about ten gay guys–most over 40 years old–who either didn’t have families or weren’t welcome at their families’ homes. Steve would put It’s A Wonderful Life in the DVD player (this would appear on all the bar TVs), and we’d cover the pool table with a tablecloth and have a huge spread! Guys would spend all day cooking turkeys and making homemade bread and mashed potatoes and gravy…it was fantastic. We’d all sit around and eat and talk for hours and watch the movie and drink a lot…mainly hot toddies. Usually I’d stay over at one of the guys’ houses, and we’d come back in the morning and have breakfast at the bar–all leftovers. So good. We’d also have our Holiday Celebrity Death Pool: we’d all make a list of ten celebrities we thought were going to croak in the next year, donate $10, and the next Thanksgiving we’d see who won. I have a great family, and I’ve enjoyed my Thanksgivings with them, but those holidays at the gay bar were something special.“
Here’s an easy hot toddy recipe that you can probably throw together, provided you have bourbon whiskey. This is a way you can justify drinking when you have a nasty cold. It will help you fall asleep quicker.
Simpleton Hot Toddy
2oz. bourbon (Or whatever. You probably knew this, but a shot glass is approx. 1 oz.)
1.5oz lemon juice (You can use the juice from the plastic lemon if you have to.)
1oz. honey (If you don’t own honey, you can substitute two tbsp. sugar…or to taste.)
2oz. water
Microwave this until steamy. If you have fancy things like actual lemons or cloves, you can throw in a lemon slice or wedge, and a clove. I know this is desperate, but I’ve used vodka before, because I didn’t want to leave the house (and/or had no money to purchase any booze). It wasn’t too bad. Depending on your vodka, this version is what I’d imagine drinking rubbing alcohol would be like.
Minty Mint Julep
This is my own variation on the classic mint julep. It’s only a variation because it’s way better, more minty, and has more class and authenticity; I can claim this because I am from the South. You can justify this as a holiday beverage due to the extreme mint.
If you grow your own herbs, you might still have some mint growing in your back yard. Go harvest it before it turns completely brown. The last time I made these, we had a mint jungle in our backyard, which is how they turned out so minty; I’ll never make them another way. Obtain from the Earth, or from the store, what you think is an absurd amount of fresh mint. Wash the mint thoroughly to get all the dirt off and set aside a fair number of sprigs for garnish.
Boil equal parts sugar and water together for a few minutes (serving becomes super easy if you do the boiling in a tea pot). Stir it well. Two cups of each should make plenty of juleps. But, like I said, it depends on how many you’re making. Once you’re done, remove the pot from the heat, let it cool just a bit and then stuff the mint in the pot. Cover the pot, and refrigerate the infusion until cool (you can cool the mint syrup overnight if you want). When you’re ready to serve the juleps, used crushed ice or ice cubes that are perfectly square (the superior cube). An approximate julep ratio is 2oz. whiskey to 1oz. syrup. I like mine less sweet, so I either add more whiskey or decrease the syrup. Garnish with a sprig of mint, and don’t drive anywhere.
via Hipstercrite
I know I said that I would stop using the word, “hipster”. You’re tired of it, I’m tired of it, WE’RE ALL F’ING TIRED OF IT! However, I couldn’t think of a better name for this post. Something about, “How To Have An Ironic As Shit Thanksgiving” just didn’t sound right. So will you please forgive me and let me have this one more usage?
When I think of Thanksgiving, I don’t think of hipsters. Unless I’m thinking of the movie, Pieces of April. Something about a dark Thanksgiving comedy taking place on the Lower East Side just screams pretentiousocity. Something about Katie Holmes makes me think of nothing at all though. Most of us will be having your pretty run-of-the-mill turkey dinners with the family: wearing that one Gap dress we bought in college and only pull out for dinners with the family, remembering why we pay $500 a month to go to a therapist, and getting drunk off of Grandpa’s stash of whiskey hidden in the floorboards.
If you’re interested in spicing things up and bringing a little of your creative, young urbanite ways to the dinner table, then follow these steps below:
1.) Take the Train- Because something note-worthy and creepy will most likely happen to you on the train and you can tell everyone in stunted breaths about your near-death experience once you arrive. So what it may take you two days sitting in an up-right position to travel 400 miles? Putting yourself in harm’s way of flashers, machete-wielding flashers, machete-wielding flasher clowns, or any other weirdo that often rides the train, will be good for your art. Also, you can finally live out your fantasy of wearing your top hat and pretending that your an old-timey president traversing the American landscape. Here is an interesting article from GOOD Magazine about riding the train for the holidays.
2.) Bring Field Roast to Dinner- Unless you inherited vegan ways from your hippie-turned-yuppie-turned-huppie parents, chances are they love meat, and chances are they will put a lot of work into making a beautiful turkey dinner that you suddenly refuse to eat because you decided that you want to be the voice of all the silenced turkeys everywhere. If you really want to drive the point home, whip out a PowerPoint presentation of graphic photos of turkeys being slaughtered on your Mac at the dinner table. Chances are you’ll finally have that fist fight you were always hoping for with your uncle Ellroy who watches Fox News.
3.) Canning- Because that part of you that listens to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska while watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands while wishing you were a 1920′s housewife living on the Plains really really wants to put things in cans. Or that Jewish part of you wants to put everything in vinegar and pickle it and swim in it. Learn all about the wonderful art of canning here.
4.) Adhere to Amy Sedaris’ hosting etiquette book “I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence”- If you’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner and hoping to get drunk and hit on your boyfriend’s dog, then this is the book for you! Sedaris’ book is chock full of hosting etiquette, redneck recipes, and funny anecdotes to hosting the most awkward and kitschy event ever! Here is a snippet:
“Hello, and I like you.” This is what you’re saying when you invite somebody into your home, without having to hear yourself say it out loud. This colorfully illustrated book (see pictures) is my attempt to share with you something I take very seriously: entertaining in my home, my style. It may not be the proper way, or the most traditional, or even legal, but it works for me…Even though the word “entertainment” is commonly used today, to me it sounds charmingly old-fashioned, like courtship or back-alley abortion…I tend to live my life like a deaf person. I communicate with my actions: the way I dress, the way my home is decorated, and the gifts I give all speak for me. I take this to heart when I entertain. My food, my party decorations, the games I create, and the music I play are all personal expressions. This is what will make your party special, sharing a piece of you, a feeling. It’s not a competition. You don’t have to be the perfect host, just the prettiest.”
5.) Make A Lot of Felt Shit- According to Readymade Magazine, Thanksgiving is not complete without making a bunch of felt objects like you did in 2nd grade. What do those mushrooms up there represent? I have no idea. Other than maybe symbolizing when you’ll get stoned and talk an hour to the cranberry sauce about what you are thankful for. P.S. The more googly eyes and tiny smiles the better. Your DIY felt object guide can be found here.
The Bloody Puritans & The Myth of Thanksgiving
by MIKE ELY
It is a deep thing that people still celebrate the survival of the early colonists at Plymouth — by giving thanks to the Christian God who supposedly protected and championed the European invasion. The real meaning of all that, then and now, needs to be continually excavated. The myths and lies that surround the past are constantly draped over the horrors and tortures of our present.
Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England.
But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists — and of the ruthless ways of capitalism.
This piece is intended to be shared at this holiday time. Pass it on. Serve a little truth with the usual stuffing.
* * * * *
In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 exiles.
The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there.
When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely.
After the first colonies were establshed — the Pequod war
The Europeans landed and built their colony called “the Plymouth Plantation” near the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They ate from abandoned cornfields grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet named Squanto had survived –he had spent the last years as a slave to the English and Spanish in Europe.
Squanto spoke the colonists– language and taught them how to plant corn and how to catch fish until the first harvest. Squanto also helped the colonists negotiate a peace treaty with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit.
These were very lucky breaks for the colonists. The first Virginia settlement had been wiped out before they could establish themselves. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the settlers not only survived their first year but had an alliance with the Wampanoags that would give them almost two decades of peace.
John Winthrop, a founder of the Massahusetts Bay colony considered this wave of illness and death to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a friend in England, “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.”
The deadly impact of European diseases and the good will of the Wampanoag allowed the settlers to survive their first year.
In celebration of their good fortune, the colony’s governor, William Bradford, declared a three-day feast of thanksgiving after that first harvest of 1621.
How the Puritans Stole the Land
But the peace that produced the Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that the Puritans would have 15 years to establish a firm foothold on the coast.
Until 1629 there were no more than 300 settlers in New England, scattered in small and isolated settlements. But their survival inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that soon established growing Massachusetts towns north of Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10 years, boatloads of new settlers came.
And as the number of Europeans increased, they proved not nearly so generous as the Wampanoags.
On arrival, the Puritans and other religious sects discussed “who legally owns all this land.” They had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon traditions, but because their particular way of farming was based on individual – not communal or tribal – ownership. This debate over land ownership reveals that bourgeois “rule of law” does not mean “protect the rights of the masses of people.”
Some settlers argued that the land belonged to the Indians. These forces were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts Governor Winthrop declared the Indians had not “subdued” the land, and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common Law, be considered “public domain.” This meant they belonged to the king.
In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the representative of the crown (meaning the local governor).
Training of the Massachusetts militia, 1637. The means of genocide and theft.
The colonists embraced a line from Psalms 2:8.
“Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”
Since then, European settler states have similarly declared god their real estate agent: from the Boers seizing South Africa to the Zionists seizing Palestine.
The European immigrants took land and enslaved Indians to help them farm it. By 1637 there were about 2,000 British settlers. They pushed out from the coast and decided to remove the inhabitants.
The Shining City on the Hill
Where did the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies of Puritan and “separatist” pilgrims come from and what were they really all about?
A self-serving historical lie — The myth of coexistance and love promoted by Thanksgiving
Governor Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts colony, said, “We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” The Mayflower Puritans had been driven out of England as subversives. The Puritans saw this religious colony as a model of a social and political order that they believed all of Europe should adopt.
The Puritan movement was part of a sweeping revolt within English society against the ruling feudal order of wealthy lords. Only a few decades after the establishment of Plymouth, the Puritan Revolution came to power in England. They killed the king, won a civil war, set up a short-lived republic, and brutally conquered the neighboring people of Ireland to create a larger national market.
The famous Puritan intolerance was part of a determined attempt to challenge the decadence and wastefulness of the rich aristocratic landlords of England. The Puritans wanted to use the power of state punishment to uproot old and still dominant ways of thinking and behaving.
The new ideas of the Puritans served the needs of merchant capitalist accumulation. The extreme discipline, thrift and modesty the Puritans demanded of each other corresponded to a new and emerging form of ownership and production.
Their so-called “Protestant Ethic” was an early form of the capitalist ethic. From the beginning, the Puritan colonies intended to grow through capitalist trade — trading fish and fur with England while they traded pots, knives, axes, alcohol and other English goods with the Indians.
Armed settlers arrive with priestly blessings
The New England were ruled by a government in which only the male heads of families had a voice. Women, Indians, slaves, servants, youth were neither heard nor represented. In the Puritan schoolbooks, the old law “honor thy father and thy mother” was interpreted to mean honoring “All our Superiors, whether in Family, School, Church, and Commonwealth.” And, the real truth was that the colonies were fundamentally controlled by the most powerful merchants.
The Puritan fathers believed they were the Chosen People of an infinite god and that this justified anything they did. They were Calvinists who believed that the vast majority of humanity was predestined to damnation.
This meant that while they were firm in fighting for their own capitalist right to accumulate and prosper, they were quick to oppress the masses of people in Ireland, Scotland and North America, once they seized the power to set up their new bourgeois order. Those who rejected the narrow religious rules of the colonies were often simply expelled “out into the wilderness.”
The Massachusetts colony (north of Plymouth) was founded when Puritan stockholders had gotten control of an English trading company. The king had given this company the right to govern its own internal affairs, and in 1629 the stockholders simply voted to transfer the company to North American shores — making this colony literally a self-governing company of stockholders!
In U.S. schools, students are taught that the Mayflower compact of Plymouth contained the seeds of “modern democracy” and “rule of law.” But by looking at the actual history of the Puritans, we can see that this so-called “modern democracy” was (and still is) a capitalist democracy based on all kinds of oppression and serving the class interests of the ruling capitalists.
The reality of colonial massacre and enslavement
In short, the Puritan movement developed as an early revolutionary challenge to the old feudal order in England. They were the soul of primitive capitalist accumulation. And transferred to the shores of North America, they immediately revealed how heartless and oppressive that capitalist soul is.
The Birth of “The American Way of War”
In the Connecticut Valley, the powerful Pequot tribe had not entered an alliance with the British (as had the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Massachusetts peoples). At first they were far from the centers of colonization.
Then, in 1633, the British stole the land where the city of Hartford now sits — land which the Pequot had recently conquered from another tribe. That same year two British slave raiders were killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who killed the slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused.
The Puritan preachers said, from Romans 13:2, “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” The colonial governments gathered an armed force of 240 under the command of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: “Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.”
The colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village on the Mystic River. At sunrise, as the inhabitants slept, the Puritan soldiers set the village on fire.
William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, wrote: “Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire — horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”
European colonists attack the Pequot villageMason himself wrote: “It may be demanded – Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But – sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”
Three hundred and fifty years later the Puritan phrase “a shining city on the hill” became a favorite quote of conservative speechwriters.
Discovering the Profits of Slavery
This so-called “Pequot war” was a one-sided murder and slaving expedition. Over 180 captives were taken. After consulting the bible again, in Leviticus 24:44, the colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured women and their children.
Only 500 Pequot remained alive and free. In 1975 the official number of Pequot living in Connecticut was 21.
Some of the war captives were given to the Narragansett and Massachusetts allies of the British. Even before the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples of North America had widely practiced taking war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves.
The remaining captives were sold to British plantation colonies in the West Indies to be worked to death in a new form of slavery that served the emerging capitalist world market. And with that, the merchants of Boston made a historic discovery: the profits they made from the sale of human beings virtually paid for the cost of seizing them.
One account says that enslaving Indians quickly became a “mania with speculators.” These early merchant capitalists of Massachusetts started to make genocide pay for itself. The slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant capitalism.
Thanksgiving in the Manhattan Colony
In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first “scalp bounty” — his government paid money for the scalp of each Indian brought to them.
A couple years later, Kieft ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword.
A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and friendship.
The Conquest of New England
By the 1670s there were about 30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in the United New England Colonies — 6,000 to 8,000 able to bear arms. With the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonists turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved them in 1620 and probably joined them for the original Thanksgiving Day.
In 1675 a Christian Wampanoag was killed while spying for the Puritans. The Plymouth authorities arrested and executed three Wampanoag without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip.
As Mao Tsetung says: “Where there is oppression there is resistance.” The Wampanoag went to war.
The Indians applied some military lessons they had learned: they waged a guerrilla war which overran isolated European settlements and were often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan soldiers. The colonists again attacked and massacred the main Indian populations.
When this war ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men of the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle. Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But the colonists won.
In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The “Praying Indians” who had converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops during battles with “hostiles.” They were enslaved or killed. Other “peaceful” Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts — and were sold onto slave ships.
It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this campaign, 500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died from battle, massacre and starvation.
After King Philip’s War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan’s New York colony: “There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts.”
In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a “day of public thanksgiving” in 1676, saying, “there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled.”
Fifty-five years after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring tribes. The Wampanoag chief King Philip was beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth, where the skull still hung on display 24 years later.
The descendants of these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson of Massasoit, the Pilgrims’ original protector, was sold into slavery in Bermuda.
Runaways and Rebels
But even the destruction of Indian tribal life and the enslavement of survivors brought no peace. Indians continued to resist in every available way. Their oppressors lived in terror of a revolt. And they searched for ways to end the resistance. The historian MacLeod writes: “The first `reservations were designed for the `wild Irish of Ulster in 1609. And the first Indian reservation agent in America, Gookin of Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen service in Ireland under Cromwell.”
Let’s see the reality of Thanksgiving — and the founding of the United States in slavery and genocide
The enslaved Indians refused to work and ran away. The Massachusetts government tried to control runaways by marking enslaved Indians: brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were tattooed into their foreheads and cheeks.
A Massachusetts law of 1695 gave colonists permission to kill Indians at will, declaring it was “lawful for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall find any Indians traveling or skulking in any of the towns or roads (within specified limits), to command them under their guard and examination, or to kill them as they may or can.”
The northern colonists enacted more and more laws for controlling the people. A law in Albany forbade any African or Indian slave from driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set up; Africans and Indians were forbidden to have evening get-togethers. On Block Island, Indians were given 10 lashes for being out after nine o’clock. In 1692 Massachusetts made it a serious crime for any white person to marry an African, an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a slave revolt.
Celebrate?
Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to celebrate.
The ruling powers of the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That’s why they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).
Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the “bounty of the American way of life,” while covering up the brutal nature of this society.
Available online at mikeely.wordpress.com. Send comments to: m1keely (at) yahoo.com
Published: December 2007. Feel free to reprint, distribute or quote this with attribution. This website’s contents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 U.S. License.
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http://www.uruknet.info?p=71821
via [Conspiract Planet]
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I was so obsessed with those prussian blue twins for awhile. Seriously just hoping (praying? kind of) that they would turn out alright.
The fact that they’re normal now, and ruined their crazy mom’s BBC (think it was BBC, it was a long time ago) documentary by becoming normal AS IT WAS BEING FILMED was too amaing.
Where on earth did you find this? Did you have to dig through the bowels of the internet or did you come upon it in the internet’s equivalent of a nasty, clogged-up toilet at a podunk gas station?
Not that I’m complaining — I admire your skills. Thanks for providing this little slice of amusing WTF!stupidity. You’ve made my morning. This is why you are one of my favorite bloggers!
This is awesome. I still get super excited when people do art that gets taken seriously.
My mom is genuinely racist (against Latinos. Weird, right?) so when I was 8 or 9 I decided to hate left handed people and people who had had their tonsils removed, to show her how dumb it was. Took her years to figure out it was a joke.