If I were an “Original”, I’m not sure if I would be carving up a Turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
First of all, I like to refer to the people that have been here on the North American Continent for thousands of years as “Originals” and not as “Indigenous” or “Indians” any longer. Columbus thought he had reached “India”. He missed that boat.
For many of us, thinking about Thanksgiving makes us think of the First Thanksgiving between the “Originals” and the Pilgrims. There are many versions of this story though, but many of us know the one we are taught in school. In 1621, America would have their very first Thanksgiving Dinner between the two different groups of people (our species). Today it is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November.
The very first Thanksgiving was to celebrate a treaty between the pilgrims and the “Originals”. This was a large feast that had enough food to feed everyone for weeks. On the table was foul such as geese, turkey, swans, duck, etc. There was also lots of meat, vegetables and grains provided by both the Indians and the pilgrims. Everyone had a wonderful celebration, and certainly a wonderful meal. The “Originals” even signed a paper stating that the pilgrims had the right to Plymouth.
Thanksgiving to the “Originals” may not mean the same thing that it did to the white settlers in American History. To the “Originals”, Thanksgiving would mean a totally different thing. This was the beginning of their end……a time where they had given up their land in return for gifts that were full of disease……which would kill many of them later down the road.
The White settlers would see this as a friendship being started, knowing that without the help of the “Originals”, they would never have survived the rough winter. It was a time of celebrating with family and friends and being thankful they were still around to do it. Today, we celebrate it with our own family with turkey, yams and ham.

Thanksgiving will always be remembered as a time when the “Originals” and Pilgrims sat at a long table and ate together, sharing everything they had with one another.
Here’s a poignant story written by Jacqueline Keeler / Pacific News Service December 31, 1999
For a Native American, the story of Thanksgiving is not a very happy one. But a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux finds occasion for hope.
I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.
Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride” in “America the Beautiful.”
Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing “Land of the Indian’s pride” instead. I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference.
At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some “inside” knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses came to our homes.
When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry — half of them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them.
Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through the winter and taught them how to grow their food. These were not merely “friendly Indians.” They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a hundred years or so, and they were wary — but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing.
Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father’s people, they say, when asked to give, “Are we not Dakota and alive?” It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all — the exact opposite of the system we live in now, which is based on selling, not giving.
To the Pilgrims, and most English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people, themselves.
Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world. Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes?
Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the “first Thanksgiving” the Wampanoags provided most of the food — and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving. What did the Europeans give in return?
Within 20 years, European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities.
By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way “for a better growth,” meaning his people.
In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil.
I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since.
Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism. Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us.
Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.
Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle. And the healing can begin.
Jacqueline Keeler is a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian Journal.
So, let us all give thanks, on this wonderful day of Thanksgiving. Let’s be thankful that those first Originals” didn’t have guns. Let’s be thankful that they didn’t just kill off all of the Pilgrim Settlers and go back home with a bunch of scalps in their pouch. Let’s be thankful that the “Originals” DID teach those thankful pilgrims how to farm, i.e., how to successfully grow the foods that we take for granted today.

Let’s just be really thankful. That’s called progress, “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride”, all part of the evolution of our species and planet. AMEN. God bless America, and can you pass the mashed potatoes please.
Peace & Abide, La paz y la morada, السلام والالتزام , שלום ושמירה, Paix et Demeure, Խաղաղությունը եւ մնալը, Мир и пребывание,, 平和と遵守, 和平與恪守, Aştî û Abad, صلح و عبید, Fred och Abide, Kapayapaan at Patuloy, Frieden und Bleiben, Mir i Ostanite, शांति और निवास, Hòa bình và ở lại, Мир и Абиде, שלום און בלייַבן, สันติภาพและการปฏิบัติ, Mir in bivanje,
Yadhum oore yaavarum kelir, “The World Is One Family”

Dr. T. C. Saxe, DD, RSISHE

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While we children waited for the latest episode of “Lassie”, our parents looked forward to the latest episodes of “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners”.
desks at school for a weekly “Drill” that was supposed to save our lives from an unexpected Atomic Bomb blast, life was good, life was simple, and most of us had fun growing up as children.
to them on their budgets instead of a “Smart” phone, and even if they DO have a Smart phone, they still only use it for making and receiving telephone phone calls from their Mother or their sister Edith, and maybe, just MAYBE, one of their grandchildren have taught them how to send and receive “Text Messages”.
Do you want to find out how to give your neighbor’s Pit-Bull a Vasectomy without anesthesia? Look it up on the Internet, in fact there’s probably a YouTube video just for that. Or you are really interested in researching who really murdered JFK? The information is there, you just have to do the research.
smart phones, and everything else will have on them. We WILL know in ten years of so, when they are graduating from High School and entering college.
The fourth group are those unfortunate souls caught in-between, the innocent people dying of starvation and wars on a daily basis. The cross-generational “Sheeple” far outnumber the cross-generational “Awakened/Awake”. The growing group of “Awakened/Awake” AND the “Sheeple”, far outnumber the “Evil-Doers” (which is ALSO cross-generational).
That “Umbrella” would be part of the MOAA and could be called, the “People Powered Planet Global Partnership” (PPPGP) set up as a not for profit Limited Liability Company, owned by all participating groups/organizations/people.
conscious or subconscious fear of “Hell Fire and Brimstone” that was taught to you all your life, and you believe that your attempt at living a saintly life will get you a Passport to your concept of “Heaven” and your place in the Heavenly Choir, or your 20 virgins that were promised to you, or your reincarnation as a higher life-form like a Cow.
One of my pet peeves in a similar regard is the madness of following some dude that convinces his “Flock” to donate a huge chunk of their life savings so he can purchase his fifth or sixth private jet (I lost count)…..You know the dude, because he just can’t fly with all those “Demons” on commercial airliners.
Heaven forbid the thought, but guess what folks, Jesus was not a “White” dude. In fact, there’s a good chance that Jesus was black, or at least a mixture of Dark-Brown and Black. You don’t hear the White folks preaching THAT too often do you.
Or how can a normal human being be OK with, justify, and be a part of, the apartheid treatment of the Palestinian people? Look at our U. S. Senate and House of Representatives (our Congress), and see how many of the politicians have Dual-Citizenship with the apartheid government that is currently occupying Palestine. Even the REAL Jewish people are opposed to, and demonstrate against, the so-called State of Israel.
P. S. S. Yes, it is very funny and entertaining to watch two dudes slowly get stoned/drunk as they discuss everything from “The cost of tea in China”, to, “Going together to get their butt-hole hair waxed”, and everything in between.

Guess who got blamed for everything? Me of course. Many broken yardsticks……broken over my ass, (mom threw the “Razor-Strop” in the trash early on when I was about five).
the day I stood with about 30 other dudes at the Hennepin County main courthouse in downtown Minneapolis, raising my right hand, swearing to defend the United States for enemies both foreign and domestic as I joined the U. S. Navy.
Spleen and Gall Bladder. I wasn’t given the gruesome details for a few years, and it was Aunty Alice that had explained why mom had died at so young an age. She died at Saint Mary’s Hospital, the same hospital where she was born. Johnny and I both were also born there.
mental institution for about the fifth time for what they called in those days, “Shock Treatments”, goggle that, it’s just a mild form of electrocution. The parts of the brain they fry, the brain tissue, is destroyed and never re-generate. It’s not wonder he got crazier and crazier over the years.
He died, drunken and froze to death up in the snow-covered mountains above Lake Elsinore, “Popsicle Ed, Frozen til Dead”.
a bottle of Yukon Jack and smoking about three bong-loads. We talked into the evening, thru the night, until the Sun came up the following morning. Of course, we reminisced about our childhood, that’s all we had, other than “What kind of work do you do”…..”What do YOU do for a living, Tommy?” I could share the entire conversation with my readers, but that would take a whole other chapter.









“Our spreading of bad or negative information, about anything, can sometimes be considered a form of Contagion” – Duncan Trussell
Sometimes we prove that we were not listening, when we are telling someone something, and the other person responds, “I already told you that, dude” – Dr. T. C. Saxe, DD, RSISHE
“Stoners who prioritize their shit when they first get high get the most benefit, from that first hour, like in my case, I write, then I go run a mile, do 500 sit-ups, and 200 push-ups” (Sure Tom).
Altering a somewhat famous quote, “When they go low….We go High-Grade with the Ganj” – Dr. T. C. Saxe, DD, RSISHE
Sloths are normally the Eagle’s prey, but now the “Eagle” needs to do a little praying because the “Sloths” are beginning to fight back, and there will be no mercy once the Sloth picks up a little speed. Click on this “Link” for the Sloth action that Joe and Duncan.
rabid fucking raccoon wanting to be POTUS so bad she would eat her daughter Chelsea’s entrails with Fava Beans and a nice Chianti.