Before you fill your plate, please remember why we mark this day.
"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe
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In school, the story we learned was simple, too: Pilgrims and Native Americans came together to give thanks.
We
made pictures of the gathering, everyone smiling. We colored turkeys or
made them out of construction paper. We sometimes had a mini-feast in
class.
I thought it was such a
beautiful story: People reaching across race and culture to share with
one another, to commune with one another. But that is not the full story
of Thanksgiving. Like so much of American history, the story has had
its least attractive features winnow away — white people have been
centered in the narrative and all atrocity has been politely papered
over.
So, let us correct that.
What
is widely viewed as the first Thanksgiving was a three-day feast to
which the Pilgrims had invited the local Wampanoag people as a
celebration of the harvest.
About 90 came, almost twice the number of Pilgrims.
This is the first myth: that the first Thanksgiving was dominated by
the Pilgrim and not the Native American. The Native Americans even
provided the bulk of the food, according to the Manataka American Indian Council.
This is counter to the Pilgrim-centric
view so often presented. Indeed, two of the most famous paintings
depicting the first Thanksgiving — one by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe and the other by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris — feature the natives in a subservient position, outnumbered and crouching on the ground on the edge of the frame.
The Pilgrims had been desperate and sick and dying but had finally had some luck with crops.
The second myth is that the Wampanoag were feasting with friends. That does not appear to be true.
As Peter C. Mancall, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote for CNN
on Wednesday, Gov. William Bradford would say in his book “Of Plymouth
Plantation,” which he began to write in 1630, that the Puritans had
arrived in “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and
wild men.”
Mancall further
explained that after the visits to the New World by Samuel de Champlain
and Capt. John Smith in the early 1600s, “a terrible illness spread
through the region” among the Native Americans. He continued: “Modern
scholars have argued that indigenous communities were devastated by
leptospirosis, a disease caused by Old World bacteria that had likely
reached New England through the feces of rats that arrived on European
ships.”
This weakening of the native population by disease from the new arrivals’ ships created an opening for the Pilgrims.
King James’s patent called this spread of disease “a wonderfull Plague” that might help to devastate and depopulate the region. Some friends.
But many of those native people not killed by disease would be killed by direct deed.
As Grace Donnelly wrote in a 2017 piece for Fortune:
The celebration in 1621 did not mark a friendly turning point and did not become an annual event. Relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated, leading to the Pequot War. In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man the settlers believed the Wampanoags killed, they burned a nearby village, killing as many as 500 men, women, and children. Following the massacre, William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for “the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”
Just 16 years after the Wampanoag shared that meal, they were massacred.
This
was just one of the earliest episodes in which settlers and colonists
did something horrible to the natives. There would be other massacres
and many wars.
According to History.com,
“From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier — the
edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural
world — became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led
the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on
Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous
people.”
And this says nothing of all
the treaties brokered and then broken or all the grabbing of land
removing populations, including the most famous removal of natives: the
Trail of Tears. Beginning in 1831, tens of thousands of Native Americans
were forced to relocate from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to
lands west of the Mississippi River. Many died along the way.
I spent most of my life believing a
gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and
family, turkey and dressing.
I was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it.
But
I’ve come to believe that is how America would have it if it had its
druthers: We would be blissfully blind, living in a soft world bleached
of hard truth. I can no longer abide that.
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