I have talked about my cultural ‘guilt’ of being British before, of the atrocities of the Empire, and European Colonialism. When I began my spiritual journey in my teens, I was heavily drawn to the animism of First American culture. This led me on a path to reading up about the indigenous people of America starting with “Black Elk Speaks” and followed shortly by “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” Many, many books followed, and meetings with indigenous people from America. When I saw movies like “Cry Freedom” I saw parallels to what the Native Americans had experienced with what the people in Africa also went through.
When I came to the USA in 1993, I saw Thanksgiving as an American version of what we called Harvest Festival, but then began to look deeper at the story. I am not a history buff, but that sort of thing interests me. I discovered that the school-promoted story of Thanksgiving was a myth, a promotional tool used to bring the predominant culture together, and white-wash history. As a storyteller, when I tell tales from other cultures I dig into them, so I learn about that culture, and do not misappropriate a story, nor strip it of it’s culture. The following is what I understand as the truth of Thanksgiving, taken from First American sources on the web, books I have read, the Smithsonian, and some other resources.
Some folks see Thanksgiving as a Founding Fathers story, but Virginia was a colony almost twenty years before the “Pilgrims” landed in 1620. Europeans had been raiding the area of Plymouth to enslave the indigenous population and trade with them for years. One such enslaved man was Tisquantum, or Squanto. Tisquantum had been taken to Spain, and later sailed to England and escaped back to his land of the Patuxets of Cape Cod. He discovered that his people had been wiped out by European diseases brought to America by the traders and slavers.
Paula Peters, historian for the federally recognized Mashpee Wampanoag states: “they weren’t ‘Pilgrims’ … and the Wampanoag weren’t invited.”
When the Brownists, or Separatists from the Church of England left for Holland to find religious tolerance, they found hardship there too. Most were rural people and found it hard to find work. They also did not want to become ‘Dutch’ and saw that there was political unrest growing in Holland, so headed back to England. These people, now called “Pilgrims”, bought passage on the Mayflower to head to America and start a colony of their own. They first landed at Cape Cod and then found and moved to what would become Plymouth. It was the land of the Wampanoag people.
Of the 102 Puritans only half of them remained after the winter had taken its toll. The Pilgrims had moved into what seemed a deserted Wampanoag village, and they took (stole) the seeds, beans, corn and other supplies they found there. In the spring, the Wampanoag returned.
The Wampanoag, like the Patuxet, had been decimated by disease. Between 1616 and 1619, ninety percent of the population of sixteen indigenous groups of the area had died due to disease brought by European traders. The remaining Wampanoag had rich lands and were fighting off other peoples to retain it. When the Puritans arrived the local people’s leader (massasoit), Ousamequin saw that an alliance with the Puritans and the Wampanoag could be beneficial. The Puritans had guns, the Wampanoag knew the land and the people.
The two groups had a tenuous relationship, with the Wampanoag helping the Puritans plant and grow crops, but the Europeans retained a distrust for them, and saw the Wampanoag as inferior people. When the first harvest was gathered, there was what was called by the Puritans, a ‘rejoicing,’ a time of celebration. ‘Thanksgiving’ to the Puritans was a time of prayer, meditation and fasting. As the Puritans celebrated, shots were fired. The Wampanoag, upholding the contract they had with the Puritans came to see if the colony was being attached. Ninety warriors arrived, uninvited, but joined the celebration. The warriors far outnumbered the Puritans.
Over the following years, tension grew between the Wampanoag and Puritans as the whites did not want to honor the coequal civil and criminal jurisdictions they had agreed to. The Puritans began to ‘divide and conquer’ the people whose land they were now stealing. They imposed English laws on First American land. Ousamequin’s sons saw the deception of the whites, and began to fight for their land. By 1670 the population of the Europeans was between sixty thousand and seventy thousand people, double that of the indigenous people. Ousamequin’s head ended up on a spike, as did one of his son’s head and that of the son’s wife.
Fast forward to 1789, about one hundred years later. Washington held the first “Thanksgiving.” The date moved around a bit in following years, and later, Jefferson, as third president, felt a ‘thanks to god’ seemed at odds and was inappropriate with the separation of church and state. Other following presidents seemed to agree and no official proclamations for ‘Thanksgiving’ were made until Lincoln’s in 1863. He wanted to create some sort of unity within the country as the Civil War continued. He thought a “Thanksgiving” would work. He made it an official national holiday for the last Thursday of November in that year after a request from Congress.
The previous year, Lincoln had read the transcripts of a number of trials which had happened in Minnesota after the Dakota War. The military commission set up to try three hundred and three Dakota men, found them all guilty. They were going to be executed. Lincoln thought this would be a bad idea, and had intervened, seeing that some of the trials had lasted all of five minutes. He deemed ‘only’ thirty eight should be hung. On December 26, 1862, they were hanged. Two of the wrong men hung, and the bodies of the Dakota men were left hanging for over thirty minutes. Although this is not part of the Thanksgiving story, it plays into how First American history is filled with mistrust of the Government.
In 1879 the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was set up and many of the native tribal leaders and people were encouraged, taken, or forced, to send their children to this school. This was one of the first of its kind. The Native Leaders believed this could be beneficial to their people. They could learn the white, ‘European’ ways and be better educated to understand and deal with white America. The students, however, on arrival were stripped of their culture, dressed as white people, given a fifth grade education and put into servitude. Instead of getting the promised education of white America, they were taught to be working class people and not given the education equal to others and therefore robbed of the opportunities to be more than laborers. This was one of the first off-reservation schools and was the model for many more. The founder, Richard Pratt, had the motto, “Kill the Indian, save the man;” a mentality which was then applied on a larger scale to the ethnic cleansing and cultural assimilation efforts of the Native American boarding school system.
As you can imagine, the white system of American did nothing for the indigenous people here. The myth of the Wampanoag welcoming the Puritans must be sickening to them. It is of no surprise many First Americans see ‘Thanksgiving’ as a time of mourning. The Guardian newspaper headline today, “The gooey overlay of sweetness over genocide: the myth of the ‘First Thanksgiving” sums it up.
In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the day of Thanksgiving from the last Thursday of the month to the fourth Thursday for commercial reasons. It was realized that when November had five Thursdays in the month, it created a shorter ‘shopping season’ before Christmas. Roosevelt thought an earlier Thanksgiving would give merchants a longer period to sell goods before Christmas. Increasing profits and spending during this period, Roosevelt hoped, would help bring the country out of the Depression. At the time, advertising goods for Christmas before Thanksgiving was considered inappropriate. I think it that myself, today!
David Silverman says Protestant fundamentalists allegedly rebranded “obscure Separatists” as “Pilgrim fathers” to assert power over other immigrants, a Plymouth tourism campaign and a revisionist footnote in a 1840s book naming the forgotten feast “the first Thanksgiving”.
Jessie Little Doe Baird of the Mashpee Wampanoag said (reported in today’s Guardian): “We are a modern people but the focus on us just once a year keeps us in 1620. If we let indigenous people talk year round, there’s a better chance for equality and change.”
Sources:
Wikipedia
https://indigenousnh.com/
Smithsonian Magazine, November 2019
uaine.org/suppressed_sheech.htm
dosomething.org/us/articles/truthsgiving-the-true-history-of-thanksgiving
David Silverman: This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, Bloomsbury, 2019
Guardian Newspaper, 25th November 2021 (Alice Hutton)