Penny, that is great about the book. And your plans sounds fine. You always are so good about your research.

I received this before Thanksgiving and didn't want to post it then. Wasn't sure if it fit anywhere else, but now, it seems this might be a good thread for it. I post it only to inform, NOT as any kind of criticim of anyone's programmes.

There are many things to be thankful for over this upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, but "friendship" between the Pilgrims and the Indigenous Peoples in New England in the early 1600's is not one of them. Below is a document printed in "Healing Global Wounds" in the Fall of 1996, which reprinted it from "Community Endeavor News", November, 1995:

The First Thanksgiving

The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.

"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance--Thanksgiving Day to them--in their own house," Newell said.

"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building," he said.

Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.

"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay."

Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was 'fictitious' although Indians did share food with the first settlers.