Patriotic and Politically Correct Thanksgiving Myths
The old patriotic Thanksgiving myth says that the Pilgrims suffered through a hard winter, and then a Native American named Squanto acted as translator and let them make contact with his Wampanoag tribe, which taught them to plant corn. After a prosperous year, they had the first Thanksgiving, a feast with the Wampanoags, who became their miliary allies.
The new politically correct myth says that, in the years that followed, the Pilgrims deliberately wiped out the Wampanoags to take their land, just one example of Europeans wiping out Native Americans.
The facts are more complex. The Wampanoags made this military alliance because their population dropped when they caught infectious diseases that the Europeans brought to America, and their weakness led the Narragansett tribe to their west to invade their territory. They formed a military alliance with the Europeans because they needed their help to defend themselves from being wiped out by another tribe of Native Americans!
All through human history and prehistory, groups of people have expanded their own territory by wiping out or driving away other groups of people. It goes beyond human history: populations of chimpanzees expand their territories by ambushing and killing individuals from other nearby populations, and populations of ants war with any nearby ants that are not genetically related to them.
The evolutionary reason is obvious: if a population of humans or animals increases the size of its territory, it is able to grow larger. Populations that have a genetic predisposition to take over land from weaker neighbors grow faster than those who don't, so this disposition spreads through the gene pool.
The politically correct seem to think that this tendency to expand is a trait of Europeans and not of their innocent victims, but it is actually a tendency of humans, chimpanzees, ants, and many, many other species of animals.
Rather than politically correct recriminations about the past, we need to realize that we are all have this same potential, so we can all rise above tribalism and see that our loyalty to humanity as a whole is more important than our loyalty to our own group.
The new politically correct myth says that, in the years that followed, the Pilgrims deliberately wiped out the Wampanoags to take their land, just one example of Europeans wiping out Native Americans.
The facts are more complex. The Wampanoags made this military alliance because their population dropped when they caught infectious diseases that the Europeans brought to America, and their weakness led the Narragansett tribe to their west to invade their territory. They formed a military alliance with the Europeans because they needed their help to defend themselves from being wiped out by another tribe of Native Americans!
All through human history and prehistory, groups of people have expanded their own territory by wiping out or driving away other groups of people. It goes beyond human history: populations of chimpanzees expand their territories by ambushing and killing individuals from other nearby populations, and populations of ants war with any nearby ants that are not genetically related to them.
The evolutionary reason is obvious: if a population of humans or animals increases the size of its territory, it is able to grow larger. Populations that have a genetic predisposition to take over land from weaker neighbors grow faster than those who don't, so this disposition spreads through the gene pool.
The politically correct seem to think that this tendency to expand is a trait of Europeans and not of their innocent victims, but it is actually a tendency of humans, chimpanzees, ants, and many, many other species of animals.
Rather than politically correct recriminations about the past, we need to realize that we are all have this same potential, so we can all rise above tribalism and see that our loyalty to humanity as a whole is more important than our loyalty to our own group.
posted by C. Siegel at 12:14 PM
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