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My Take — 06
Thanksgiving is an American Holiday
It should be an International Day of Remembrance
A day to think about what was lost.
Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday. Like the Fourth of July it is unique to America. Like the Fourth of July, it is built on a pastiche of fact, fantasy, historical revisionism, and a complete misunderstanding of the historical context that the actual event was embedded in.
The Pilgrims didn’t discover “America”, or North America, or New England. They didn’t discover anything. They weren’t explorers, they were a religious cult looking for a home.
Jamestown in Virginia was already thriving by this time. Tobacco was being grown to ship back to England. Slaves had been imported to work in the nascent plantations, with the first arriving in 1619. The poisonous legacy of that, shapes our nation to this day.
The Spanish had been in the Caribbean since 1500. In Mexico since 1520. Peru and South America since 1532. The French explorer Jacques Cartier had mapped the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in 1534. The French had outposts and small bases in Canada.
