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<h1 class="reader-title">The Myth of the First Thanksgiving is a
Buttress of White Nationalism and Needs to Go</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">by David J. Silverman - <span
class="article-info">11/24/19 </span></div>
<br>
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.
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<p>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 <em>fast
days </em>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. </p>
<p>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 <em>Chronicles of
the Pilgrim Fathers</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.
<br>
</p>
<p>_________________</p>
<p><strong>David J. Silverman </strong>is a professor at
George Washington University, where he specializes in Native
American, Colonial American, and American racial history. He
is the author of <em>Thundersticks</em>, <em>Red Brethren</em>, <em>Ninigret</em>,
and <em>Faith and Boundaries</em>. 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.</p>
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