This year will be the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Mass., but there’s little national conversation about it. Is Thanksgiving now an embarrassment?
The Washington Post published a recent article headlined: “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.”
What follows is a long, mournful reflection on how disastrous the first Thanksgiving was for the Wampanoag Nation, descendants of the original tribe who greeted the Pilgrims and joined the English for that momentous meal.
The Post reports: “Long marginalized and misrepresented in the American story, the Wampanoags are braced for what’s coming this month as the country marks the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and Indians.”
A tribal activist complains: “For us, Thanksgiving kicked off colonization. Our lives changed dramatically. It brought disease, servitude, and so many things that weren’t good for Wampanoags and other Indigenous cultures.” A tribal historian told The Post: “Thanksgiving portrays an idea of us seeming like idiots who welcomed all of these changes and supports the idea that Pilgrims brought us a better life because they were superior.”
The Post quotes several aggrieved Mashpee Wampanoags, a subset of the original tribe, for whom a federal reservation in Massachusetts was created in 2015. Total descendants of the original tribe likely number many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans, most of whom are likely unaware of their ancestry. Most probably celebrate Thanksgiving robustly.
It goes without saying that misdeeds in American history should be recorded, but Thanksgiving was not among those misdeeds. The first Thanksgiving seems to have included genuine comity and good will. So why not celebration instead of disdain? Such moments are too rare among conflict-prone humanity. And amid today’s American polarization, such commemorations, now derided as historical “myths,” are needed more than ever.
The Post article, among others, stresses subsequent tragedies afflicting the Wampanoag and other natives of New England. We should know these stories, but such conflicts are endemic to fallen humanity. The Wampanoag helped the Pilgrims as potential allies against other tribes. Pre-Pilgrim New England was not Edenic; like most of the earth, it was a constant battleground for contending war-prone nations. What tribe did the Wampanoag conquer and eradicate before the English arrived? The Post article doesn’t mention it. The Wampanoag, like all peoples, have their own “myths” about their own virtue and victimhood.
Read the rest at World magazine here.
Comment by Rebecca on November 24, 2021 at 7:42 pm
Revisionist history helps fill the pocketbooks of other than white people. Not all people are buying into it but their take on the subject is suppressed.
Comment by Search4Truth on November 27, 2021 at 6:24 pm
Mark, the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, MA. Might have been 400 years ago, but the first Thanksgiving in what is now the Continental United States actually took place 65 years before that. If we’re going to talk about the first, let’s get the right first – between the Pedro Menendez party and the Timucuan Indians in what is now the Fountain of Youth preserve in Saint Augustine, FL.
Comment by Loren J Golden on November 29, 2021 at 4:27 pm
The Thanksgiving offered by the Plymouth Pilgrims and the Wampanoag nation in 1621 was a landmark event in the history of the United States. The earlier Thanksgiving offered by Menendez and the Timucua was not.
Comment by Search4Truth on December 2, 2021 at 5:51 pm
Is that revisionist history?