Can Thanksgiving teach us?
Traditional Thanksgiving celebrations conjure up images of early European settlers seated at outdoor tables with Native Americans, sharing autumn’s bounty: turkeys from the forests, fish and shellfish from the rivers and sea, nuts from the trees and a wide variety of vegetables and grain.
These are celebrations with reflection, and thanks for the good things in life that we enjoy. By celebrating and giving thanks, we enhance our appreciation for what nature provides - a sense that nature’s capacity to provide should not be taken for granted.
This is no new concept or concern.
Archaeologist Francis Jordan presented a paper to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia in February 1880. Titled The Remains of an Aboriginal Encampment at Rehoboth, the paper paints a picture of a seasonal Native American community, unequaled anywhere along the Atlantic seaboard, in the exact location of today’s resort. He mentions “the phenomenal freaks of nature rarely met with on our coast, namely, three lakes whose waters are perfectly fresh and clear as any in our northern latitudes, although within a few hundred feet of the salt sea.”
He continues: “In selecting this spot as the site for an encampment, the Indians displayed a keen appreciation of its unsurpassed natural advantages. It was simply an elysium. Here they had every comfort their savage natures could wish for. Game, fish and oyster in abundance and easily obtained. An inexhaustible supply of fresh water at their very threshold, and the adjacent forest of white oak harbored the deer and bear, furnished them with fuel and lumber to construct their sea canoe.”
But, writing as the infant resort was just sprouting in the sand and pines, Jordan sounded a prescient knell of inevitability about the ancient encampment reaching back thousands of years: “Even as I write, embryo streets traverse its domain in every direction, and in the space of perhaps only a few months, lofty hotels and comfortable cottages will rise upon the site of the Indian wigwam, and every trace of the aboriginal character of this spot will have disappeared before the march of improvement.”
That was 135 years ago. Have we learned anything?
