As We Approach Thanksgiving

I can recall dishonest recreations of Thanksgiving Day stories in elementary school that painted interactions as harmonious and generous.  While conflict is often acknowledged, it is alongside the great "accomplishments" of creating a great democracy and westward expansion.  In reality, officials who committed great violations of human bodies and spirits in Ireland ("conquering" the Irish natives) were relocated to commit the same atrocities on the American continent.  The English colonists generally instigated violence, often for food supplies despite the English's insistence that they best knew how to work the land efficaciously.  English settlers would characterize American Indians as lazy and unproductive, despite a reality to the contrary.  Indians were often helpful and hospitable, despite the manipulative behaviors of the Europeans who settled among them.  They tried to make peace and often shared their harvests.

Nonetheless, English settlers saw themselves as morally, intellectually, and bodily superior to American Indians.  They justified their abuses of and thievery from American Indians by this self-assessed superiority.  They also seemed willfully ignorant of the reality that the American Indians better knew how to survive in the American landscape had it not been for the arrival of English colonizers who spread disease and threatened their ways of living.  Colonizers failed to see the success and effectiveness of native models and also failed to see their own negative impact.  The English depleted resources, attacked natives, spread diseases, etc.