Politics of the History of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a beloved national holiday, but I’m sure that I am not the first person to tell you that the history surrounding it is tragic, not celebratory. The holiday was declared official by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 amid the turmoil of the Civil War. It celebrates an autumn harvest festival shared between English colonists and the Wampanoag people in 1621 and the ostensible friendship that this meal represented. 

However, as author and historian David Silverman told Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, the narrative that has evolved ever since is largely fictional. For starters, the Wampanoag leader Ousameqin’s motivations for forming an alliance with the English colonists were almost certainly political. By 1621, the Wampanoags had been in contact with Europe for almost a century—bloody contact that involved the Europeans’ slave raiding—and several members of the tribe spoke English, had already traveled to Europe and back, and likely already knew of the Pilgrims’s venture. Simultaneously, the Wampanoag people were navigating an epidemic that was devastating New England’s Indigenous population and dealing with threats and incursions from the Narragansett people.

For Wampanoag leadership, the arrival of the Pilgrims heralded the arrival of a potential political ally, and it was in this context that the meal was held. In fact, Silverman explained that many Wampanoag people were vehemently opposed to Ousamequin’s decision to reach out to the English and that during this time “Ousamequin put down multiple plots to wipe out the colony and unseat him.” He continued, saying, “When the English arrived, they entered a multilateral Indian political world in which the internal politics of the Wampanoag tribe and the intertribal politics of the Wampanoag tribe were paramount. To the degree the Wampanoags dealt with the English, it was to adjust the power dynamics of Indian country.”

The relationship between the Wampanoag people and the English colonists deteriorated, eventually becoming one of the factors leading to King Phillip’s War, one of the bloodiest wars in colonial American history. Silverman explained that the myth of the Thanksgiving meal as we know it today likely began around 1769 when a group of Pilgrim descendants living in Plymouth began to spread seeds that their ancestors were the “Fathers of America” to promote tourism. Publications of the time show the first signs of the name “The First Thanksgiving,” which quickly gained traction among settler Americans, eventually leading to Lincoln’s enshrinement of the holiday to promote unity. The myth of Thanksgiving gained more importance in the late 19th century when it became more important to include Native Americans in the national mythos following the Indian Wars as an attempt to foster peace. In the process, the dark underbelly of the holiday disappeared from public consciousness. However, many Native Americans do not celebrate the holiday and organize yearly awareness events; for more information, here is the United American Indians of New England’s informational page on the National Day of Mourning. 

Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate loved ones and the gifts that we have been given, but it is also a time to remember: We live in a country that was made on stolen land, and myths in our early history do not have happy endings.