The Real Story of Thanksgiving—and the Racist Myths You’ve Been Told About It for Years

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 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 time and a distinctly White perspective. In this newsletter, 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.

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.

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 plagues, which had wiped out much of the Wampanoag people who’d previously lived on that land. After a century of violent encounters with the Europeans, the Wampanoags were not eager to welcome the new ship of settlers—far from it. However, because of their much-reduced population and their political concerns regarding neighboring, rival Native American tribes, they decided to attempt diplomacy to avoid further losses. Squanto, who had learned English while in captivity in England, was returned to Massachusetts in 1619. He served as a translator between the Wampanoag and the English settlers. With Squanto’s help, Wampanoag sachem (i.e., chief) Ousamequin brokered an entente with the pilgrims.

In 1621, there was a three-day harvest rejoicing. Contrary to the traditional fasting-and-prayer thanksgivings the pilgrims held from time to time, these harvest “rejoicings,” were celebrated with feasting, drinking, and contests and drills for the militia, which included target practice. By some accounts, gunshots from such drills could have prompted as many as 90 Wampanoag men to come to this 1621 rejoicing to aid the English in what the Wampanoag men thought was a battle, as a matter of diplomacy. Another diplomatic hypothesis puts Ousemequin and the Wampanoag people at the rejoicing because their crops had been planted next to the settlers’. Celebrating the harvest together could have been political statecraft, so to speak.

In 1637 and again in 1676, there were documented “thanksgivings,” but of the fasting-and-prayer variety. In the Protestant pilgrim tradition, a true thanksgiving necessitated quiet reflection. These two in particular seem to have been held in honor of English victories in major battles against Native Americans. The first, in 1637, marked the end of the Pequot War, wherein the English massacred the Pequot people. The second, in 1676, coincided with the end of King Philip’s War (also called the Great Narragansett War), one of the most horrific 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 racism and exploitation running through all of it. Instead, it paints the pilgrims as the picture of Puritan perfection and rationalizes their actions in the name of “liberty for all”—as if that existed.

A significant byproduct of this false storytelling is also the erasure of African Americans and enslaved people during this time. The irony is that Lincoln used the story of White men and Native American men to paint a picture of “unity” for his own political agenda during the Civil War—all the while Native Americans’ freedom and equality had been brutally taken from them. Here’s how Deloria described this juxtaposition in The New Yorker: 

The real truth of Thanksgiving is that White Europeans bulldozed entire groups of people of color in North America and then used a story about one cross-cultural celebration to whitewash the bloodstains of their racist and imperialist actions in subsequent decades and centuries. In the long history of our nation, when has there ever truly been simple recognition of the numerous sacrifices made by people of color, let alone “thanks” given to them for their invaluable contributions to this country? Such a “thanksgiving” on a national level would be an occasion worthy of celebration.