The Real Story of Thanksgiving—and the Racist Myths You’ve Been Told About It for Years
FEATURED ARTICLE
The year is 1621. It’s November near what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, and European settlers—the pilgrims—are preparing for their first harvest in the “New World”. That is, the world that is new to them. As the story goes, the pilgrims feasted for three days with members of the local Wampanoag tribe of Native Americans, who welcomed the settlers on their land, helped them adjust to the climate, and enthusiastically celebrated the harvest with them, sowing the seeds for a cordial alliance. Or so the story goes.
It is undoubtedly a powerful story—one promoting an idea of intergroup harmony and cooperation that Americans are taught in primary school, often accompanied by a game of dress-up with kids choosing either a tall, buckled hat or a feathered headdress and stamping their painted hands on
How the erasure of Native American truths from the Thanksgiving narrative reflects the racial inequality in our country to this day
construction paper to create a turkey. Some readers’ children may have participated in similar activities last week, when those of us in the United States celebrated Thanksgiving.
For most of us, Thanksgiving today still centers on a harvest feast, but it’s much less about the pilgrims and Native Americans and much more about bringing family and friends together, sharing good food, and expressing gratitude for all that we have been given. The holiday offers us a dedicated moment to pause and reflect on the blessings in our lives—a good thing that we should continue to do (after all, having a sense of gratitude is one of the strongest predictors of happiness).
However, it also offers us the opportunity to reflect on how the day came about in the first place, and whether the true story bears resemblance to the one that we were fed in grade school. In reality, this story of the “first Thanksgiving” that we’re told is not an entirely factual, historical account but rather a myth drawing from several different points in