Thanksgiving is Not Racist 

Some of you may notice I used the term "Indian" throughout this video and did not say, "Native American." The reason is that it is the prefered term and was used by the historians I relied on. See here for more: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kh88fVP2FWQ.html

It is both joyous and saddening to know that this is a more accurate and honest portrayal of events than what will be taught in most schools and colleges by those with degrees on the subject. I will be adding this to my list of material for my students.

As a guy who loves apologetics and history, this is the perfect mashup

As a person from a different country residing in the US, this bit of American history was very useful. Short and informative.

Best give that new editor a raise. This looks fantastic

I’m excited to see this and I’m glad you are doing a thanksgiving episode and not skipping straight to Christmas like companies are doing

IP, you should do content like this every now and then. This was really well done!

Great work as usual! I’m glad you have acknowledged the American mythology from both sides of this history. The Puritans and their relationship with the Native Americans gets so often conflated with the acts of Spanish Conquistadors and the French missionary-types. Good to see a clarification.

Finally someone who talks about this and isn’t biased.

This is the most thoroughly researched finding I’ve ever heard on Thanksgiving. Great job

I cant wait to share this with the whole fam on thanksgiving 🦃 🕺

Very excited for this video. Found your channel some time ago and though I don’t agree with you on every matter, you are surely delivering a great message. May God bless your ministry through this channel.

If done correctly this would actually make a really interesting TV series or set of movies. We need more stories told of American history on the big screen.

This video was probably more informative than anything I had ever learned in school.

I wouldn’t be upset at all if you put out more historical/educational videos like these tangent to your apologetic work. This was really good!

Dude! I know shooting this as a tv show or a movie would be expensive but audio drama is making a big comeback! I’m just getting into making them myself. I would love to do an audio series on this!

Fantastic! the painstaking animation and artistic choices, narration, research-everything.

I learned more from a few minutes of this video than in the 18+ years of schooling.

Well done as always, IP! You come through w "the heavy lifting", thank you. Seems the Plymouth colonists really knew their Old Testament, w their insistence on land purchase & other policies. Personally, I would like to see more Native Americans in positions of authority in the States. For example, managing resources, fire control & suppression. We are still ethnocentric to a degree. The colonists in Plymouth may have gotten a lot "right", but they still ran the show. Just a thought. Happy Thanksgiving to all, if you don't have one, start one! With that, gonna go invite my brother on the other end of political spectrum to dinner!😄

I listen to you because your voice is so soothing man!God bless your Angelic voice.

Wow, this is so refreshing to see! Facebook os loaded with false information on this topic and I’m glad to see a proper breakdown on this! Much appreciated!

This was incredibly well made

One of the Greatest videos on the History of Thanksgiving 🦃 🙏

Excellent, as always! Thank you for this timely message!

I've never seen a fish this happy while being speared. 10:01

Thank you for reminding us that history isn't simple

Well done, Mike. I appreciated the well timed sound effects within the narration, not to mention the painstaking research and well reasoned conclusions drawn. You are a master at your craft.

Nice change of pace. Never dove deep into a lot of history but this sounds much more believable

U r not biased that's why i can always trust u and ur research.

I love the new graphics.

I am thankful for this . Happy Thanksgiving.

Please do not be offended by this comment IP. I really liked this video. I just wanted to give you some advice. When it comes to things that start to tie into politics, many people who are opinionated on these subjects tend to become very polarized and often become "turned off" to any other content offered on a channel. So just choose your words carefully, and do research thoroughly. Speak only what is true and more importantly what God leads you to say on any subject, political, historical, cultural, or theological. As always, I love your videos. And I really enjoyed this video. Keep up the good work.

I am not a fact checker or expert or anything on this matter but I have just a few concerns with the video. One, at one point you showed a Native American chief in what appeared to be a headdress, which I associate with tribes that were much further west. So I worry about whether the clothing art in the video is actually reflective of the specific tribes these people came from. It can be an important thing to get right if you want people to listen to you. Two, several times you cited European accounts of specific incidents. I'm not going to say they were wrong per se but it's just so easy to get complacent when you hear one side of a story without hearing the other. Native American tribes of the time had no (or just a few? again, not an expert) written records and even well meaning English writers will have a bias towards themselves. The scope of what you can cover is just a youtube video is limited but it would be nice for you to at least mention that problem. Still, it was helpful for you to say "according to the Puritans" and such as it at least helps to mark places where you are most relying on their testimony. I do agree with the general point that history is complicated, but we are indeed lucky that Thanksgiving is about giving thanks. The origins may be imperfect, and we want to make our account of that time accurate, but it would be such a shame to "cancel" the whole thing just for that. The way we celebrate it now is just as important if not moreso, just like our relationships with the modern tribes that survived.

I wish I could DM you man. You have helped me so much in my journey of faith. I had so much confusion until this channel stumbled into my life on accident. My life has been such a jumble of disaster and chaos the past 7 years and I just wanted you to know (if you get a chance to read this) that you have impacted my life in so many different ways and I can’t thank you enough.

Thanks brother. Have a happy Thanksgiving.

As an Indian (and Irishman) l can confirm that not only is the noble-savage myth racist as hell but this notion of "stolen land" is a myth and in of itself. Many different nations and cultures scattered across the wilderness, fighting each other and taking each other's land (that was taken from other clans previously and so on) for thousands of years before the white man even showed up. Even afterwards there were still tribes that hated each other worse than the white man and many were just as brutal as any other societies of pre-modern times. Patriarchy, slavery, conquest, you name it. The only advantage that the Spanish, British, French, etc. had were guns and technology.

Thanks for digging deep into the history of this holiday IP. God bless brother!

man IP new design looks good

Hey! Love your videos, informative as always!

Fantastic ending. Thank you for this!

You are really a blessing for many 🙏🏻.

So, i noticed that the main references for this video are pilgrim or English based. This makes a lot of sense, as the prevalence of a written history is not typical of native Americans of the region, but I wonder if there’s more to this. Before I continue, I will say that I appreciated how you never attributed specific rationals to their actions, as this leaves it open to further research and understanding. I recently watched a Wampanoag tribesman talk about their history of Thanksgiving and how the romanticism of the holiday started with the very first use of the word in pilgrim texts. They’re history says there was no invitation to a shared meal. Their claim is that the Wampanoag had arrived, armed, to their allies aid due to hearing musket-fire. To the Wampanoag the meal wasn’t actually a meal in their histories. And they tend to view the depiction of Thanksgiving in a light of mourning, not gratefulness. I would be curious to see a discussion or more research into the Wampanoag histories.

Love that you put references in the description.

"let's begin at the beginning" truly profound God bless you man. love your channel

Why is thanking God for all things (with family and friends)... racist? 🦃

Much informative.

excellent work

Roger Williams actually opposed converting the Natives, especially by force.

Thank you for making this video, I have been waiting to see it!

Great video! Fantastic editing

Bro, a little change of routine for you, but YES , THANK YOU!

Wow, even inspiring philosophy is now engaging in more political topics. Not saying anything is wrong with that, it just surprised me a little.

Animation style 👌

Well done as always IP. I love history

Very nuanced, great video.

Fun fact, Squanto became a Catholic (or at least a Christian). He was abducted by Englishmen and taken to Europe to be sold into slavery, but he was bought instead by Spanish friars who baptized and educated him.

As someone who works with Native American groups regularly, I can kinda get some of your points. However, when people accuse Thanksgiving of racist overtones, what they more often mean is people try to take the tone of the 1st Thanksgiving (where Pilgrims and Indigenous people ate together) and try to use that 1 meal to broad stroke paint that across the United States' entire relationship with Natives, which has been primarily antagonistic and based in genocide. Basically, using a nice moment to gaslight away the horrific moments. I think people would have less problem with the holiday if it could be (accurately) treated in the context that it was 1 nice moment, but not indicative of the US' general relationship to Native groups and shouldn't be used as a shield to deflect conversation (and action) on repairing the damage that has been done. If people want to look more into some of the things that have happened over the past and present, I'd recommend 2 things. One is to look into the Boarding Schools (concentration camps in all but name) across the US and Canada where Native kids were taken away from their tribes and put into these 'schools' who's mission was to, "Kill the savage to save the man," i.e. brutally torture these kids to give up their religion, culture and language. There is still survivors alive today, and investigations have FINALLY started (especially in Canada) where we're uncovering thousands of bodies of kids who died in these places. The second is the acronym MMIW, which is short for 'Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women'. Native American women are at higher risk than most populations, and a key reason is Native American reservations are only kinda/sorta treated like a sovereign nation. This means that people who want to harm women in general, but don't live on the reservation, can cross into reservation land, harm an Indigenous woman and the result is a jurisdiction nightmare where the Tribal and State police have to jump through a billion hoops together to figure out who can do what, all the while the predator gets away and evidence deteriorates. People have been pushing the US government for years to update how this all works so predators don't have that loophole anymore. Whenever you see a Native American woman wearing a red skirt, or any Native American with a red hand print painted on their face or body, those are symbols to show support for MMIW (because, in some tribes' cultures, there is a belief that the only color spirits can see is red, and by promoting red you're helping the harmed women find their way home).

Ooh, American history. Very interesting. Thanks!!

This should be required material for schools instead of telling them they could be washing machines if they feel like it

Could you do a video on a supposed contradiction with Paul: Did he go to Arabia first or Damascus?

Metacom... What a cool name dude....

I’m confused by the sin of ethnocentrism that you point out. Are different cultures not better than others at certain things? Are people supposed to believe that every culture is equal? It just seems rather strange to suggest that to me.

Great Job. Question: why did the puritans believe the Indians were Hebrew?

You earned a sub from me with this one. I don’t personal use Indian as a term. I’m fine with American Indian or Native American, it really doesn’t matter which is used. I don’t use Indian alone to keep straight what I am talking about, since I’m a Buddhist it’s important to make a clear distinction.

The animations on this are amazing! Did you do this?

What documentation is there that the Puritans believed the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel?

Your research, information, and presentation is all fantastic! Thank you so much and God bless you!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks!

I would love it if you talked about the Colony of Maryland, founded by the 2nd Lord-Baron of Baltimore Cecil Calvert; and how it was the first attempt at religious toleration in the New World, at a time when Protestants and Catholics were butchering each other in droves in Europe. Great video as always.

The fact that you made a video with this title proves you are racist. -Someone in the comments, probably

I never understood why people call Thanksgiving racist and genocidal. It may have originated in some form with the Pilgrims (though there were plenty of Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies before them), but it was never a day to celebrate them. Rather, it was a day for US to show our thanks and gratitude for the good things that WE have. So even if everything the woke left says about the Pilgrims was true, it's still irrelevant to Thanksgiving.

Nice IP do more vids like this like on American slavery etc

I think you're forgetting something important, but please correct me if I'm wrong. The First Thanksgiving feast was actually a meeting to discuss trade, and at first, they had a deal, and there was peace. But one day, a baby Native American boys was found stabbed dead by a dock in Boston, so without any evidence, the settlers slaughtered the Natives and the Massachusetts governor at the time (forgot his name) declared that day to be The First Thanksgiving, thanking God for the massacre. Granted this declaration was probably before Lincoln official declaration of Thanksgiving nationally, but still.

It seems a lot of the pop history misunderstanding comes from referring to the various tribes with their inter-political conflicts as the monolithic, generic “Indians.”

Very interesting! Thanks!

In short, history is complicated, yo.

4:04 For reference, with that population, you could give about three-and-a-half to four square miles of land to each one individual person.

I recently have read Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick which concurs with your video. It is also a good read.

Also, it should be mentioned that the colonists of Virginia were about as ethical as the puritans. Actually, they were less brutal than the puritans could be, since they still allowed for the tribes to exist even after the wars they fought with them and allowed for the confederacy to maintain power throughout the 17th century. The problem was that the Powhatan Confederacy - the twenty native tribes of Tidewater Virginia, which included the Chickahominy, Pamunkey, Mattaponi, and so on - were an aggressive native population. In fact, the reason why the English colonists had to turn to violence was due to the Powhatan Confederacy attacking them _before_ they fully established contact with them. In fact, the Virginia company of London explicitly told the colonists to not build a fort at their chosen settlement site, but they had to break that agreement within a few week of landing at Jamestown due to the persistent attacks by the Powhatan Confederacy. By contrast, the pilgrims ended up in a much better situation, since the native tribes that were around them had largely died off and the only few natives around there had been, to some extent, taught the English language. They had a much easier time with negotiating with the natives than the English at Jamestown.

Why did you have to propagate the lie that Spain was so evil towards Indians? Spain was the first country to forbid their slavery, and also converted them en masse to Christianity, ending human sacrifices.

Interesting.Could you do videos concerning church history?

Good to see that IP is being honest in this presentation. However, there are problems with some of his statements. First, the Spanish weren’t “worse” than the puritans. In fact, they made laws to defend the natives after much fighting from Spanish missionaries who denounced the encomienda system. Second, Cortez and others saw the natives as rational beings capable of being Christians and loyal to Spain. And a lot of these so called atrocities are exaggerated by the black legend. Also, ethnocentrism is really a good cause for racism as you see your culture as superior. I don’t think this needs much explaining

Viewing history through a simple and narrow lens with a modern perspective is deceptive at best.

The Musket was not considered a powerful weapon at that time. it wasnt the same as the musket in the american revolution. it didnt shoot as far, load as fast, be as reliable. in fact the bow and arrow was faster and more reliable at the time. The cannon however made the english a powerful ally.

Nicely done! :-)

Are you still gonna do exodus rediscovered?

I love this innocent picture of war 7:35 Thanks for posting this btw keep this record straight is important

Hey I noticed you killed two birds with one stone. You covered how Thanksgiving is not racist and it’s not pagan in origin. Great work with bringing up actual history with first hand sources.

There is still a lot of racism against aboriginals in north america still today and its not going away. If you have no clue or disagree, then you do not live near aboriginal communities.

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🦃 *Thanksgiving's history is complex, beyond extreme views. Pilgrims, though imperfect, were more humane than other colonists. Native-English relations had nuances.* 01:19 🏞️ *Plymouth, 1620: Pilgrims, fleeing persecution, landed in an area already hit by plague, encountering few Indians initially. Relations were wary due to past clashes.* 02:44 🛑 *Myths dispelled: Pilgrims didn't seize much land, as it was mostly deserted due to disease. Smallpox further reduced the Native population. Trade agreements were common.* 04:19 🌐 *Relations & Alliances: Pilgrims formed alliances with Native tribes, like the Wampanoags. Trade, diplomacy, and mutual aid prevailed, leading to the first Thanksgiving in 1621.* 06:13 🦃 *Thanksgiving in History: The 1621 feast wasn't an annual tradition. Days of Thanksgiving existed, but it wasn't until 1863 that it became a national holiday, promoting unity.* 08:47 🔄 *Population Dynamics: By 1637, English outnumbered Indians. Diseases devastated the Native population. The myth of land theft is debunked; many land deeds protected Native rights.* 11:02 🤝 *Fair Treatment: Puritans aimed to establish a Christian society but not by conquering. Ethnocentrism, not racism, drove them. Legal fairness, respect, and attempts at integration were observed.* 14:40 ⚔️ *Pequot War Clarification: The Pequot War wasn't genocide; it involved complex tribal dynamics. Tribes sided based on alliances. It was a conflict over treaty violations and trade disputes.* 18:22 🔀 *King Philip's War Complexity: Metacom's war had intricate causes. Puritans' control, land issues, and cultural clashes contributed. The war wasn't racially divided; tribes had varied allegiances.* 20:42 🦃 *Thanksgiving Symbolism: Thanksgiving isn't a racist celebration. It symbolizes imperfect people setting aside differences to share a meal and give thanks, akin to the 1621 harvest gathering.*

Good one IP

Hey IP, long time fan. Can you discuss dinosaurs, and why they aren't mentioned in the Bible? I find the account of behemoth and leviathan being dinosaurs to not really sate my honesty to myself. Why would God create creatures before Eden that aren't mentioned in Genesis? If that isn't the case, then why aren't they mentioned more often, or at all? And if they were alive with humans, how did humans live with them, and why aren't there more historical records and scientific evidence for them living together? I know this is a lot, but I need to see these things answered if they can be.

There are people out there who thing Thanksgiving is racist??? The idiocy is amazing, maybe the movie idiocracy was a documentary, not a comedy.

Well done Mr. Jones

This was Inspiring Philosophy for PragerU.

Hey uhhh, can you make a video about the intercession saints please if its right or wrong?

Where did this belief that Natives were Israelites come from?

10/10 Explanation!!

Forget is “thanksgiving racist” is thanksgiving apart of the scriptures? Does it have pagan roots? Why am I celebrating something the world is celebrating?