← Back to context

Comment by zozbot234

1 day ago

[flagged]

Wasn't Thanksgiving a practice before people came to the US? The US now does it, but they didn't start it. I only know it because I'm Dutch and I wanted to see if the Dutchies were somehow involved (because they are way more often than they should be). Here's a source I quickly found but there are many sources on it [1].

There's more to Thanksgiving than only the US.

[1] https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/how-netherl...

this always gets brought up, but realistically no one ever cares or brings this up from the perspective of celebrating American origins, but rather just a reminder to be thankful for things in your life that matter to you. I don't see the problem with this

North American natives were exterminating and enslaving each other long before the Europeans got there.

Nobody has anything to be proud of.

  • The term "slave" encompasses a lot of wildly different kinds of unfree labor. The racialized system most people think of from transatlantic slavery is a very recent thing.

    Nothing resembling that was widespread in precolumbian North America. The earliest similar systems I'm aware of took root in the 17th and 18th centuries, well into the early colonial period.

    • Research what the Iroquois did to the Huron people, what the Apache did to the Pueblos, and what the Aztecs did to everybody.

      The continent what a slaughter show for thousands of years.

      1 reply →

  • While it was (mostly?) unintentional, the biological warfare committed by Europeans makes for a different story than anything that happened before they arrived. The Americas weren't a paradise, but neither were they a slaughterhouse.