ESL American History

the Eastern Wild Turkey, perhaps a national symbol superior to the Bald EagleRecently my Saturday night class of Japanese students has taken a keen interest in American History, and last week I lectured about the roles of various immigrant communities in creating the current demographics of the United States.  This week, one of my students asked me about whether American states, cities, and towns had holidays unique to themselves, as is common in Japan.  After waxing about Boston's Evacuation Day and St. Patrick's Day being both on March 17th, I mentioned that Thanksgiving was originally a local celebration, but had spread to the rest of the United States as homesteaders from New England made their ways to the midwest, mountain states, and west coast.

In a way, I realized, the history of Thanksgiving serves as a metaphor for the entire history of the United States.  I explained about the Spanish looking for gold in Central and South America, the French fur trade, the Chinese on the west coast, Vikings and the Vinland Sagas, even speculations that St. Brendan of Ireland and the Phoenicians had reached the New World in their days, though I dismissed those latter two claims as highly speculative.  We discussed how various religious sects - especially English - came to America to live, and not just to do business like the Spanish and French.  These religious sect members and their cohorts were more numerous and committed, and from the end of the French and Indian War, they became the dominant cultural primogenitors of the United States.  We discussed Roanoke and CROATOAN, Jamestown, and Plymouth before moving on to Thanksgiving.

The English settlers were not prepared for the environment of Massachusetts, I said.  They brought only European seeds, and they thought all those plants would grow in Massachusetts.  But the earth in Massachusetts - unlike the earth in Virginia - is really, really rocky, and acidic, so European plants could not grow.  Thanksgiving is in November, because in September, there was a really bad harvest, people got sick and began to die.  In October, lots of people died, and, in November, it seemed like the whole Plymouth colony would die of starvation.  But the Native Americans showed the English settlers how to produce foods native to New England, like turkey, venison, fish, lobster, clams, corn, pumpkin, cranberries, and squash, which is why we all eat those foods on Thanksgiving now.

We next discussed how the descendants of the poor English settlers went on to kill the descendants of the helpful Native Americans and took all their land: from 1620, the descendants of those English settlers swept across the country, through the French lands, through the Spanish lands, towards Manifest Destiny, and by 1900, the only real Native American lands left were reservations.  

We also discussed the difference between the kind of wild turkeys I saw in my backyard growing up and the bloated, fat domesticated Thanksgiving turkeys that have breasts so large they cannot breed without being artificially inseminated, which drives PETA nuts.  In the vein of "you are what you eat", one can look at the history of Turkey - that quintessential American food - and find the history of America: the Pilgrims were struggling to survive, unprepared and poorly equipped - both mentally and physically - to survive the harsh New England soil and winter; and yet now their cultural descendants have industrialized, technologized, mass-marketed, and exported that very symbol of American antitranscendentalism.