Before the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and turkey trots dominated Thanksgiving traditions, the holiday holds a dark and gruesome past not very well taught in schools. Originating from a harvest once ‘held’ by the Pilgrims in 1621, the original European settlers in the New World celebrated growing relations with Indigenous tribes, but the economic tool covers a sordid tale.
Thanksgiving, as it is recognized today, can be traced back to early American history, specifically, the harvest feast which the Pilgrims hosted in Plymouth, Mass., in 1621. The Pilgrims arrived in this region, which was occupied by the Wampanoag tribe of southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, by the famous Mayflower ship.
This group of people were the ‘puritans’ wishing to break away from the Church of England. When Holland, their first sanctuary failed, they secured funding for a trip across the Atlantic. Although this group was not the first settlers in the New World, their story is ingrained in American culture.
As far as public education goes, that was the extent of the tale. Pilgrims and Native tribes worked together, swapping agricultural innovations, knowledge, and language. The traditional dishes of turkey, potatoes, corn, and bread are representative of the food shared amongst peers during this era.
So as they told us all growing up in school, and in most white homes, we were told that Thanksgiving was all about turkeys, and food, and being grateful for everything we have. Truthfully, the culture and reality of Thanksgiving is way deeper and darker than that.
National Geographic writes, “The peace between the Native Americans and settlers lasted for only a generation. The Wampanoag people do not share in the popular reverence for the traditional New England Thanksgiving. For them, the holiday is a reminder of betrayal and bloodshed.”
There was a great deal of tension and bloodshed in the years that followed the feast, as the Wampanoag and Pilgrims’ relationship soured.
Along with their European culture, the Pilgrims brought devastating diseases that wiped out entire villages. Indigenous tribes, often severely isolated from the outside world, lacked defensive pathogens and antibodies against the diseases brought across the ocean, decimating their populations.
As missionaries arrived in the region, language was exchanged in an attempt to translate and share the Bible. A few dozen miles away, The Pequot War was raging through New England as colonists came to take away land.
As the population waned, so did their culture, language, traditions, and histories. Millions of indigenous people were deceased and displaced. English settlements spread across the region, and tensions rose into more violent conflicts.
King Philip’s War broke out in the 1670s, a generation after the first Thanksgiving. The war was named after Metacom, the sachem of the Wampanoag, after he took the English name Philip as representative of the friendly relations between the two groups.
The relationship between the Pilgrims and Native Americans was romanticized by American society in the 19th century, which reduced the story to a myth of peaceful coexistence. The continuous violence that Indigenous peoples endured, are frequently overlooked in this narrative.
The darker truth of settler colonization and the devastation of Native civilizations was hidden by the emphasis on the Thanksgiving feast.
This ‘contemporary’ Thanksgiving came around in the 19th century. Professor Anne Blue Willis of Cambridge University attributes what we know as Thanksgiving to a single women’s magazine editor, Sarah Hale.
Hale, extremely conservative and wishing to preserve to Protestant values America was founded upon, was worried about the influx of Catholic immigration in the colonies. She detailed the ‘perfect’ Thanksgiving meal, proposing it as an annual tradition for the first time.
Teen Vogue’s Ben Tumin sat down with Professor Willis, and put it, “So Hale’s concerns about immigration, combined with her views of women’s proper, domestic place in society, led her to invent the tradition of a Thanksgiving feast at home.”
At this time, the Civil War began waging, and the Battle of Gettysburg resulted in 50,000 deaths of American lives. President Abraham Lincoln, in an effort to unify the country and raise spirits, declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, to be observed Thursday, Nov. 26.
In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving from the final Thursday of November to the second-to-last Thursday, one week earlier than usual, in the hopes of boosting the economy by extending the Christmas shopping season by seven days during the Great Depression.
As the years have passed, Thanksgiving became remembered as a peaceful and loving environment. Thanksgiving now no longer has as much of its original sacred significance meaning in many American homes; instead, it is now a time to prepare and share a full dinner with loved ones before the capitalistic-fueled Christmas season commences.