Thanksgiving and the Narrative We Were Given

The version of Thanksgiving most Americans grow up with depicts a harmonious 1621 harvest feast shared between Pilgrim settlers and Wampanoag people at Plymouth Colony. Children are dressed as one or the other in school plays. The imagery is of mutual gratitude, of two peoples meeting as equals and sharing what the land had given them. It is a comforting picture. It is also one that requires the omission of almost everything that happened before, during, and after that autumn gathering.

Understanding why the myth was built the way it was, and what it continues to obscure, is not an act of hostility towards any living person who finds meaning in the holiday. It is, however, a basic requirement of honest history.

What the 1621 Gathering Actually Was

The 1621 event at Plymouth was not called Thanksgiving by anyone who attended it. English harvest celebrations were common and carried no special ceremonial weight. The primary written record of the event is a single brief passage in a letter from Edward Winslow, a colonist, who described a three-day celebration in which the settlers fired their weapons in sport and ninety Wampanoag men arrived, accompanied by their leader Massasoit. Winslow notes that the Wampanoag men went out and killed five deer, which they brought back to the gathering.

That is essentially all the contemporary record says. There is no mention of turkey, no prayer of thanks, no formal invitation, and no indication that the Wampanoag had any particular reason to celebrate. They had, in the years immediately preceding 1621, lost between 50 and 90 percent of their population to epidemic diseases, likely introduced through earlier European contact along the coast. The Plymouth settlers had arrived on land already cleared by those who had died. The relationship between Massasoit and the colonists was a strategic alliance born of mutual vulnerability, not a friendship between equals.

The second major document that informs the Thanksgiving mythology is a journal kept by William Bradford, the Plymouth governor, who wrote about harvests and food supplies but again without attaching any particular ceremonial significance to the 1621 event specifically.

How the Myth Was Built

The idea of Thanksgiving as a national origin story was largely a 19th-century invention. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, campaigned for decades to have Thanksgiving declared a national holiday, writing to five successive presidents before Abraham Lincoln agreed in 1863. Lincoln's proclamation came in the midst of the Civil War, and the holiday was explicitly framed as a call for national unity and gratitude to God for Union fortunes in the conflict. The Pilgrims were retrofitted as founding archetypes.

Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as public schools expanded and the United States sought to assimilate waves of new immigrants into a coherent national identity, the Thanksgiving story was standardised and simplified. The 1621 gathering became the centrepiece. The Wampanoag were cast as helpful supporting characters in the story of European settlement. Everything that followed, the wars, the land seizures, the colonial violence that killed or displaced the Wampanoag and their neighbours, was edited out.

By the time the story was being delivered to schoolchildren through the middle of the 20th century, it had been so thoroughly transformed that it functioned not as history but as myth, in the technical sense of a narrative that explains and legitimises a social order. The settlers were kind. The Native people were welcoming. Both were grateful. Everything was fine.

What Came After 1621

What actually followed the 1621 gathering matters enormously to any honest assessment of the holiday. Within fifty years, the relationship between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag had collapsed entirely. Between 1675 and 1676, a war known as King Philip's War, named after Metacom, Massasoit's son, became one of the most destructive conflicts in the history of North America relative to population. A higher percentage of the total population of New England died in that conflict than in any other war in American history, including the Civil War.

The Wampanoag suffered catastrophically. Metacom was killed, his body drawn and quartered, and his head displayed on a pike in Plymouth for twenty-five years. Thousands of Wampanoag people were killed, enslaved, or forced into exile. The colonial settlements survived, expanded, and continued westward.

None of this appears in the school play. None of it appears in the holiday as most people observe it. The feast at Plymouth was not a moment of harmony before things went wrong. It was a brief tactical arrangement between parties whose interests were fundamentally incompatible. The war that came fifty years later was not an aberration. It was the continuation of a logic already present in the original colonial project.

The Wampanoag Today

The Wampanoag Nation still exists. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) are both federally recognised. Their members have been speaking publicly about the Thanksgiving myth for decades, offering a corrective to the standard narrative that is grounded in their own oral history, their scholarly work, and their direct ancestral connection to the events in question.

Wampanoag scholars and activists have made a consistent and reasonable argument: they do not ask that Thanksgiving be abolished. They ask that it be told honestly. They ask that schoolchildren learn who the Wampanoag were before 1621, what happened to them after, and what their descendants have continued to face in the centuries since. That is not a radical demand. It is the minimum that honest history requires.

For many Indigenous people across the United States, the fourth Thursday of November is observed as the National Day of Mourning, a tradition that began in Plymouth in 1970 when Wampanoag leader Frank James, invited to speak at a state celebration of the 350th anniversary of Plymouth Colony, submitted a speech that was deemed too critical and was uninvited. He and a group of Indigenous people gathered on Cole's Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock instead. The Day of Mourning has been held there every year since.

Why the Framing Still Matters

Mythology does not stay in the past. A story told to children about the founding of a nation shapes how those children, when grown, understand their relationship to that nation's history and to the people that history displaced. If the Thanksgiving story tells them that colonisation began with harmony and goodwill, they are poorly equipped to understand the treaty violations, the forced removals, the boarding school programmes, and the ongoing land and resource disputes that are the direct consequences of what colonisation actually was.

The mythology also directly affects how Indigenous people are perceived in public life. A narrative that casts Native Americans as historical figures, as characters in a story that ended in 1621 or perhaps in 1876, makes it harder for the public to see them as present-day political actors with contemporary grievances that have legal and moral weight. When living Wampanoag people challenge the Thanksgiving narrative, they are sometimes told they are being divisive or ungrateful. The irony is thick.

Reforming how Thanksgiving is taught does not require dismantling the holiday as a cultural event. Families can still gather. Gratitude is not the problem. The problem is a specific historical fiction that has been dressed up as fact for well over a century, and that continues to do real damage by making the full arc of colonial history invisible to the people who most need to understand it.

The record of what happened between 1620 and the present is not difficult to find. It has been documented by historians, by tribal nations, by federal archives, by the survivors themselves. The question has never been one of evidence. It has always been one of will: whether the dominant culture is willing to look at what the evidence actually shows, and to teach it plainly to the next generation.