At this time of year, when we celebrate family, the middle of the Christmas season and making low-wage employees leave their families to work on a major holiday, we should not forget that Thanksgiving also commemorates two major themes in our national history: immigration to America to look for a job and screwing over Native Americans. And also? Pie.
America's first immigrants were a plucky band of Siberians who, some 17,000 years ago, crossed the land bridge that then existed from Asia to North America across the Bering Sea, then, like subsequent waves of immigrants to America, destroyed the bridge behind them. They found the new land, later called Alaska, welcoming and comfortable, largely because they came in summer and Sarah Palin wouldn't live there for another 17,000 years. The immigrants took jobs in their new land, most involving slaughtering any wildlife they found good to eat (mmmmastodon!) or threatening. (Really, Nature? Tigers need saber-teeth to look badass?) Also, they probably invented pie.
America being like one of those clubs that don't put out signs so as to keep out the riff-raff, 16,000+ years elapsed before white people came to these shores, in the form of Vikings looking for new lands to plunder and pillage, and also a nice schvitz. The Native Americans, having remained unplundered and unpillaged for millennia, objected, some rather vehemently. Finding the plunder and pillage more plunder-y and pillage-y closer to home in Europe, and finding also few saunas that would admit people wearing horned helmets, the Vikings departed, leaving behind only a few artifacts, including a casserole dish of lutefisk which has not to this day gone bad, or at any rate worse.
When Europeans again started immigrating to America a few hundred years later, they came better prepared than the Vikings. Instead of swords and horny hats, they brought guns, germs the natives had no immunity to, and a tender regard for the natives as fellow human beings--except for the tender regard for the natives as human beings part, because oh! those Puritans and their wacky hijinks, like killing heathens. Actually, that was their only hijink.
Like later waves of immigrants, the Pilgrims came to this land unemployed (they'd had a tough time getting jobs in Holland, where they'd emigrated from England, on account of the cosmopolitan Dutch having very few openings that called for Nottinghamshire bumpkins, which the Pilgrims were), with almost nothing save the aforementioned guns and germs. Unlike later immigrants, they spent their first few months in their new home digging up Native American graves for food and implements, the graves' inhabitants having fortuitously died just a few months before of the "fulminating" (!) smallpox brought by previous European settlers. Even so, half the Pilgrims died of disease and starvation their first year in America, and more would have, had the local Indians not helped—well, not all the local Indians, as some felt understandably peevish with white people after all the murder and enslavement and smallpox.
My daughter's grade-school class shortly before Thanksgiving one year made clothes-pin Pilgrims and Indians (and I believe there might have been a turkey too), with which, every year at our Thanksgiving dinner, we would enact the following touching scene of interracial harmony and aid:
Pilgrim: Oh, my, whatever shall we do? We are starving!
Indian: My people and I shall teach you how to fish and plant maize.
Pilgrim: Oh, thank you, kind Indians. Won't you dine with us?
Indian: Thank you, we will.
Pilgrim: Not the expensive stuff. Here, have a smallpox-infected blanket.
Indian: Thanks! What's smallpox?
Pilgrim: It doesn't matter. You'll like it.
(Yeah, I know the smallpox-infected blankets are anachronistic. I liked to give my kids a more-vivid picture of history than the mere facts allowed, i.e., to make shit up.)
The Indians regretted their early help, and quite soon, as the right side of the continent rapidly filled up with unemployed white people who eventually formed a country (the Unemployed States Of America, the first word later shortened to "United") with an Army that made room for all those unemployed white people by stealing the Indians' land:
U.S. Army: Hey, you Indians, would you mind moving to Oklahoma?
Indian: Oklahoma? Dude, we live in Florida! We don't even know where Oklahoma is.
U.S. Army: It doesn't matter. You'll like it.
Indian: Well, does it get cold there? Will we need coats? All we have are these rudimentary 19th-century Speedos.
U.S. Army: Nope. And in 70 or 80 years there'll be something called a Dust Bowl. You'll like that too.
Indian: Do we have a choice?
U.S. Army: Well, we could kill you with our guns.
Indian: Oklahoma, OK!
Of course, when the country got more crowded and needed that land in Oklahoma for white people and to get oil out of, the Army took it back. Apparently the phrase "Indian giver" was invented around this time too. Also, Rodgers and Hammerstein gave the Native Americans no credit when Oklahoma! debuted.
Immigration continued apace, as did screwing over the Indians, and after only a couple of centuries and a bloody internecine war, Southerners cheerfully released from slavery those African-Americans who had so eagerly immigrated to this country in chains (the ones who didn't die in the Middle Passage and have their bodies unceremoniously tossed into the ocean); then, just to show there were no hard feelings, the Southerners lynched and persecuted those African-Americans for another century. No fools they, the former slaves got the hell out of the South and moved to Northern cities, joining the waves of other immigrants whom employers paid so well in the colorfully-named "sweatshops" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
(Hi, Gramma, back in the 19-teens! Don't sew too hard! You're going to die at 43 anyway! Hi, Grampa! Don't bake too much; that flour dust is going to rot your lungs out!)
The United States, fearing that all of Europe would come here to do what its original settlers had--try to get a job--imposed limitations on "undesirable" immigrants, Jews, Italians, Chinese and Irish mostly, but no restrictions on Northern European immigrants, like Germans and Scandinavians, who had by this time stopped wearing horned helmets but still inexplicably enjoyed lutefisk. And so it stands today, though the people the U.S. tries to keep out now come from Spanish-speaking countries and don't have smallpox--or Ebola, with all due respect (none) to Fox "News".
For my part, I welcome anyone who wishes to immigrate to this great country, be they Mexican or Canadian, Irish or Senegalese, Hindu or Muslim, hobbit or troll, Klingon or Texan. (Well, I might restrict Texans.) This Thanksgiving, I think with pride of my unemployed immigrant ancestors and their celebration of the dignity of work: "Eh," they would say, "It's a job." I think of how the US at long last compensated Native Americans for its genocide and wholesale theft of Indian lands by allowing them to run casinos. (We're all good now, right?) And I think with sympathy of all those people fearful that a new wave of immigrants will do to them what their ancestors did to the Native Americans; I'd like to tell those people: It doesn't matter. You'll like it.
But then I remember that I don't care about those idiots. Did someone mention pie?