Happy Thanksgiving.
As we Americans express our gratitude to God for His blessings, we
recall the first celebration of this harvest feast in the early Seventeenth
Century, shared with the Native Americans in appreciation for their teaching
the English settlers of the Plymouth colony
about raising local crops, which was the first fruit of the bounty of America .
I think of
how there were always good relations with the Natives of Pennsylvania, the
Lenape or “Delaware ”
tribe, with no genocide of any kind or treaty violations. The only hostilities with Native Americans in
Penn’s Woods occurred when another tribe invaded Lenape territory from New York
and kidnapped or killed settlers along the frontier of the Blue Mountain in the
mid Eighteenth Century, and also during the American Revolution, most
infamously when Native allies of the British slaughtered settlers in the
Wyoming Valley Massacre. Although there
are no federal or state reservations for the Lenape in the Commonwealth, they
have maintained their presence around the Northeastern States, including with
state reservations in other States, as well as their heritage.
As I have
noted previously, Columbus Day is appropriate for celebrating the binding of
the two Hemispheres together through the Discovery of the New World by
Christopher Columbus in 1492, whereas Thanksgiving is the time to thank God and
to be particularly grateful for the friendship of the Native Americans and
their many contributions to America.
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