A Better Way To Celebrate

Thanksgiving Now

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NOVEMBER 18, 2022NATURAL LIVING

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By Neenah Payne

In 1621, colonists and the Wampanoag shared a ‘feast’, viewed as the first
Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is now one of the most popular holidays in America.
More people travel to be with family for Thanksgiving than for any other holiday.
Many Americans look forward to the terrific foods — especially the turkey. It’s a
“feel good” holiday because we are told it commemorates the “First Thanksgiving”
which the Pilgrims shared with Native Americans.

However, Why We Must Be Honest This Thanksgiving explains that the story we are
told about Thanksgiving Day fails to acknowledge that it is a Day of Mourning for
many Native Americans. Isn’t it odd that Americans celebrate “collaboration” with
Native America only one day a year — one which ignores the real history of that
holiday — and ignore the existence of the 500 Native Nations for the rest of the
year? What’s missing in this story and why is it so important for us to know the truth
now?

This strange disconnect makes sense when you understand that Thanksgiving Day
is the consolidation of the celebrations of massacres of Native Americans! Growing
Calls To Repudiate “Doctrine of Discovery” shows that Thanksgiving Day — like
Columbus Day — is based on a Papal Bull in 1493 that encouraged Europeans to
commit genocide in the Americas and to steal the continent. Pope Francis has been
asked to rescind the doctrine, but has not yet done so. Fortunately, a number of
churches have renounced it.

The Doctrine of Discovery encouraged Europeans to genocide the Americas and to

steal the hemisphere. So, we used to celebrate the “discovery” (theft) of the
Americas on Columbus Day. However, in 2021 Biden became the first president to
commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In November, we are unwittingly
encouraged to celebrate the slaughter of the millions of peoples who lived here for
tens of thousands of years — some in civilizations more advanced than those in
Europe. In this way, we are encouraged to celebrate the murder of the peoples who
gave Europeans their understanding of political, economic, and religious freedom
which inspired the US Constitution.

However, we now have a choice as a growing number of Americans reject

Thanksgiving Day. We can instead celebrate Transformation Day as discussed
further below. This may be out best hope to avoid both the World Economic
Forum’s plans for The Great Reset and the Sixth Mass Extinction. We can use this
holiday to learn from these wise ancient civilizations that are still here and willing to
help humanity.
Why More Americans Reject Thanksgiving Day Now

Thanksgiving History Timeline

Rethinking Thanksgiving 2021

THE FIRST THANKSGIVING, THE LAST OF ITS KIND

These Celebrities Publicly Denounce Thanksgiving For Multiple Reasons

The Real Story of Thanksgiving: Story of a Massacre 1637

The Real Story of Thanksgiving

The Real Story of Thanksgiving

In 1637, near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men,

women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for
their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving
celebration. In the predawn hours, the sleeping Indians were
surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered
them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or
clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who
huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive.

The next day, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony

declared “A Day of Thanksgiving” because 700 unarmed
men, women, and children had been murdered. Cheered by
their “victory”, the brave colonists and their Indian allies
attacked village after village. Women and children over 14
were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats
loaded with as many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of
New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to
encourage as many deaths as possible.

Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in

what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced
a second day of “thanksgiving” to celebrate victory over the
heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of
Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even
the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their
chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in
Plymouth, Massachusetts — where it remained on display for
24 years. The killings became more and more frenzied, with
days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful
massacre.
 George Washington finally suggested that only one day of
Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each
and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed
Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the
Civil War — on the same day he ordered troops to march
against the starving Sioux in Minnesota.

Four hundred years of Wampanoag history

The Invention of Thanksgiving

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November

holiday.

In the story that many generations of Americans grew up

hearing, there were no Wampanoags until the Pilgrims
encountered them. If Thanksgiving has had no continuous
existence across the centuries, however, the Wampanoag
people have. Today, they make up two federally recognized
tribes, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag
Tribe of Gay Head, and they descend from a confederation of
groups that stretched across large areas of Massachusetts,
including Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket….

We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony.

Perhaps we should recall instead how English settlers
cheated, abused, killed, and eventually drove Wampanoags
into a conflict, known as King Philip’s War, that exploded
across the region in 1675 and 1676 and that was one of the
most devastating wars in the history of North American
settlement. Native soldiers attacked fifty-two towns in New
England, destroyed seventeen of them, and killed a
substantial portion of the settler population. The region also
lost as much as forty per cent of its Native population…
The Thanksgiving story buries the major cause of King Philip’s
War—the relentless seizure of Indian land. It also covers up
the consequence. The war split Wampanoags, as well as every
other Native group, and ended with indigenous resistance
broken, and the colonists giving thanks. Like most Colonial
wars, this one was a giant slave expedition, marked by the
seizure and sale of Indian people. Wampanoags were judged
criminals and—in a foreshadowing of the convict-labor
provision of the Thirteenth Amendment —sold into bondage.
During the next two centuries, New England Indians also
suffered indentured servitude, convict labor, and debt
peonage, which often resulted in the enslavement of the
debtor’s children…..

Thanksgiving’s Pilgrim pageants suggest that good-hearted

settlers arrived from pious, civilized England. We could
remember it differently: that they came from a land that
delighted in displaying heads on poles and letting bodies rot
in cages suspended above the roads. They were a warrior
tribe.

Despite continued demographic decline, loss of land, and

severe challenges to shared social identities, Wampanoags
held on. With so many men dead or enslaved, Native women
married men outside their group—often African-Americans—
and then redefined the families of mixed marriages as
matrilineal in order to preserve collective claims to land. They
adopted the forms of the Christian church, to some degree, in
order to gain some breathing space. They took advantage of
the remoteness of their settlements to maintain self-
governance. And by the late twentieth century they began
revitalizing what had been a “sleeping” language, and gained
federal recognition as a tribal nation…
David Silverman, in his personal reflections, considers how
two secular patriotic hymns, “This Land Is Your Land” and “My
Country ’Tis of Thee,” shaped American childhood
experiences. When schoolkids sing “Land where my fathers
died! Land of the Pilgrim’s pride,” he suggests, they name
white, Protestant New England founders. It makes no sense,
these days, to ask ethnically diverse students to celebrate
those mythic dudes, with their odd hats and big buckles. At
the very least, Silverman asks, could we include Indians
among “my fathers,” and pay better attention to the ways they
died? Could we acknowledge that Indians are not ghosts in
the landscape or foils in a delusional nationalist dream, but
actual living people?…

This sentiment bumps a little roughly against a second plea:

to recognize the falsely inclusive rhetoric in the phrase “This
land is your land, this land is my land.” Those lines require the
erasure of Indian people, who don’t get to be either “you” or
“me.” American Indian people are at least partly excluded
from the United States political system, written into the
Constitution (in the three-fifths clause and the Fourteenth
Amendment, for example, where they appear as “Indians not
taxed”) so as to exist outside it. Native American tribes are
distinct political entities, sovereign nations in their own right.

“American Indian” is a political identity, not a racial one,

constituted by formal, still living treaties with the United
States government and a long series of legal decisions.
 Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King
Philip’s War

Amazon Description

Winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize: A compelling and original

recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to
colonial America. “By making what we thought was a small
story very large indeed—Ms. Brooks really does give us ‘A New
History of King Philip’s War.’”—The Wall Street Journal.

“Provides a wealth of information for both scholars and lay

readers interested in Native American history.”—Publishers
Weekly.
 With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa
Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and
Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named
King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a
female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc
scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary
Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo,
Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader
scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks
leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial
New England and of American origins.

Brooks’ pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in

extensive archival research but also in the land and
communities of Native New England, reading the actions of
actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis
of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal
history.

The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue

In truth, massacres, disease and American Indian tribal

politics are what shaped the Pilgrim-Indian alliance at the root
of the holiday… as David Silverman writes in his new book
This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth
Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, much of
that story is a myth riddled with historical inaccuracies.
Beyond that, Silverman argues that the telling and retelling of
these falsehoods is deeply harmful to the Wampanoag
Indians whose lives and society were forever damaged after
the English arrived in Plymouth.
 This Land Is Their Land

Amazon Description

Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a

new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for
the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the
story.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the

balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin
(Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared
their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to
mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their
 first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation.
Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the
“First Thanksgiving.” The treaty remained operative until King
Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between
the two parties would come to an end.

400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman

sheds profound new light on the events that led to the
creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on
the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to
consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted
long after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags’
ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day.

This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native

people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday
which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white
proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land
shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation,
tell the history of Thanksgiving.

500 Native Nations: The Story of North America

Kevin Costner, star of the 1990 film Dances With Wolves, was an Executive Producer
of the 500 NATIONS 8-part documentary linked to below and serves as its host.

Costner begins by saying,

My knowledge of history has been limited by what I was

taught. As far as I was concerned, the history of the continent
started 500 years ago when Columbus ‘discovered’ the ‘new
world’. But we know that’s not true. There were people here.
So, how is it that we know so little about this past — the
human history of North America — our own story?

Could it be that we don’t think it worthy of mention the way

history has remembered the ancient civilizations of Greece,
Rome, Egypt, or China? The truth is we have a story worth
talking about. We have a history worth celebrating. Long
before the first Europeans arrived here, there were some 500
nations already in North America. They blanketed the
continent from coast to coast, from Central America to the
Arctic. There were tens of millions of people here speaking
over 300 languages. Many of them lived in beautiful cities
among the largest and most advanced in the world.

In the coming hours, 500 Nations looks back on these ancient

cultures — how they lived and how many survived. We turned
for guidance to hundreds of Indian people across the
continent. You’ll meet many of them in our programs. To
bring the past alive, we searched archives for the oldest and
most authentic images of Indian people. We sought out rare
books and manuscripts for the actual words of participants
and the eyewitness to history. Our camera crews traveled
throughout North America to film at the actual places where
important events in Indian history occurred. We filmed
incredible treasures of Indian creativity from museums across
North America and Europe. Historians and archeologists
worked with visual artists and advanced computer technology
to allow us for the first time to walk through virtual realities of
ancient Indian worlds.

What you are about to see is what happened. It’s not all that
happened and it’s not always pleasant. We can’t change that.
We can’t turn back the clock, but we can open our eyes and
give the First Nations of this land the recognition and respect
they deserve, their rightful place in the history of the world.
 With that in mind, we take you first to where our story ends —
on the Great Plains in the late 1800s.

500 NATIONS – THE STORY OF NATIVE AMERICANS PART 1

500 Nations is an eight-part American documentary television

series that was aired on CBS in 1995, about the Native
Americans of North and Central America. It documents events
from the Pre-Columbian era to the end of the 19th century.
Much of the information comes from text, eyewitnesses,
pictorials, and computer graphics.

500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians

The story of Native American leaders, customs, political

systems, and ways of life, this is American history from the
Native American perspective: friendship, betrayal, war, and
ultimately, the loss of homeland. A companion volume to the
CBS series produced by Kevin Costner, Jack Leustig, and James
Wilson aired in 1995. Illustrations & photos.
500 Nations DVD is the 8-part series hosted by Costner.
The Original Instructions

In the 2008 video Indigenous Native American Prophecy, actor Floyd Red Crow
Westerman said Native Americans were told that they would see America come and
go. He said, “In a sense, America is dying from within because they forgot the
instructions on how to live on Earth”. He warned that people who do not know how to
live spiritually on Earth likely will not make it. He explained that when Columbus
came, that started the true First World War. By WWII, the indigenous population of
the Americas had dropped from 60 million to 800,000! The Native American
population in the US is currently 4.5 million.

Fortunately for the world, the Native American nations have survived and have
retained much of their inspiring cultures. Several are working to restore their
languages. These nations which the West tried so hard to wipe out are now here to
share their ancient proven wisdom to save the world. We would be wise to listen
and learn from them once again.

Original Instructions: Indigenous

Teachings for a Sustainable Future

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson studied with the Haudenosaunee (Six
Nations Iroquois) for 30 years. In 1987, the US Congress admitted that the US
Constitution was inspired by the Haudenosaunee system of government. New York
Times: IROQUOIS CONSTITUTION: A FORERUNNER TO COLONISTS’ DEMOCRATIC
PRINCIPLES.

“American” is a name the British colonists used for the Indigenous peoples of this
hemisphere. When the US Founding Fathers declared independence from Great
Britain, they adopted the name “American” and founded The United States of
America. This shows just some of how deep our connection is to the original
peoples of this hemisphere!

Learning the wisdom of Native America again and how to follow The Original
Instructions is the best way to avoid the Sixth Mass Extinction that our way of life is
causing.

Eckhart Tolle: A New Earth

There are growing calls now for us to “Think Different” as Apple advises us. We have
no choice if we want to survive now. There are only 6 inches of top soil left now —
enough to grow food for just 60 more years! Native Americans Are a “Keystone
Species” shows that the Native American worldview leads to abundance. Are we
wise enough to learn from them again now?

Eckhart Tolle is the author of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, The
Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Oneness With All Life, and Stillness
Speaks. He explains in the video below that we are going through a period of
insanity, a collective illness. Why Joe Rogan’s Interviews on Mass Psychosis “Broke
The Internet” explains that Belgian psychologist Prof. Mattias Desmet, author The
Psychology of Totalitarianism, says the world is going through at “Mass Formation”
psychosis.

Tolle says we need wisdom now. He predicts that as we move past the ego now,
there will be a very different Great Reset from the one the globalists are planning!

Video: “A Great Reset Will Happen…” Eckhart Tolle

National Day of Transformation

Thanksgiving can be a Day of Transformation — day of learning and healing —

individually, for the nation, and for the world. This may be one of the best ways to
protect ourselves now from the globalists’ plans for The Great Reset in which the
World Economic Forum says that by 2030 “You will own nothing” and we will be
merged with Artificial Intelligence! Drug companies make billions of dollars from the
Indian botanical knowledge, but do nothing to help protect those cultures which
are such an ancient sources of wisdom. Westerners are flocking to the Amazon to
drink ayahuasca with Amazonian shamans, but also are doing little to help protect
the Amazon.

The Flip Book below shows how we can use this holiday now to reconcile with the
500 Native Nations who so inspired our sense of what it means to be free.

Click through my Transformation Day Flip Book below.