Chapter 3, Summary and Analysis

Loewen opens "The Truth about the First Thanksgiving" with disappointment that students never suggest 30,000 BCE as when the current US is first settled, but 1620. This shows that the Thanksgiving myth, the mythic origin of the nation, is all that matters. Students recall the religious persecution of the Pilgrims in England, the Mayflower Compact as a forerunner to the Constitution, and Squanto helping the Pilgrims to survive - but nothing about a plague.

Living under conditions that protect against the transmission of disease, Indians and Pacific aborigines are "a remarkably healthy race" before Columbus but ripe for infection by foreign microbes. British and French fishermen begin the New England infection in 1617, which within three years wipes out ninety to ninety-six percent of the coastal inhabitants (compared with thirty percent of Europeans in the "Black Plague" of 1348-50). Smallpox rages for fifteen years...