By Jennifer Ju
Facing Ourselves
Jennifer Ju
Thanksgiving is a holiday which many have praised for being a celebration in which all can participate, one which is not linked to a religion or a certain ethic group. It has been cherished as a time in which gratitude is expressed and which commemorates the story of Pilgrims and unnamed generic American Indians. We are indoctrinated with the tale of its origins from a very young age. Alongside hand-traced construction paper turkeys, Charlie Brown Thanksgiving TV specials, and nostalgic tchotchkes like plump ceramic Pilgrim salt and pepper shakers decorating our tables, the story of Pilgrims and Indians coming together at a shared table and giving thanks, in the spirit of friendship, collaboration and peace echoes in our ears and hearts as we prepare for a day of appreciation for the abundance in our own lives.
This treasured depiction of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth over 400 years ago paints a rosy picture that is more fiction than fact. The interactions with European explorers in the years preceding the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621 were marked by fights, deception and capturing and selling indigenous people into slavery. One of these was the famous Wampanoag Tisquantum, renamed Squanto by the English. He spent several years trying to return to his native land, and disease which nearly decimated the Wampanoag tribe. During “The Great Dying,” which lasted three years, approximately two thirds of the Wampanoag people perished from the diseases brought from Europe.
The Pilgrims made landfall in 1620. Survival was difficult, with approximately 50 percent of the settlers dying from starvation and the harsh weather during their first winter. The Wampanoags, whose name means “People of the First Light,” and who despite having lived on this land for at least 10,000 years prior to the arrival of European explorers, faced ongoing challenges to survive after the near-extermination of their tribe over the previous decades. As a result, when the Wampanoag made first contact with the Plymouth settlers in the spring of 1621 they hoped to form an alliance that would help them keep the peace with neighboring tribes.
Our cherished Thanksgiving folklore is accurate in its portrayal of the assistance the Wampanoags gave the Pilgrims, teaching them how to plant crops in the unforgiving New England soil and other skills crucial to survival and establishment of the new colony. The Pilgrims successfully achieved their first harvest, which they celebrated with a “harvest feast,” now known as the first Thanksgiving.
However, this is where reality diverges from our popularized mythology. The Wampanoags were not initially invited to this harvest feast. When the Wampanoags heard the sound of muskets, which were fired as part of the Pilgrim’s harvest celebration, the Wampanoags feared the start of a war and ran to the site of the harvest festival. When they learned that no battle was brewing, they brought deer to share at the feast. Many historians think it is unlikely that turkey was served, but rather other fowl, fish, shellfish and possibly cranberries. In addition, unlike the common depiction of the Wampanoags attired in full headdress, the Wampanoag men wore a type of mohawk made from porcupine hair.
What happened since this first Thanksgiving? The tenuous alliance between the indigenous people and the colonists crumbled. Seizing of land and massacre of indigenous people marked the subsequent years. Many say that the first Thanksgiving holiday actually occurred in 1637, when Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governor John Winthrop set aside a day to celebrate the mass slaughter of hundreds of Pequot Indians, including women and children, in the area now known as Mystic, Connecticut.
The English colonists thrived and grew in number, forcibly taking increasingly larger areas of land. King Philip’s War between the New England Confederation of Colonies and the Wampanoag tribe started in 1675, killing approximately half of the indigenous people and up to 30 percent of the English population. Ultimately the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, Metacomet, was killed and dismembered, with his impaled head displayed on a spike for 25 years.
King Philip’s War was just one of many bloody battles between the colonists and the indigenous people. Centuries of slow genocide and assimilation continued, including a Massachusetts law that made teaching Wampanoags how to read or write punishable by death, forcing conversion to Christianity under a “pray or die” policy, capturing indigenous children and sending them to boarding schools whose goal was the eradication of their “Indian” culture and language, and trying to survive in an environment in which the motto proclaimed by Civil War veteran and Army Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, “Kill the Indian, save the man” was celebrated.
The more popular and comforting mythic retelling of the first Thanksgiving has nevertheless been commemorated, starting with President Abraham Lincoln. This has minimized, if not practically erased, the facts of what transpired between the colonists and the indigenous people during those early settlement years. For indigenous people, Thanksgiving represents colonization, servitude, death and the near-annihilation of their people and culture. It is not surprising that for indigenous people, and for those who aware of the history as it actually took place, the Thanksgiving holiday is viewed as more of a “Takesgiving” or “the Thanksgiving massacre.” The Wampanoag Nation alone, whose numbers were once up to 100,000 in the region between southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, has been whittled down to less than 3,000 people.
Some believe that discussing the actual history of Thanksgiving and the tragedy subjected on indigenous people in the US is one more example of the recent trend toward “woke” thinking. Yet, for many indigenous people, Thanksgiving has been a day of mourning for decades and has been established as a National Day of Mourning since 1970. On this day, indigenous people gather at Plymouth, Massachusetts or at their own homes for a day of prayers and remembrance of the past as well as ongoing struggles of indigenous people to survive and thrive.
As the plaque commemorating the National Day of Mourning states, “It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.”
So what is Thanksgiving? A day of family, food and gratitude? Or a holiday in which the longstanding and pervasive violence, injustice and oppression against indigenous people has been reduced, revised and virtually forgotten?
Recent discussions on racial justice have challenged misconceptions and fairytale retellings of the past when it comes to the treatment of women and other minorities. Yet there appears to be a staunch unwillingness to accurately acknowledge the treatment of indigenous people since the first settlers arrived as immigrants on their shores, or to see the Thanksgiving holiday through a truthful lens.
Dispelling this treasured Thanksgiving diorama seems to be an attack on what this holiday has come to represent and its values: family, friends, love, appreciation, joy. Why not let bygones be bygones? If the origins of the Thanksgiving story is a carefully crafted form of whitewashing, so what? After all, isn’t it more important to celebrate Thanksgiving as the holiday into which it has evolved, without consideration of past injury and grievances?
The issue with this approach is that it embraces an either/or versus a both/and mindset. An either/or mindset closes off communication as the opposing sides go to their respective corners, with any meeting of the middle. It resembles a round in the boxing ring. Either/or thinking is based on the assumption that we know best or all there is to know. There is little flexibility or curiosity, and it often narrows our focus and perspective to only what lies within our own limited and often biased field of vision. It forces us to choose sides, leading to blame and finger-pointing. It promotes alienation, not connection.
Connection can be nurtured when we embrace a mindset open to the possibility that there is much we may not know about others, their struggles and the historical scars that are very much present and unhealed today. Perhaps we can cast away defensive arguments such as “that happened so long ago” or “I’m not to blame, it’s not like I’m the one who purposely gave them blankets infested with small pox or massacred the Indians.” It is true that you may not have directly been involved or responsible for the unjust treatment of the indigenous people. And it is also true that the indigenous people have experienced genocide and continue to struggle under the weight of ongoing injustice and the legacy of trauma on physical and mental health.
We can look beyond blaming one another and instead accept accountability, individually and collectively. None of us is perfect, and all of us have room to learn, grow, change and improve. We can look upon others’ struggles with empathy and compassion, rather than adopting an attitude of rigid defiance when we feel that what we hold dear, including the popularized myth of the original Thanksgiving celebration, is under attack.
It is not a call for complacency, approval or condoning, nor a summoning of shame and recrimination for its own sake, but rather a willingness to see and accept the truth of past and present, listen, be accountable and make reparation. However you choose to spend Thanksgiving this year, there can be room at the table for compassion, honesty, remembrance, responsibility and action alongside gratitude for what you have been granted.
We can start by acknowledging the reality of the first Thanksgiving and all the injustice which has been subjected upon indigenous people. We can donate to organizations and causes that support and make reparations to indigenous people on Thanksgiving Day and beyond. We can sit quietly with our discomfort and really contemplate the words of Woody Guthrie’s song,
This land is your land and this land is my land/
From California to the New York island/
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/
This land was made for you and me.
How true were these words then? How true are they today? What would it take to create a land that is truly “made for you and me”?
Jennifer Ju, MD is a physician who is a graduate of the Brown University family medicine residency program. She is also an actor and writer who has performed in various theatres across the state and whose plays have been produced locally. Ju has also presented numerous online and in-person workshops on mindfulness, health and wellness for parents and children, as well as for pre-K-12 educators in New Haven and Fairfield counties.