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orrific and deadly wars of the American colonial era. As Philip Deloria reported in The New Yorker, an army of Native Americans demolished 17 towns in a widespread siege spread across 52 towns in New England. In the subsequent fighting, 40% of the Native population, some of whom fought for the settlers, died. According to historian Lisa Brooks, after the 1676 battle, the men in Plymouth put the head of chief Ousamequin’s son, Pumetacom, on a spike and displayed it in the town center for two decades.
During the period between the 1621 harvest and the war in 1676, the two parties maintained their alliance. However, the pilgrims consistently took more and more territory and resources for themselves and spread more diseases to the Native Americans. After the settler victory in King Philip’s War, the power balance officially shifted toward the Europeans.
We have to fast-forward nearly two whole centuries before finding documentation of a thanksgiving of the kind we think of today. In the mid-18th century, as other colonial territories in the region became more important to the burgeoning revolution, pilgrim descendants in Plymouth and other parts of New England felt the need to boost local tourism as well as their relevance to the rapidly changing culture. So, as David Silverman describes in his book, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, they started spreading the notion that the pilgrims were the “fathers of America.” In 1841, that notion made it into a footnote of
Reverend Alexander Young’s in which he mentioned the 1621 “rejoicing” alongside the tradition of autumn harvest festivals and the term “Thanksgiving”.
Fast-forward again, to 1863, in the middle of the Civil War when the country was, clearly, divided. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of a publication called Godey’s Lady’s Book, publicly proposed that President Abraham Lincoln should make Thanksgiving a national holiday in an attempt to counteract the discord of the war and invoke unity on the national level. And Lincoln did just that following Union victories in Vicksburg, Massachusetts, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Over the remaining decades of the 19th century, immigration of Catholics and Jews from Europe ticked up, causing something of a panic among the Protestant settlers, who feared losing their power and cultural dominance. At the same time, the American-Indian Wars saw some of their final, bloody battles—the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. Once the battles against the Native Americans “ended,” the Protestant settlers started to propagate the story of a united, aligned Thanksgiving feast between the early English settlers and Native Americans as a way to further entrench their cultural preeminence.
The resulting Native erasure and racial inequity
As you can see, the myth we’ve learned fails to reveal the full reality of our history. Instead, the version we have been taught (and, in many schools, the one that is still being taught) is essentially a myth that ignores the Native Americans’ history prior to the arrival of the Europeans, glosses over the atrocities perpetrated against them, and erases the