Happy Thanksgiving (with Qualifiers)

Happy Thanksgiving . . . unless, of course, you were a Wampanoag, slaughtered during the chaotic violence of King Philip's War because of the colonists' insatiable desire for land-- Harvest Festival be damned-- although if you were a Native American back then, I guess you could have been thankful that you were alive in the first place, and had not perished from the diseases the English settlers brought to the New World . . . and the Native Americans that did make it until the 1800s didn't have much to be thankful for either, as they were forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern U.S. to Oklahoma, marching and dying on this "Trail of Tears" . . . but at least we commemorate the Native American culture by eating some pumpkin pie once a year . . . yuck (and don't even get me started about gravy and mashed potatoes . . . I really don't like historic American food).