[News] The Myth of the First Thanksgiving is a Buttress of White Nationalism and Needs to Go

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173689?fbclid=IwAR00OTkt0h9hraOohGi_8qXw6Twju-fMrtTXuFmQsTwy_jClfzgyOaIfMVA 



  The Myth of the First Thanksgiving is a Buttress of White Nationalism
  and Needs to Go

by David J. Silverman - 11/24/19

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.

_________________

*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.

-- 
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863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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