Correcting MYTHS of the first Thanksgiving

Kinsey Crowley, USA Today via MSN; Xochitl, Crystal Quintero (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

National Day of Mourning, Thanksgiving, 11/25/21, Plymouth, MA (Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty)

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It's a myth that the pilgrims invited Native Americans to a feast

I've got my eye on you, Baby. I'm coming for ya

In the fall of 1621, a handful of English Pilgrims and Native Americans feasted together after a misunderstood confrontation in Plymouth, near Boston.

Four hundred years later their American descendants celebrate Thanksgiving as a national holiday, but for the Native Americans of the region it's considered a National Day of Mourning.

Native American Paula Peters remembers learning about the pilgrims' arrival in North America in elementary school, the backstory behind Thanksgiving Day.

Gotcha! I'm taking you home with me.

As the teacher explained how "friendly Indians" came to help settlers arriving on the Mayflower, Peters was excited to hear about her own history in the classroom.

She's a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe who grew up to become an independent scholar of the history of the Wampanoag, who have inhabited present-day Massachusetts and Eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years, according to the tribe.

"As a kid, I'm thinking to myself, 'This is great. She's talking about me, and she's talking about my history,'" Peters told USA Today in an interview this month.

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But her wonder was squashed when a classmate asked what happened to those friendly Indians after Thanksgiving. "They all died," the teacher said.

Peters remembers being shocked at the erasure of a long history that preceded the Mayflower and the Wampanoag's continuation into today. 

"That's the way that our history was being taught for the longest time, and still is in some areas of the country," she said.

With the upcoming American holiday, known by many as Thanksgiving but recognized by Native American communities as the National Day of Mourning, Peters and other Indigenous activists and scholars are advocating for the recognition of the Wampanoag's true history.

They say that must be grounded in the fact that they existed far before and long after the pilgrims' first harvest feast.

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"I mean, you can't argue with people coming together and celebrating family, good fortune, and being thankful. That's an important holiday to have," Peters said.

"But it is also a platform that we as Indigenous people have to step on and remind people of the significance of our story and the myths that are perpetuated by the Thanksgiving holiday."

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The myth of Thanksgiving

Visitors look over Thanksgiving exhibit at Pilgrim Hall Museum on 11/25/21, Plymouth, Massachusetts. Native American historians have said that there is not much evidence that suggests they ate what is traditionally served at Thanksgiving today (© Bryan R. Smith, AFP via Getty).

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The Plymouth colonists and the Native American Wampanoag people "shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies" in 1621, according to the History Channel.

The History Channel says that the pilgrims invited the Native Americans to the feast, but Peters said that part is a myth. "There wasn't an invitation extended to invite the Wampanoag to come and feast with them," she said.

"It was really quite by accident that there were any shared festivities at all."

The pilgrims were celebrating their first harvest when they fired off muskets repeatedly, a form of entertainment for the settlers. Hearing the blasts, the Wampanoag thought it was a threat. The supreme leader Massasoit Ousamequin assembled a small army of approximately 90 warriors and approached the settlement, much to the surprise of the pilgrims.

Statue of Chief Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag Tribe, towers above people marching during the National Day of Mourning, Thanksgiving Day, 11/25/21, Plymouth, Massachusetts (© Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty).

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After deescalating the situation, the pilgrims and the Wampanoag feasted together, though historical texts don't indicate what they might have eaten besides deer hunted by the Wampanoag, as Peters writes in an introduction to "Of Plimoth Plantation."

"The contemporary holiday perpetuates the myths of the Wampanoag and Pilgrim relations," Peters writes in the book.

"It further buries the truths of kidnappings, pestilence, and subjugation and ignores the scant details of the tense encounter, while it conjures up Hallmark images of happy Natives and Pilgrims feasting on a cornucopia of corn, pies, and [dead animals], including a fully dressed roast turkey."

What the Thanksgiving story misses about Indigenous history

Native Tisquantum ("Squanto") spoke English

Peters said that the years leading up to the arrival of the Mayflower and the first harvest are just as important as what followed.

The pilgrims were aided by a couple of Indigenous men who remarkably knew how to speak English, including a man named Squanto.

• PHOTO: The wooden head likeness of Native American Squanto, which is the only surviving piece of the wooden pediment that was installed on the Pilgrim Hall Museum building in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1880 (Christine Hochkeppel/Cape Cod Times/USA Today Network).

His acquired tongue was not a miracle, but a byproduct of tragedy: In 1614, he was part of a group of Native Americans lured onto a ship and sold into slavery in Spain.

When he returned in 1619, his home village of Patuxet had been ravaged by a great plague. In fact, the settlers who came to that same land had to move decaying bodies to make the village that later became Plymouth.

Peters said that story is rarely told and demonstrates an example of the erasure of Indigenous histories.

That erasure exists in part to gloss over the ugly parts of American history, said Harvard Prof. Joseph Gone, an enrolled member of the Aaniiih-Gros Ventre Tribal Nation of Montana, who researches the intersections of coloniality and mental health in American Indian communities.

That can have an impact on those whose stories are not being told, he said. "We are aware of much more than most people would realize the weight of history and the realities of dispossession that even though these might have happened centuries ago, they linger on in our relationship to America," Prof. Gone said.

"So we engage today in a constant tussle with American myths about who we were and who we are, in the effort to better imagine a future."

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Reconciling the holiday and the history

Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Whetstone participates in Truthsgiving Run,Virginia

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Although the Wampanoag and the pilgrims did not exist as harmoniously as many are taught, many tribal members still take the holiday to celebrate family, Prof. Gone and Peters said.

Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Whetstone of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in South Dakota started the Truthsgiving Run to bring awareness to Indigenous perspectives and issues.

The virtual, 4-mile run was created in the summer of 2020 to try to counteract some of the myths around Thanksgiving and the first interactions of between pilgrims and the tribes of first contact, said Whetstone, also the founder and executive director of Indigenous grassroots organizing group Rising Hearts.

"We really wanted to highlight the truth coming..." More