Paul Elisha: Thanksgiving

As this year’s momentous Thanksgiving Day approaches, adorned with marketing grossness and all-out efforts at political pay-off, pay-back and pontification, this commentator’s conscience is belabored by the habitual harking back to less volatile times, when we were regaled with more memorable tales of Native-American generosity, that made the First Thanksgiving not only possible but seemingly more worthy of our remembrance.  Tragic but true, the selfless generosity shown by Native-American tribes to far too many of those who came here seeking ownership, instead of apportionment, was eventually repaid with rapacious plunder and greed.  Former Poet-Laureate, William Jay Smith (of partial Native-American extraction, himself) has immortalized the inhumane treatment of  American –Indian tribes in his now historic poem: “The Cherokee Lottery,” hailed as one of the “great works” of American literature.