Like a Yin-Yang, the Thanksgiving holiday occupies two completely opposite spaces in American culture. Officially, it’s a time for gratitude and togetherness, but it’s also shorthand for the time when families rip themselves apart over minor differences.
But far from sad, that contrast—the light and the dark of the fourth Thursday in November—should be viewed as a good thing.
Think of it this way: as you sit down to pick at dry turkey, tolerate your uncle, and watch some mediocre TV, you won’t be tarnishing the history of Thanksgiving. In fact, if you really want to honor the holiday’s origin story, you wouldn’t try to stop fighting with family. You’d go no-contact.
A Tale of Two Turkeys
Although we’re sold an image of Native Americans and European settlers sitting down together to a feast of modern comfort foods, the real story is considerably darker.
The myth of the First Thanksgiving is a simplistic fairy tale, a caricature of the people and the politics of the time. It casts everyone in the wrong light, and none more so than the Wampanoag, to whom our great cultural myth is jaw-droppingly disrespectful.
The actual story—what we know for sure—isn’t so much a joyous embrace of different peoples who sought to share earth’s bounty and each other’s company. It more closely resembles a welcome-to-the-neighborhood casserole passed between two neighbors who, just a short while later, realize they despise each other.
It involves pity, broken promises, disease, slavery, and ungratefulness. You know, classic Americana.
What Really Happened?
In the year 1621, there actually was a “First Thanksgiving.” And it was, by all Puritanical accounts, pretty dope.
The European settlers had just completed their first successful harvest, thanks to a Native American named Tisquantum (who you may know as “Squanto”), who taught them—in English—how to grow New World crops like potatoes and corn.
A member of the Patuxet tribe, Tisquantum had been captured twice by Englishmen, sold into slavery in Spain, and eventually sailed back to what is present-day Massachusetts only to find his people had been wiped out by smallpox.
After that macabre discovery, Tisquantum asked to join the Wampanoag nation, touting his ability to speak to white people as a boon to the tribe. With their numbers declining due to old-world diseases, the Wampanoag used Tisquantum to ink a mutual defense pact with the new settlers. The decimated Wampanoag would benefit from the guns of the Europeans, and the Puritans would have a Native ally who could alert them to nearby threats. Win-win.
This is what everyone agrees on. After that, two narratives emerge.
Some historians believe the Puritans invited the Wampanoag to a typical end-of-harvest celebration.
Others claim the Natives heard gunshots nearby and, fearing the white man had backed out of the deal, sent a squadron of warriors to investigate, only to find their allies trying to shoot some deer—and missing wildly.
Feeling a bit bad for their new partners, the Wampanoag offered to take over the hunt and bring the bounty back to Plymouth Plantation. About 90 members of the tribe showed up, toting three large deer they’d felled with bow and arrow, and joined the Puritans in their 17th-century version of a rager.
Sadly, the meal proved to be the high point of the relationship.
Tisquantum was increasingly seen as power hungry and untrustworthy, many Wampanoag became distrustful of the Puritans, and some Europeans were convinced their allies were plotting with other tribes to ransack and destroy Plymouth Plantation.
Their hard-won deal collapsed under the weight of suspicion, and the two sides generally kept to themselves in an uneasy detente. As the years wore on, more European settlers arrived, more Native Americans died, more wars were fought, and the complexion of the land lightened considerably.
Why Lie About It?
While the Plymouth-Wampanoag feast was a brief and rather insignificant event, the concept of a “Thanksgiving” was already hard-wired into early American culture.
Back then, it wasn’t always meant to be fun. In a land settled in part out of religious zeal, the concept of “Thanksgiving” was not about feasting and family. It was about ascetic self-denial.
In those days, observances of Thanksgiving meant three days of fasting and prayer, usually reserved to commemorate victories in battle. These observances, in which Christians thanked their creator for the victory and mourned their dead, were regularly celebrated in America since the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower.
Usually, these were local events, but records show the first Continental Congress issued a proclamation of Thanksgiving to mark the end of the Revolutionary War. Presidents at the time also got in the act, with George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison all issuing proclamations.
Abraham Lincoln issued two—the famous one that you learned about in school and an earlier edict that called for the national observance to take place in October.
Lincoln’s holiday wasn’t a celebration of the harvest, however. His famous Thanksgiving proclamation was conceived as a salve for the Civil War. Urged by prominent magazine editor Sarah Hale to declare a single day to be spent on healing and reconciliation, Lincoln asked the country to put aside its differences and show gratitude to a creator.
It was an extremely Northern idea. The Union was the epicenter of the abolitionist movement, and calling for a holiday draped in references to Puritanical New England was a sneaky bit of political propaganda.
What better way to nudge the South toward cooperation than to harken back to the very roots of the country’s history? The myth-making behind the First Thanksgiving was, in part, an attempt to quell the violence of the Civil War by painting the lack of cooperation as distinctly un-American.
But that little white lie, however well-meaning, grew into something terrible.
Modern Interpretations
As the years went on, a fully fabricated tale about “Pilgrims and Indians” emerged. Like George Washington’s cherry tree, the story was always more about teaching values than adhering to truth. But even that went out of fashion after the World Wars.
By the time Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday from the last day of November to its third Thursday, he wasn’t shy about admitting his goal was to extend the Christmas shopping season.
But that doesn’t let us off the hook. Unlike some other foundational myths, the gloss on the First Thanksgiving has stubbornly persisted. American schools have taught generations of children to extract the wrong moral lessons from their country’s history and chosen to bypass some truly nasty stuff.
A better retelling of the First Thanksgiving should be honest about the Wampanoag, whose tribal name is all but missing from our textbooks. Too often, they’re lumped together with all other Native peoples and cartoonishly depicted as either Noble Savages or Ignorant Innocents. An honest account should also correct a few ideas about the Puritans. They didn’t dress like the Renaissance Dutchmen. They drank beer and didn’t have a moral issue with killing Natives when they wanted their stuff.
The politics of the time were complicated, and what’s come down to us is surely incomplete. But if we’re going to draw lessons from the First Thanksgiving, we should consider what the real story teaches us: don’t let suspicion make enemies of your friends, repeating a lie doesn’t make it the truth, religiosity doesn’t equal morality and always enjoy moments with your friends—because the good times never last long enough.
Editor’s Notes:
1) We acknowledge that the term “Puritan” is used here to refer to the Pilgrims, though they were distinct groups. The Pilgrims sought separation from the Church of England, while the Puritans aimed to reform it. However, their beliefs and customs were nearly identical, and they eventually merged. Thus, for our purposes, the Pilgrims represent the broader Puritan cultural movement of the time.
2) This article was assigned and written not to sow dissent or cast shade upon our nation, but rather to inform, edify and inspire our readers to pursue a deeper understanding of history. It is only in a free and prosperous country that the people have the liberty to examine their past, critique their predecessors, and make the conscious choice to improve upon their methods. It is arguably the most patriotic thing a citizen can do. There are two common sayings at play that converge here, and both should be considered. The first is the reminder that if we fail to learn the mistakes of our past, we are doomed to repeat them. The second is the cynical but starkly accurate observation that history is written by the victors. As such, the narratives handed down to us are warped by a perspective sorely lacking in empathy for the conquered, and thus should be cast aside in favor of an accurate reading of our past that empowers us to make better decisions that help us build a brighter future for everyone.
3) The views and opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the publication, its owners, or its advertisers.
