Jennie Augusta Brownscombe: Thanksgiving at Plymouth, oil on canvas by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, 1925; in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
American elementary schoolchildren and glossy coffee-table history books often learn a similar story about Thanksgiving. It is a story of gratitude and generosity, harmony and cooperation: A small band of English colonists at Plymouth, unprepared and nearly starving through their first brutal winter in 1621, receive help from their Indigenous Wampanoag neighbors and then invite them to share a harvest feast. The tale of the first Thanksgiving is a story told and retold through generations of American schoolchildren. It has been washed smooth by time and repetition into something that can feel like myth, something it is hard to question or break apart. But it is also a story very carefully edited for national consumption and ideological reinforcement. It leaves out almost everything that actually happened, and nearly everything that followed.
The first problem with this story is that it centers the English colonists as the organizers and hosts of a harvest celebration. Indigenous nations, including the Wampanoag, stewarded this land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Their fall harvest feasts were an established and widespread practice of gratitude for the gifts of the land, the harvest, and the family and spiritual communities that sustained them. The English did not invent this ritual of thanksgiving on this continent. They learned it from the Indigenous nations around them…