Is Thanksgiving Bad?

For John, BLUF:  A number of people see traditional Thanksgiving as bad, calling for people to view it as a "National Day of Mourning, given the fate of Native Americans.  The Author is an Americaan Expat in France.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Is Thanksgiving a "Myth" or a "Problematic Holiday"?  What Nobody Tells You About Indians and Other Native Americans

From No-Pasaran, by the Unnamed Author, 25 November 2022.

Here is the lede plus three:

Every time I hear about the tragedy (the tragedies) suffered by the Indians of North America (whether at Thanksgiving or at any other time), I bring up some variant of the following questions: Do the calamities also include the theft of the lands of the Apaches? Does the genocide, real or alleged, of the Native Americans also concern the extermination of the Huron tribe (Huronia)?

This type of question usually boondoggles the leftist, whose eyes grow like saucers and who waffles trying to reply, since in his eagerness to sum up American and world history by meting out simplified explanations in one-sentence platitudes (that conveniently, and invariably, happen to be damning towards Americans, i.e., white Americans), he has neither had nor taken the time to think any details through as he attempts to display his alleged expertise as a modern-day genius. The most intelligent leftists will be — rightly — suspecting that the questions are in some way or another some form of trap…

The problem, of course, is that the lands of the Apaches were stolen by the Comanches.

While the Hurons were wiped out by the Iroquois.

The Author paints a rather grim picture of some of the tribes across the continent.  He doesn't get into human sacrifice, which was practiced in the lower parts of North America.  On the other hand, he passes over the helpfulness of the local eastern Massachusetts Native Americans.  We commemorate that cooperstion when we celebrate Thanksgiving.  For sure, the Native American population can not be taken as a uniform collection of tribes,  Rather, they are a large number of groups, with unique cultures, from the Wampanoag to the Mississippian Culture to the Iroquois to the Comanches.

I think the appreciation of Thanksgiving is in the fact that a group of people faced bad odds, and beat them, and took the time to thank God for seeing them through their trials.  I think we should apprecite that at the first Thanksgiving the European Immigrants welcomed and thanked the Native Americans who helped them survive.  If we load the feast down with too much analysis we are impoosing our current understanding on people who might never have contemplated such complications.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Pueblo Indian Society Overcomes Disaster

For John, BLUF:  There was history in North American before the coming of the British.  Here is an example of a society that coped well for several centuries.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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One American Culture Actually Benefited From 'The Worst Year in Human History'

From Science Alert, by Reporter Mike McRae, 3 DECEMBER 2021.

Here is the lede plus two:

As far as years go, you could do a lot better than 536 CE. By some historians' standards, it may have well been 'the worst year to be alive in human history'. Depending on where a person lived around the globe, those cold, bleak times kept on truly sucking for many years to come.

Now, it seems it might not have been the worst thing, at least for the Ancestral Puebloan communities who occupied the southwestern US. In fact, the darkness of this brief, global ice age might have heralded a bright new day for their culture.

A study conducted by a team of archeologists and anthropologists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Colorado State University in the US has uncovered signs that the population spread across the Four Corners region not only recovered from a catastrophic climate shift in the mid-6th century – in some ways they came back stronger than ever.

To understand the climate issue, consider that reports were of a sun performing like the moon, due to an atmosphere obscuring the sun due to volcanoes:

Today, it appears this sun-shielding fog had its origins in a series of volcanic eruptions across the Americas, which spewed enough ash into the atmosphere to turn summer into winter across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Just five years later, a good chunk of the Roman population would fall beneath a plague like no other. Oh, and another colossal volcanic event, this time in El Salvador, churned out even more ash to top it all off.

Life in North America wasn't much better. Measurements of tree rings from northern Arizona reveal a drop in temperature and precipitation that lasted for decades.

Yet archaeological records show that in spite of these challenging times, the Ancient Puebloans would go on to develop a rich, complex culture that would thrive for centuries.

So, are we as a society ready to meet the new social challenges that would be posed by a rapid climate change or some other environmental or economic change?  Not some gradual climate change, but rather a rapid onset, one that included major challenges in food production and in other activities, including new diseases and a gloomy atmosphere?

I am not sure the Biden Administration and the "Green New Deal would be what we would need in such a crisis.  I suspect we would benefit most from decentralized empowerment.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Who Was Here Before?

For John, BLUF:  Sometimes it seems the more we learn the less we know.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Fossil footprints show humans in North America more than 21,000 years ago

Here is the sub-headline:

The footprints, the earliest firm evidence for humans in the Americas, show that people must have arrived here before the last Ice Age.

From NBC News, by Reporter Tom Metcalfe, 23 September 2021, 2:00 PM EDT.

Here is the lede plus one:

David Bustos heard about the “ghost tracks” when he first went to White Sands National Park in New Mexico to work as a wildlife scientist in 2005.  When the ground was wet enough at certain times of the year, the ghostly footprints would appear on the otherwise blank earth, only to disappear again when it dried out.

It wasn’t until over 10 years later, in 2016, that scientists confirmed that the ghost tracks had been made by real people — and it’s only now that some of the ancient footprints at White Sands have been dated as the earliest in North America.

“We’d been suspicious of the age for a while, and so now we finally have that it’s really exciting,” Bustos said.  “One of the neat things is that you can see mammoth prints in the layers a meter or so above the human footprints, so that just helps to confirm the whole story.”

The footprints at White Sands were dated by examining the seeds of an aquatic plant that once thrived along the shores of the dried-up lake, Ruppia cirrhosa, commonly known as ditchgrass.  According to research published Thursday in the journal Science and co-authored by Bustos, the ancient ditchgrass seeds were found in layers of hard earth both above and below the many human footprints at the site, and they were radiocarbon-dated to determine their age.

Trails of footprints called "ghost tracks" have been seen in the White Sands area for years, but usually only when the ground was wet.

Trails of footprints called "ghost tracks" have been seen in the White Sands area for years, but usually only when the ground was wet.  The tracks at one location have been revealed as both the earliest known footprints and the oldest firm evidence of humans anywhere in the Americas, showing that people lived there 21,000 to 23,000 years ago — several thousand years earlier than scientists once believed.

Here is the Wikipedia article on Native Americans.  The question is, were these the people who were here before the last ice age?  If not, what happened to those people?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff