Pilgrims are only part of Thanksgiving

By Jim Bradshaw
jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net

Each year at Thanksgiving our children and grandchildren laboriously draw, color, and cut out pictures of turkeys, pumpkins and Pilgrims. These are the images of Thanksgiving. They are New England images, reflecting the tales of the Puritans' hardship and struggles as they settled upon the land that would become America.

America has indeed become a great nation, but early settlers from every land and from many backgrounds faced hardship as they attempted to wrest a new beginning from a New World. It took more than Pilgrims to build this place.

Indeed, the Acadians faced a terrible winter when they first arrived in the New World, two generations before the Pilgrims got here. Thirty-five of the 79 men who built the first Acadian colony in the Bay of Fundy died from scurvy or cold or starvation. But the first Acadians persevered, hung on — and were well settled before the Mayflower and its load of Pilgrims ran into Plymouth Rock.

Maybe we should draw the Acadian chapeau instead of the black Pilgrim hat when we think of those who first faced hard times in the new land.

The Puritans who settled in New England were firmly convinced that Divine Providence had sent them across the sea. Indeed, if it had not been for their faith, many of the Puritans would probably have returned to the more civilized life they left behind.

By the same token, many of the early Acadians crossed the ocean for the same reason as did the Pilgrims — to build a new life for themselves and to escape the religious intolerance rampant in Europe. It may have been more than simple coincidence that one of the ships that brought early Acadian settlers across the ocean was La Grace de Dieu, The Grace of God.

Since those days of our first settlements, people from many lands have fled intolerance to face hardship and deprivation to find hope in this proud land of America.

Look at the cultural mélange in Acadiana: The African experience speaks for itself. The story is well known. Some of our first German settlers came here because they were fleeing religious intolerance in the time of Bismarck. Frenchmen fled the reign of terror of the French Revolution or brutal internal conflicts after Napoléon’s fall from grace. French-speaking Jewish merchants fled anti-Semitism. Lebanese Christians, who also spoke French, found tolerance in Louisiana when they were persecuted at home. Irish Catholics fled poverty and persecution. Spanish-speakers from the Iberian peninsula and the Canary Islands found their way here. More recently, Vietnamese émigrés fled here after the takeover of their land by forces of intolerance.

Celebrate America this Thanksgiving. All of it. We all come from pasts laden with hardship and yet even the poorest of us has found much to be thankful for in this place, Acadiana, which is like no other.

And when our youngsters cut out pictures of the Founding Fathers and Mothers, they might want to remember that not all of them wore tall black hats and spoke funny English. As we bow our heads this week to thank God for American values, let's remember that they come from many places and got here in many ways and brought many different things to the melting pot — and to our festive table.