The dude said that the whole reason the Natives helped the pilgrims grow crops and stuff is so they would stop digging up the graves and eating their dead. Also, I am less interested in pilgrims being cannibals on Thanksgiving (whenever that really is), and more interested in whether or not they cannibalized dead Natives at all. If you can answer both though, that would be awesome.
It sounds like a slightly garbled recollection of the grave-robbing that the settlers at Plymouth did in their first winter to survive.
From Charles C. Mann:
How did even that many survive? In his history of Plymouth Colony, Governor William Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food. After two days of nervous work, the company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done.”
From Mann's Native Intelligence.
Some of the garbling might also be from the fact that there was documented cannibalism in the Jamestown colony in Virginia.
This is the story that I also heard today. There's a transcript as well as the audio.
The speaker does talk about the digging up of graves by Pilgrims, and the host (Robin Young) makes a clarifying statement at the end of the audio about cannibalism (of native remains) being in Jamestown and not New England.
I'd love to hear this. What show and day was it on?