The Thanksgiving Myth

The Thanksgiving myth is the Thanksgiving story that we Americans were taught in school as history. But the story as commonly told isn’t exactly true. And for some Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning.

The traditional story is about the Pilgrims, who had sailed to the New World from Europe. Their ship the Mayflower landed in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620. The Pilgrims struggled to survive the winter, but they received help from the local Native Americans. The Native Americans also taught the newcomers how to succcessfully raise crops in the New World. And in the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims and Native Americans enjoyed a harvest feast together, which was the First Thanksgiving.

This story has been celebrated every fall in American schools with songs and pageants and classrooms decorated with crayon drawings of turkeys. The 19th century illustration below, with a helpful Native American offering what might be corn (or possibly a pie?) to a family of newly arrived Pilgrims is emblematic of the myth. The real story is more complicated and much darker.

The Thanksgiving Myth: The Pilgrims

The Pilgrims were members of the English Separatist Church. They had separated from the Church of England, which they believed to be corrupt. The Church of England was the established church of England, however, and citizens were supposed to attend its services and follow its teachings. Those who refused were subject to fines and imprisonment. So the Separatists/Pilgrims left England to find religious freedom and moved to … the Dutch Republic. The Dutch Republic was something of a haven for people of minority religions at the time. The Thanksgiving myth tells us that the Pilgrims came to the New World to find religious freedom, but in fact they had already found it.

Note that the Pilgrims were part of a larger movement that also included the Puritans, another group who would settle in Massachusettss. The major difference between the Pilgrims and Puritans was that the Puritans hoped to reform — or purify — the Church of England rather than separate from it.

The Pilgrims left the Dutch Republic because they found Dutch culture too permissive, and also because they were having a hard time earning a living. But sailing to the territory claimed by England in North America was a major enterprise that required a land patent, or grant, from the King’s government. It also required investors. These eventually were obtained. The original Pilgrim colonists set sail in two ships, but when one proved to be unsound a smaller group crossed the Atlantic on just one, the Mayflower. Of the 102 colonists who endured the cramped voyage aboard the Mayflower, only 35 were actual Pilgrims. The remainder were hired by the company sponsoring the voyage to protect the company’s investments.

They called their new home Plymouth.

The Thanksgiving Myth: The Wampanoag

The Wampanoag people are the Native Americans in our story. From the website of the National Museum of the American Indian:

The Wampanoag were a people with a sophisticated society who had occupied the region for thousands of years. They had their own government, their own religious and philosophical beliefs, their own knowledge system, and their own culture. They were also a people for whom giving thanks was a part of daily life.

When the Mayflower landed there were many Wampanoag communities in the region, each with its own sachem or chief.   And they had already crossed paths with the English. In 1614, about 20 Wampanoag men had been lured onto a ship and then captured and sold into slavery in Spain. One man, Tisquantum, who was called Squanto by the English, was able to return in 1619. He found that two-thirds of his people had been killed by an epidemic after contact with the English. Historians believe the disease was either smallpox or yellow fever, previously unknown in North America.

As the Pilgrims and company men came ashore and struggled through their first winter, the Wampanoag watched from a distance. Half of the English died that winter, of starvation, disease, and cold. But then the Great Sachem or Massasoit, Ousamequin, made a fateful decision. He needed to keep peace with, and possibly defend his people from, a neighboring indigenous nation, the Narragansetts. And there were too few of his people remaining for defense. The English had firearms. Perhaps they would be allies. So it was that Ousamequin made contact with the English in the spring of 1621.

A Harvest Feast, Then War

With the help and advice of the Wampanoag the newcomers did have a successful harvest in the fall of 1621. And they organized a celebratory feast. But they did not invite the Wampanoag. During the celebration some Englishmen fired muskets, and soon a party of Wampanoag warriors arrived, armed for battle. When they realized the English neighbors were having a party, the warriors brought more food — venison, fish, eels, possibly cranberries — and joined in. There is no record of roast turkey consumed that day, however. And there is no record the feast was called “Thanksgiving” at the time.

The feast may have been the high point of the Wampanoag-English relationship. Over the next few years more settlers from Europe arrived, causing more encroachment on tribal lands. After the The Pequot War (1636-1638) several New England colonies, including Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, formed a confederation for defense against Native Americans. The colonials began to treat all Native Americans as an enemy.

In 1675 Plymouth Colony judged three Wampanoag men guilty of murder, and hanged them. This enflamed the Wampanoag against the English. The new Great Sachem, Metacom, began leading raids against the colonists. Metacom was known more widely as Philip, sometimes King Philip. The war between the colonists and the Wampanoag is called King Philip’s War, and it’s considered among the bloodiest conflicts in the recorded history of North America.  The end result was the decimation of the Wampanoag and other indigenous people.

The Making of the Myth

In his book This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, historian David Silverman wrote there was little remembrance of the 1621 harvest feast until the 19th century. In 1841 a Unitarian minister and amateur historian, the Rev. Alexander Young, learned of the harvest feast and inclluded a description of it in a book called Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers.  And the Rev. Young called the harvest feast “Thanksgiving.” The story, or a version of it, became more widely known. President Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holidy in 1863.

Still, according to Silverman, the Thanksgiving story of the 1621 feast didn’t become the big deal it is now until late in the 19th century and into the early 20th century. This was a time in which unprecedented numbers of immigrants were coming to the U.S., many of them Catholics and Jews. This was also when the Indian Wars were coming to a close.  The old stock White Protestants seized the Thanksgiving story as an essential part of America’s founding, in part as a way to underscore WASP — White Anglo-Sason Protestant — supremacy. And this was a story of Native Americans welcoming the noble and Protestant Pilgrims and practically inviting the Pilgrims to take over the land.

So it was that American schoolchildren ever after have spent a large part of every November rehearsing Thanksgiving pageants and decorating their classrooms with crayon turkeys.

Postscript

The Wampanoag did not disappear. Parts of the Wampanoag nation have found themselves fighting for recognition as tribes, however. Just this month the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe, which is headquartered in Plymouth, received state recognition as a historic and continually present Indigenous tribe. You can read about it at “Healey grants Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe state recognition” by Katie Cole at Vermont Public.