The Myth of the First Thanksgiving
The Myth of the First Thanksgiving is a Buttress of White Nationalism and Needs to Go
David J. Silverman is a professor at George Washington University, where he specializes in Native American, Colonial American, and American racial history. He is the author of Thundersticks, Red Brethren, Ninigret, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have won major awards from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the New York State Historical Association. He lives in Philadelphia.
Most
Americans assume that the Thanksgiving holiday has always been
associated with the Pilgrims, Indians, and their famous feast. Yet that
connection is barely 150 years old and is the result of white Protestant
New Englanders asserting their cultural authority over an increasingly
diverse country. Since then, the Thanksgiving myth has served to
reinforce white Christian dominance in the United States. It is well
past time to dispense with the myth and its white nationalist
connotations.
Throughout
the colonial era, Thanksgiving had no association whatsoever with
Pilgrims and Indians. It was a regional holiday, observed only in the
New England states or in the Midwestern areas to which New Englanders
had migrated. No one thought of the event as originating from a poorly
documented 1621 feast shared by the English colonists of
Plymouth and neighboring Wampanoag Indians. Ironically, Thanksgiving
celebrations had emerged out of the English puritan practice of holding fast days of
prayer to mark some special mercy or judgment from God, after which the
community would break bread. Over the generations, these days of
Thanksgiving began to take place annually instead of episodically and
the fasting became less strictly observed.
The
modern character of the holiday only began to emerge during the mid to
late 1800s. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared that the last
Thursday of November should be held as a national day of Thanksgiving to
foster unity amid the horrors of the Civil War. Afterward, it became a
tradition, with some modifications to the date, and spread to the South
too. Around the same time, Americans began to trace the holiday back to
Pilgrims and Indians. The start of this trend appears to have been the
Reverend Alexander Young’s 1841 publication of the Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers,
which contained the only primary source account of the great meal,
consisting of a mere four lines. To it, Young added a footnote stating
that “This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New
England.” Over the next fifty years, various New England authors,
artists, and lecturers disseminated Young’s idea until Americans took it
for granted. Surely, few footnotes in history have been so influential.
For
the rest of the nation to go along with New England’s idea that a
dinner between Pilgrims and Indians was the template for a national
holiday, the United States first had to finish its subjugation of the
tribes of the Great Plains and far West. Only then could its people stop
vilifying Indians as bloodthirsty savages and give them an
unthreatening role in a national founding myth. The Pilgrim saga also
had utility in the nation’s culture wars. It was no coincidence that
authorities began trumpeting the Pilgrims as national founders amid
widespread anxiety that the country was being overrun by Catholic and
then Jewish immigrants unappreciative of America’s Protestant,
democratic origins and values. Depicting the Pilgrims as the epitome of
colonial America also served to minimize the country’s longstanding
history of racial oppression at a time when Jim Crow was working to
return blacks in the South to as close to a state of slavery as possible
and racial segregation was becoming the norm nearly everywhere else.
Focusing on the Pilgrims’ noble religious and democratic principles in
treatments of colonial history, instead of on the shameful Indian wars
and systems of slavery more typical of the colonies, enabled whites to
think of the so-called black and Indian problems as southern and western
exceptions to an otherwise inspiring national heritage.
Americans
tend to view the Thanksgiving myth as harmless, but it is loaded with
fraught ideological meaning. In it, the Indians of Cape Cod and the
adjacent coast (rarely identified as Wampanoags) overcome their initial
trepidation and prove to be “friendly” (requiring no explanation), led
by the translators Samoset and Squanto (with no mention of how they
learned English) and the chief, Massasoit. They feed the starving
English and teach them how to plant corn and where to fish, whereupon
the colony begins to thrive. The two parties then seal their friendship
with the feast of the First Thanksgiving. The peace that follows permits
colonial New England and, by extension, modern America, to become seats
of freedom, democracy, Christianity and plenty. As for what happens to
the Indians next, this myth has nothing to say. The Indians’ legacy is
to present America as a gift to others or, in other words, to concede to
colonialism. Like Pocahontas and Sacajawea (the other most famous
Indians of Early American history) they help the colonizers then move
offstage.
Literally.
Since the early twentieth century, American elementary schools have
widely held annual Thanksgiving pageants in which students dress up as
Pilgrims and Indians and reenact this drama. I myself remember
participating in such a pageant which closed with the song, “My Country
Tis of Thee.” The first verse of it goes: My country tis of thee/ Sweet
land of liberty/ Of thee I sing./ Land where my fathers died!/ Land of
the Pilgrim’s pride!/ From every mountain side,/ Let freedom ring!”
Having a diverse group of schoolchildren sing about the Pilgrims as “my
fathers” was designed to teach them about who we, as Americans, are,
or at least who we’re supposed to be. Even students from ethnic
backgrounds would be instilled with the principles of representative
government, liberty, and Christianity, while learning to identify with
English colonists from four hundred years ago as fellow whites. Leaving
Indians out of the category of “my fathers” also carried important
lessons. It was yet another reminder about which race ran the country
and whose values mattered.
Lest
we dismiss the impact of these messages, consider the experience of a
young Wampanoag woman who told this author that when she was in grade
school, the lone Indian in her class, her teacher cast her as Chief
Massasoit in one of these pageants and had her sing with her classmates
“This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.” At the time, she was
just embarrassed. As an adult, she sees the cruel irony in it. Other
Wampanoags commonly tell of their parents objecting to these pageants
and associated history lessons that the New England Indians were all
gone, only to have school officials respond with puzzlement at their
claims to be Indian. The only authentic Indians were supposed to be
primitive relics, not modern, so what were they doing in school,
speaking English, wearing contemporary clothing, and returning home to
adults who had jobs and drove cars?
Even
today, the Thanksgiving myth is one of the few cameos Native people
make in many schools’ curriculum. Most history lessons still pay little
to no heed to the civilizations Native Americans had created over
thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans or how indigenous
people have suffered under and resisted colonization. Even less common
is any treatment of how they have managed to survive, adapt, and become
part of modern society while maintaining their Indian identities and
defending their indigenous rights. Units on American government almost
never address the sovereignty of Indian tribes as a basic feature of
American federalism, or ratified Indian treaties as “the supreme law of
the land” under the Constitution. Native people certainly bear the
brunt of this neglect, ignorance, and racial hostility, but the rest of
the country suffers in its own ways too.
The
current American struggle with white nationalism is not just a moment
in time. It is the product of centuries of political, social, cultural,
and economic developments that have convinced a critical mass of white
Christians that the country has always belonged to them and always
should. The myth of Thanksgiving is one of the many buttresses of that
ideology. That myth is not about who we were but how past generations
wanted us to be. It is not true. The truth exposes the Thanksgiving myth
as a myth rather than history, and so let us declare it dead except as a
subject for the study of nineteenth-and twentieth-century American
cultural history. What we replace it with will tell future Americans
about how we envision ourselves and the path of our society.
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