The real timeline of events
Native Americans had been living in North America for 12,000 years or more before the arrival of Europeans. The Wampanoag tribe lived in the Massachusetts region, in lands bordering the coastline. Europeans arrived on the shores of North America for the first time in 1524. Contact between the Native Americans, including the Wampanoag people, and Europeans occurred throughout the century and was marked by violence and enslavement. The Europeans even captured some of the Native Americans, bringing them back to Europe, where they sold them as slaves. One Wampanoag man named Tisquantum, commonly known as Squanto, whom many Americans have learned about in the Thanksgiving story, was kidnapped and enslaved in 1614.
time and a distinctly White perspective. However, I reflect on the real story behind Thanksgiving and how the racial inequities in our country today began as early as then.
The myth we’re taught about Thanksgiving
In schools, we’re taught that when pilgrims from England arrived on the shores of what is now Massachusetts in 1620, they found empty land waiting for them. Shortly thereafter, they were greeted and welcomed by the chief of the nearby Wampanoag tribe, Ousamequin, in what was purportedly the “first contact” between Native Americans and Europeans. Ousamequin and other members of the Wampanoag people subsequently showed the pilgrims how to work the land. According to the legend, they established an alliance and friendly relations, ultimately leading to a joint harvest celebration in 1621 where they expressed mutual respect and gratitude for each other—the first Thanksgiving feast.
The myth continues that the Native American tribes ceded land to the settlers, allowing the English to further establish the colonies in the valiant pursuit of religious and political freedom. Some versions of the story acknowledge conflict between the English and the Native Americans, but exclude details about the Native American experience before and after the harvest celebration.
However, the real story of events surrounding that first harvest celebration and what we now call Thanksgiving is much longer and more fraught—and includes the violent theft of life, land, and liberty by White settlers of Native Americans who’d been in North America for millennia before.
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" .... immediately preceding the arrival of the Mayflower — the Wampanoag suffered a severe smallpox pandemic that killed much of their population in the Plymouth, ...."
In the 1610s—the years immediately preceding the arrival of the Mayflower—the Wampanoag suffered a severe smallpox pandemic that killed much of their population in the Plymouth, Massachusetts, area. The loss of such numbers created an imbalance in power between the Wampanoag people and neighboring tribes, placing the Wampanoag at a disadvantage against their rivals, the Narragansetts.
In 1620, the pilgrims traveled on the Mayflower from Plymouth, England, to current-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. The land appeared “available” only because of the