Tell Your Kids the Real Story of Thanksgiving This Year

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There are so many things to love about Thanksgiving. First off, what’s not amazing about a holiday where food is the star?! Thanksgiving is an occasion to gather with family and friends, often giving us an opportunity to reconnect with people we haven’t seen in a while or to let our kids spend bonding time with family members they don’t get to see very often. It’s a time for traditions, stretchy pants, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and — if we’re lucky — maybe even a post-dinner nap.

But as with just about anything, there are downsides — and we’re not just talking about indigestion or dealing with Uncle Frank’s very vocal opinions about how “kids are too soft these days.” The inherent problem with Thanksgiving is that, like many other historical events, it has been very whitewashed. Most of us learned in school that the first Thanksgiving was a joyous and harmonious occasion between Native Americans and Pilgrim settlers. And while that isn’t entirely untrue, it’s quite a stretch; the Native American perspective is left out more often than not, and leads children (and some adults who never learned the real story of Thanksgiving!) to believe that relations between the settlers and the native dwellers of the lands they inhabited were much more peaceful than they were in reality.

So what really happened?

In the autumn of 1621, approximately 90 Wampanoag and 52 English settlers joined each other for a celebratory meal to mark the end of a successful harvest; that much about the traditional Thanksgiving tale is accurate. Though skeptical of the English settlers — the Mayflower voyagers we refer to as “Pilgrims” weren’t the first white people the Native Americans had encountered — the Wampanoag formed an alliance with them through the help of the English-speaking Squanto, sharing knowledge about the best practices for planting and hunting that essentially kept the Pilgrims from starving to death during their first year.

Squanto (whose name was actually Tisquantum), a member of the Patuxet tribe and arguably the most famous Native American in the Thanksgiving origin story, knew English only because he had been kidnapped years before by a slave trade ship and taken to Spain. He managed to escape his captors with the aid of Catholic friars and made it to London, where he lived for a few years before finding passage on a ship bound back across the sea to his home. But while he had been in England, he discovered, a scourge of disease — likely brought by English settlers — had wiped out nearly his entire home community. Devastated, he went to live with the remaining Wampanoag in the area.

A neighboring Native community, the Narragansetts, had not been quite so unfortunate. Using their larger population to their advantage, they began taking over Wampanoag land. Ousamequin (commonly referred to as Massasoit), intertribal chief of the Wampanoag people, saw an opportunity to form a strategic alliance with the English settlers. He needed to keep the peace with the Narragansetts while, at the same time, making sure the Wampanoag weren’t also at odds with the new settlers in the area, which could have been another threat to the tribe. He likely figured that the English would be better allies than enemies, and could provide a source of weaponry if it came to fending off the advances of the Narragansetts.

Having kept a close eye on the Pilgrim settlers for months, Ousamequin knew that they were inexperienced, poorly equipped, and struggling. He also knew that Tisquantum’s English-speaking skills could be of great advantage. With Tisquantum enabling them to cross the language barrier, the Wampanoag made contact in the spring of 1621, teaching the English settlers valuable lessons about agriculture and hunting that kept starvation from wiping them out.

In celebration of their first harvest, the Pilgrims threw a party … but the Wampanoag weren’t even invited, even though they were literally the ones who made the harvest possible. They only came because when the settlers fired off their guns in a victory volley of sorts, the Wampanoag thought it was a declaration of war; they showed up fully armed. Only after they were reassured that it was a celebration did they bring food and join the festivities, thus prompting the heartwarming “first Thanksgiving” narrative that we’ve heard all our lives.

The problem with the current story …

While the sentiment behind the Thanksgiving story that’s been told for generations means well — celebrating community, gathering together, and being thankful for what we have are all wonderful things — it’s rooted in white supremacy. It seldom, if ever, includes any Native perspective. Aquinnah Wampanoag and tribal historian Linda Coombs told The Washington Post that the Thanksgiving narrative paints a false picture that the Native people were “idiots who welcomed all of these changes and supports the idea that Pilgrims brought us a better life because they were superior.” The story we’re commonly told implies that the Pilgrims settled on unclaimed land, while in reality the land where they settled was already inhabited by the Wampanoag. And it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that any peace between the two groups was short-lived and that the Native people would ultimately lose their independence, their land, and their way of life.

In fact, rather than observing Thanksgiving at all, many Indigenous Americans gather at Cole’s Hill, where Plymouth Rock is located — the famed landing site of the Pilgrims — to participate in a rally known as the National Day of Mourning. This observance was established because, in 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited Native Wamsutta (Frank) James to speak on behalf of the Wampanoag people — but once they found out his speech would be a truthful account, they disinvited him, prompting the organization of the National Day of Mourning.

“This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end,” he wrote.

A plaque at the site reads in part: “Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To them, Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their 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.”

Know better, do better.

So now that we know how the whole thing went down (and how vastly different it is from what most of us learned in school), how do we help our kids more accurately understand the Thanksgiving story?

Center Native American voices and perspectives. There are lots of good books for kids that tell the story from the perspective of someone other than the colonists, but we especially love this one by Mashpee Wampanoag author Danielle Greendeer, called Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story and told in Native tradition.

Talk about other “Thanksgivings.” Though it may not be called Thanksgiving in other countries, Americans are far from the only cultures who participate in harvest festivals and celebrations giving thanks — and have for centuries. There’s China’s Gan’en Jie, Germany’s Erntedankfest, and Korea’s Chuseok, just to name a few. (Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of harvest festivals worldwide divided by region!)

Research who lived on your land before. Obviously, the Wampanoag are far from the only Indigenous people to be driven out of their homelands. It’s jaw-dropping to see just how many tribes inhabited not only American lands, but locations worldwide, and this interactive map lets you view just that. Find your hometown with your kids and discover who lived there first.

Let kids know that Indigenous Americans are not a monolith — or people who existed only in the past. In the traditional whitewashed narrative of Thanksgiving, the portrayal of Native people is caricatured and oversimplified, as though they’re all the same. Not only that, but Thanksgiving is one of the only times of the year (if not the only time) that Indigenous Americans are even mentioned in curriculum, especially for younger kids, which can lead to the misconception that they are figures of the past. Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian is a fantastic resource for learning all about not only the past, but the present contributions and vibrant cultures of Indigenous Americans, and their Native Knowledge 360° Education Initiative provides resources for both students and teachers that accurately incorporate Native narrative.

Reframe the reasons for celebrating Thanksgiving. Instead of focusing on the Thanksgiving celebration through the lens of the “first Thanksgiving” trope, focus on the things that truly do unite us: being thankful for what we have, gathering to celebrate with the ones we love most, and — of course — all the delicious food we get to enjoy together.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful celebration for all those reasons — as long as we can clear up the blatant erasure of the Native American perspective and not continue to glorify the story’s Eurocentric roots. Let’s use this holiday as a springboard to teach our children about Native American history and culture. According to the blog of nonprofit organization Native Hope, when Wampanoag tribal spokesperson Steven Peters was asked his thoughts on Thanksgiving, he had this to say: “I think it’s great. My ancestors had four harvest festivals throughout the year. Gathering with family, enjoying our company, sharing our blessings, and giving thanks for all that we have is a good thing. I say have more thanksgiving events throughout the year. I also ask that you take a moment in that day to remember what happened to my people and the history as it was recorded and not the narrative that we had been given in the history books.”