Historically, Thanksgiving celebrates the generosity and assistance Native American tribes provided to English colonists from the Mayflower. The colonists’ fall feast represented gratitude for help without which most would likely have died…
— from a November 22 op-ed by Mario Nicolais in the Colorado Sun.
Mario Nicolais, Esquire, is an attorney and columnist whose commentaries appear regularly in the online Colorado Sun. The introductory paragraph to his November 22 op-ed — about avoiding large family gatherings this year at Thanksgiving due to spiking COVID infections in Colorado — struck a chord for me, but not because of the COVID references. I took note of Mr. Nicolais’ comment because my daughter Ursala and I have been arguing (politely) about why Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, year after year.
Ursala contends that most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving for the very reasons stated in Mr. Nicolais’ op-ed. We’ve been were told a story, she argues, about Indians coming to the rescue of the Plymouth colony at a critical moment in the colony’s existence. In the 400 years since the arrival of the Mayflower, generations of children have heard of the generous gift of sustaining foods, provided by neighboring Indians, when the Plymouth colony was verging on starvation.
The story, as told to children, typically ends there, in terms of the relationship between the Indians and the Plymouth colony. We often don’t tell our children what happened next.
She contends that most American families, gathering for their annual Thanksgiving fest, are celebrating an event that took place in 1621.
It’s only when our children are much older that they begin to hear about the genocidal campaigns, all across the nation, that drove the Indians off their native homelands and onto ‘reservations’ where poverty, starvation, cultural disintegration, and abuse have been rampant ever since.
This year, on November 26, the United American Indians of New England will celebrate their 50th ‘National Day of Mourning’ in the town of Plymouth, on Cole’s Hill, overlooking the site where the Mayflower landed its desperate passengers in 1620. From the ‘National Day of Mourning’ website:
Since 1970, Native Americans and our supporters have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.
My children — Ursala, Lily and Kahlil — are also the children of my late ex-wife, Clarissa Rizal, who traced her lineage back to the Tlingit Indians of southeast Alaska, as well as to certain Filipinos who migrated to Alaska in the early 20th century, and also to a grandfather of German descent from Minnesota.
Following a half-century of oppression by missionaries, governments, business owners and school systems, the Tlingit people were beginning to revive their culture just as Clarissa was entering high school, and she spent much of her life helping with that revival, especially in the performing and visual arts.
So my children — raised by an activist mother — carry a natural empathy for the precarious social issues facing indigenous people all around the world, but especially here in North America. When Ursala announced that she was going to boycott Thanksgiving this year, and would instead begin the creation of a different family tradition, to take place around the same time of year, I understood where she was coming from.
But it made me think about my experiences, celebrating Thanksgiving dinners over the past 68 years. Yes, I was told the stories about the Plymouth colony and the friendly Indians, and the ‘first Thanksgiving feast’… but I cannot recall, in all those 68 years, anyone in my family actually making reference to that story during our dinner gatherings. As far as my personal experiences go, Thanksgiving has actually been about family — grandparents, parents, children, cousins, aunts, uncles, close family friends — sitting down at a big table and eating and drinking together.
From what I can tell, Thanksgiving — for most non-Indian families — has much more to do with pumpkin pie than with something that happened in a colonial village overlooking Plymouth Harbor in 1621.
The story we’ve been told, about the feast that took place among the Plymouth colonists and their Indian neighbors, derives from two sources: a letter written in December 1621 by Edward Winslow, one of the 100 or so people who sailed from England aboard the Mayflower in 1620; and a brief mention of the feast in a manuscript, Of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, who was Plymouth’s governor in 1621. Apparently, neither of these accounts actually mention the word “thanksgiving”.
The story contained in Edward Winslow’s letter was made popular in 1841, when author Alexander Young shared it in his book, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. William Bradford’s manuscript was discovered in England during the 1850s.
Bradford’s manuscript, stolen by the British during the Revolutionary War, was recovered in the 1850s, just in time for magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale to incorporate it into her campaign to create an official national Thanksgiving holiday.
In 1863, Hale achieved her goal when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the final Thursday in November as a national Thanksgiving holiday for the first time. From its roots in the Plymouth harvest celebration to Hale and Lincoln’s attempt to mend a divided nation during the Civil War, we can trace the origins of the annual celebration of family, food and gratitude we know today.
On October 3, 1863 — apparently, for the primary purpose of celebrating the pivotal Union Army victory at Gettysburg — President Lincoln announced that the nation would celebrate an official Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, 1863. His speech, written by Secretary of State William Seward, designated the fourth Thursday of every November as an official US holiday of Thanksgiving.
Looking at things from an historical perspective, the story we’ve been telling our children about Thanksgiving is pretty much a fairy tale. Regardless of what Mr. Nicolais, Esquire, would have us believe, the holiday was originally designated to honor the untimely death of 51,000 men at a particularly bloody battle, during the most deadly war ever fought on US soil.
I support Ursala, if she wants to change our family tradition, and invent a new and different reason to celebrate over pumpkin pie. For me, this holiday has always been about family, and sharing food. It’s never been about telling fairy tales.