A sermon given by Frater Babalon at Church of the Morningstar’s first Thanksgiving mass.

So, this mass is tied into the holiday of Thanksgiving, a holiday whose popular narrative is about pilgrims and indiginous people coming together for a meal after the local tribe had helped the  new comers through a winter that would have starved them all otherwise.

A holiday of gratitude towards the Wampanoag, in a country that’s still actively genocidal seems bitterly ironic, especially given what happened later when, after having been allies, the colonial rulers began to create intentional distance between their people and the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag, a federation of farming communities, held land in common, the way English peasants had done until around this time, when the ruling class was enclosing common lands to have it worked to increase their own profits.  The Wampanoag also ran their society… basically like an anarchist federation (sending delegates after voting on issues… because they’re a goddamn civilized people) and the ruling class of the colonies sought to prevent their servants and slaves from defecting or considering how the Wampanoag’s system of organization might be applied on the home front.  The Wampanoag after a relatively long period as English allies, saw their people being enslaved by the Colonists over petty criminal cases and saw their lands and rights being further and further eroded and so they organized with other local tribal groups to fight back against the English.

In retaliation, the tribe was nearly (but not completely) wiped out.  This is especially gruesome given that the reason that the Wampanoag had allied themselves to the English in the first place with a treaty that served the colonists far better than it served them, was because they had suffered a devastating plague that had killed 2/3rds of their population and left them vulnerable to traditionally hostile neighbors.

The Wampanoag weren’t recognized by the US until 2006 and we’re STILL trying to steal what miniscule amount of their land they have left.  (Update: We took their land again)

The first Thanksgiving wasn’t even a Thanksgiving for the Wampanoag, simply a harvest festival in Thanksgiving to the Christian god.  The Wampanoag only showed up and were invited to dinner because they heard colonists firing as they hunted geese and thought the colony was under attack and rushed to help.  The colonists then invited them to dinner, but the Wampanoag warriors saw that the spread was meager and went out and shot several deer to supplement the food. These are people who fed and aided my ancestors, who fed and aided my partner’s ancestors and they betrayed them unspeakably and we keep on betraying them unspeakably.

The horror of Thanksgiving is that it’s the equivilent of thanking someone you’re actively trying to murder for saving your ass when you were choking to death.

Settler Colonialism is a truly Faustian bargain.  Settler colonialism, typically a nice way of saying “invasion and genocide” is a mechanism of control.  It’s a way that the ruling class can expand its reach in times of unrest by allowing the working class to pillage from others, so they do not turn instead to take back what their overlords have stolen from them.

It is a way of temporarily improving the living conditions of the working class, by giving them gains stolen from other peoples, that then, the ruling class can gradually appropriate for themselves.  It is fool’s gold payment for spreading their power yet further across the globe.

This was especially true in America where many of the indiginous peoples had forms of social organization that would have been profoundly dangerous to the European ruling class if the lower classes had gotten too much exposure to them.

We live on stolen land, land stolen so that a few centuries later a real estate baron could own all of it and charge extortionate rates to the descendants of those who had committed mass murder on the land baron’s ancestor’s promise that they’d be free there.

Happy thanksgiving.