The (complicated) history of Thanksgiving

By: Peter Neville, Assistant Sports Editor

It’s likely that you’re familiar with the often-told myth of the very first Thanksgiving: a story about an unidentified Native American tribe coming together with the Pilgrims. They just descended from the Mayflower, and began breaking bread with a feast of turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. The reality, as it often is, was far different from this romanticised

tale of peace between two vastly different groups of people. 

Unraveling what’s true and what’s false around Thanksgiving is as difficult as baking an apple pie when your cooking skills are about the same as a 12-year-old’s. The generally accepted theory is that in 1621, after a brutal epidemic between 1614 and 1620 had dwindled the Patuxet band of the Wampanoag tribal confederation to extinction. After a harsh winter in 1620–1621 had also killed nearly half of the Plymouth colonists, Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag, sent two intermediaries to negotiate a peace treaty with the settlers. 

With the peace treaty having largely succeeded, the colonists provided protection, and the natives taught the settlers hunting techniques and provided food in times of drought. The Pilgrims, after a good harvest, planned a three-day feast in the autumn of 1621. Although the myth describes the Pilgrims as inviting the natives to this feast as thanks for their help in teaching them how to survive in this foreign land, this is one of the most commonly seen misconceptions regarding the Thanksgiving holiday.

It is believed, from word of mouth retellings from Wampanoag descendants, that as part of the festival, the Pilgrims participated in a demonstration of arms, and as part of their agreement, having assumed that their allies were under attack from an enemy, the Wampanoag arrived fully armed. At that point, the Pilgrims invited the Wampanoag to join in their feast, with the tribe also contributing their own foods to the meal.

The word of mouth nature and a lack of reliable written accounts of the event have led to different retellings of the story from both sides over the years, and have likely led to a majority of the misconceptions around the event we see today.

The modern idea of Thanksgiving we think of derives from similar autumnal celebrations of thanks across New England for hundreds of years before being officially designated as a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War in 1863.

Despite being signed into law by Lincoln, the person most responsible for Thanksgiving becoming a national holiday was Sarah Josepha Hale, a writer and activist from New Hampshire. Hale spent 17 years in the latter half of her life lobbying six different presidents: Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. The letter that finally convinced Lincoln to declare the scattered celebrations into a national holiday was the idea of having a holiday about a unifying day for a nation dealing with the stress and horrors of the Civil War.

Today, the holiday sits in a precarious place. While most people, including myself, look forward to the day as a time to be around family and be thankful for the things we have in life while watching football, there are countless people who see the holiday as a symbol of the whitewashing of the Pilgrim and colonist genocide of the Native American people. Counter-protest holidays, such as the “National Day of Mourning,” were created by Frank “Wamsutta” James, the leader of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, after he was not allowed to speak at the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower. 

Ultimately, the Thanksgiving tradition is something so deeply steeped in American culture that making large changes to the holiday will likely fall on deaf ears. The continued acknowledgment of the Native American genocide and education about how the holiday came to be, though, will hopefully lead to more critical conversations about how to engage with the holiday and its history as a society.

via Sophie Asher