When I think of Thanksgiving, I think food. I picture platters piled high with turkey, gleaming gravy boats overflowing with flavor, dishes full of steaming stuffing, rows of pies of all flavors and colors, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, squash…the decadent list goes on and on.
Every American family makes their own special alterations to the traditional meal, and most also take advantage of the occasion to spend time with friends and family. It is a festive occasion for the US, and many people do actually go around the table and say one thing they are thankful for prior to commencing their meal, in keeping with the holiday’s name. However, the fact remains that the first word or image that comes to mind at the mention of Thanksgiving is not family, nor gratitude expression: it is food.
Am I a superficial glut for thinking first of the food? If so, I have the pleasure of the acquaintance of several other superficial gluts that I will gladly refer you to. Then again, the celebration of food during Thanksgiving, trivial as it may seem, is in fact a way of paying respect to our pilgrim ancestors…and even to food itself, something that many of us today take for granted. The first Thanksgiving is thought to have been celebrated in Plymouth in 1621: it was an autumnal feast shared by the surviving Mayflower pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans. Their three-day celebration marked the alliance of the two groups, and moreover the endurance of a brutal year for the pilgrims: they had lost approximately half of their original numbers to sickness and malnutrition during a merciless winter for which they were woefully underprepared. Those who did survive owed their lives to the Wampanoag tribe; an English-speaking Wampanoag named Squanto taught the pilgrims the lay of the land, where and how to hunt and plant crops, and other vital survival skills during the spring of 1621. The sacred nature of food emerged and was recognized during that first Thanksgiving because its recent, life-threatening scarcity allowed the pilgrims to appreciate it fully in its abundance. Although today we generally gorge on desserts and stuffing in place of seal and deer, the food and companionable meal retain the same significance.
Some claim that Thanksgiving’s origin lies elsewhere—with Texan natives in 1598, or in the Virginia area in 1619—but the most widely accepted first unofficial Thanksgiving is the aforementioned harvest celebration of 1621. Two years later, a Thanksgiving with more religious connotations was observed; Plymouth pilgrims gathered in church to give thanks for the rain that had ended a two-month drought. It was only in 1863, however, during the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving to be held on the fourth Thursday of each November. The nationally recognized date of this festival has endured until today, with only a brief interruption during the Great Depression.
Perhaps the role of harvest appreciation in Thanksgiving justifies my mental superficial gluttony. But something about this well-meaning holiday still bothers me. Holidays, being celebrations, are often observed just for pleasure without recognition of their origins or meanings—Christmas and Easter come to mind as examples. The harvest and food may be celebrated and praised with gusto during Thanksgiving, because it’s fun to eat and feel grateful and generous in good company…but what happened to that first Native-American-colonist unity? What happened to the descendants of the people who rendered Plymouth’s Thanksgiving possible? I enjoy holidays enormously, silly traditions and all, but the fracturing of that unity is one of the most appalling symbols of ingratitude I can think of.
Squanto and his people were the only reason the Plymouth pilgrims made it through their first year in the New World, and Squanto helped these desperate British survive, despite having been himself enslaved by Englishmen in the past. The alliance of pilgrim colonists and Wampanoag endured approximately 50 years…but when the pilgrims were absorbed by the larger, Native-American hostile Puritans, that alliance began its swift deterioration. Throughout the original 13 colonies, as settlers surged in from England in ever-increasing numbers, colonists disregarded most Native Americans as they drove them from their own lands. Some were captured and sold into slavery; many more died when exposed to European illnesses such as smallpox, and others perished waging war against the overbearing, inconsiderate land seizing of the colonies. The tribes that remained neutral either relocated—and many of these also died on the westward march known as the “Trail of Tears”—or endured to become today’s underfunded reservations. The poor conditions of these reservations are evidence of the betrayal and broken promises constituting United States relations with Native Americans. These conditions have only worsened as federal budget cuts known as sequestration interfere increasingly with “rez” life, while the US attempts to push itself out of debt.
The White House currently has a “pardon a turkey” tradition to honor Thanksgiving. I would recommend the instillation of a new, more influential tradition: every Thanksgiving, donating extra badly needed money to reservations dotted across the country as partial recompense for all the wrong the USA has done to North America’s native population. As much as I enjoy honoring friendship and family—and, of course, food—I think it is high time to begin mending a bond broken long ago so that Americans can add compassion and fellowship to their list of things to be thankful for.
Thanksgiving: An Editorial
Sophie Culpepper