What to Remember on this Thanksgiving Day: The Truth

I can vividly remember taking part in a Thanksgiving Day play when I was in kindergarten. Some of us were dressed up as Native Americans with feathers on our heads and others were wearing black construction paper hats to represent the pilgrims. Proud parents sat in the audience watching all of us play out a peaceful scene of the two groups coming together and having a celebratory feast known today as Thanksgiving. However, what the play knowingly decided to leave out was the truth.

Genocide, war, slavery, colonialism, disease. The list goes on and on as to what really happened when the English colonizers arrived on the Mayflower in Plymouth on Dec. 18, 1620. Many people have come to believe that the history of Native people didn’t begin until the Europeans arrived. According to David Silverman in his book, This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, people had been living in the Americas for over 12,000 years. Believing in a history that starts when the Europeans arrive is both harmful and damaging to Native Americans and their history.

Plymouth wasn’t the first time Native Americans and Europeans met either. According to Silverman, the Wampanoag tribe had a century of contact with the Europeans and it was often bloody and filled with the enslavement of Native peoples. What our Thanksgiving traditions also fail to mention about the alliance the Wampanoag leader Ousamequin made with the English, is that he didn’t do it to be friendly. His people were dying from disease and Ousamequin saw the English as a way to defeat his tribal rebels.

However, this alliance quickly deteriorated leading to the bloodiest war per capita in U.S. history, King Philip’s War. While the war was devastating for people on both sides, it ultimately benefited the English who continued to colonize the Native people, stealing land, sovereignty and erasing Native history.

The great Thanksgiving Day feast was really born out of an effort by pilgrim descendants to boost tourism to their New England colony as they felt their cultural authority slipping away. Silverman says the dinner began from a mention of a great festival of New England in a publication that the Rev. Alexander Young published. The dinner quickly gained popularity and Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday during the Civil War to try and foster unity among the colonies.

The idea of a Thanksgiving feast allowed the colonizers to control the narrative of what really happened when settlers came to the Americas and also allowed them to profit off of this story through the selling of food and other decor. This story let Americans feel good about their colonial past so they didn’t have to confront the true realities.

All of these cultural myths are extremely damaging to Native people today who are still not properly represented in our American history or recognized today. This false rhetoric is also very damaging to white Americans who grow up believing in a white washed history that does nothing to reflect on white American privilege or the realities of colonization, slavery and genocide.

So, on this Thanksgiving, when you are enjoying your turkey and mashed potatoes and pies, think about what you are really celebrating and talk with your family or friends or colleagues about what Thanksgiving really means.