A National Day of Mourning

"The pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of
Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed
the graves of my ancestors and stolen their
corn and beans."
-------Frank James, known in the Wampanoag Tribe as Wampsutta


Not a day to give thanks, but a National Day of Mourning for the
Native Americans.

In 1970, James was invited to speak at the annual Thanksgiving feast by
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When festival organizers learned
that James's speech was an angry recounting of the treachery of the
pilgrims, an outcry against the genocide of the Wampanoags, they
refused to let him speak. He left the dinner and went to the statue of
Massasoit, Sachem of the Wampanoags, and gave his speech to 7 or 8
Indians and supporters.

Every year since then on Thanksgiving Day, Native Americans and their
supporters gather at the top of Cole's Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock
to observe the National Day of Mourning.

And every year. in schoolhouses all over the country, children enact
a simplistic, distorted pageant of kindly, virtuous pilgrims and
friendly Indians getting together for a meal which set the tradition
for the first Thanksgiving.

According to Indian sources, the meeting was about the Pilgrims
wanting to acquire land, the Wampanoags had the food for their own
traditional fall feast and brought it along.
See the Native Americans' Bureau of White Affairs.

Two hundred years later, there was no pretense of friendly meetings
when the Cherokees were driven out of Georgia. They were living in
houses, schooling their children, had their own printing press, and
were considered no threat to anyone. But those in power coveted
their land.

In 1931, Nancy Callahan Dollar, better known as Granny Dollar, died
on Lookout Mountain at the age of 105. Her father, William Callahan,
a full-blooded Cherokee, was one of several who escaped the infamous
Trail of Tears by hiding out in caves on the mountain.

There were men on the mountains who would not fight for the Confederacy
and slavery, and before that there were mountain people who would not
turn in the escaped Cherokees, but welcomed them as neighbors. And
there were men who stole their lands, forcing those who survived the
terrible march and those who escaped to start all over again.