Yep, Indigenous Americans standing on shore watching the first European ships arriving must have had an ominous sense of foreboding. And yes, they should, indeed, have built the damn wall!
Regarding the first Thanksgiving, the Indigenous Americans provided for the Pilgrims, not the other way around.
The Pilgrims were a bunch of incompetent religious nerds, trying to go to Virginia, got lost and ended up in Massachusetts just as the frigid New England winter was setting in. These incompetents had no idea how to survive and would have all died out if the Wampanoag Tribe had not helped them build shelters and showed them how to grow local foods.
After they had survived one year, the Pilgrims decided to hold a feast of Thanksgiving, to thank god, not the Wampanoag who had actually saved them. They did not intend to invite the Indigenous Americans who had saved their sorry asses.
Wampanoag tribe members saw them out hunting with their pathetic lack of skills, and invited themselves to the feast. Shocked at how little the Pilgrims had, the Wampanoag brought a bounteous feast of waterfowl, venison, ham, lobster, clams, berries, fruit, pumpkin, squash and unspecified fowl (no specific mention of turkey), as described in accounts from Pilgrims Edward Winslow and William Bradford, signatories of the Mayflower Compact.
Within a few short decades, the Pilgrims and other English settlers that followed, would betray them with the first rounds of genocide and death by illnesses unknown in the Americas that the Indigenous Americans had no defenses for.
Many surviving Wampanoag descendants today remember Thanksgiving the way the Jews remember the Holocaust. The Patuxet band of Wampanoag, including Tisquantum (better known by the diminutive “Squanto”), who acted as liaison and interpreter between the indigenous people and the invaders, had been entirely eradicated within a few years of the Pilgrims’ arrival, though descendants of other Wampanoag villages remain.
Yep, Indigenous Americans standing on shore watching the first European ships arriving must have had an ominous sense of foreboding. And yes, they should, indeed, have built the damn wall!
Regarding the first Thanksgiving, the Indigenous Americans provided for the Pilgrims, not the other way around.
The Pilgrims were a bunch of incompetent religious nerds, trying to go to Virginia, got lost and ended up in Massachusetts just as the frigid New England winter was setting in. These incompetents had no idea how to survive and would have all died out if the Wampanoag Tribe had not helped them build shelters and showed them how to grow local foods.
After they had survived one year, the Pilgrims decided to hold a feast of Thanksgiving, to thank god, not the Wampanoag who had actually saved them. They did not intend to invite the Indigenous Americans who had saved their sorry asses.
Wampanoag tribe members saw them out hunting with their pathetic lack of skills, and invited themselves to the feast. Shocked at how little the Pilgrims had, the Wampanoag brought a bounteous feast of waterfowl, venison, ham, lobster, clams, berries, fruit, pumpkin, squash and unspecified fowl (no specific mention of turkey), as described in accounts from Pilgrims Edward Winslow and William Bradford, signatories of the Mayflower Compact.
Within a few short decades, the Pilgrims and other English settlers that followed, would betray them with the first rounds of genocide and death by illnesses unknown in the Americas that the Indigenous Americans had no defenses for.
Many surviving Wampanoag descendants today remember Thanksgiving the way the Jews remember the Holocaust. The Patuxet band of Wampanoag, including Tisquantum (better known by the diminutive “Squanto”), who acted as liaison and interpreter between the indigenous people and the invaders, had been entirely eradicated within a few years of the Pilgrims’ arrival, though descendants of other Wampanoag villages remain.