There is a certain dialectic between how American students have perceived Thanksgiving over the course of their education. In elementary school, Thanksgiving is taught as an early multiculturalist and cosmopolitan landmark between the unfamiliar Native Americans and the white English pilgrims. But from middle school onwards, Thanksgiving is discussed primarily as a distraction from the future violence and oppression white settlers committed against the native populations in later centuries. Now in high school, how should we collectively perceive Thanksgiving? As a moment of civility between two cultures? A meaningless gesture before centuries of mindless suffering and dishonor, or a calm before the storm?
Everyone knows the basic story. Puritan Separatists fleeing from religious intolerance and persecution in England founded a colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts on December 12, 1620. The land they had settled on was conveniently empty, due to a 1616 plague dubbed the “Great Dying” that had wiped out the former inhabitants there. Before landing at Plymouth, the Mayflower reached New England and sent men to Cape Cod on November 11. The men had to steal food from homes, graves, and storages to prevent starvation. Even after the pilgrims reached Plymouth, the winter and their lack of cultivation and fishing skills killed forty-four of them by March of the next year. By then, a chief of the neighboring Abenaki people by the name of Samoset had approached the colony with a desire to trade. Through Samoset, a relationship grew between the Wampanoag tribe and the colony. Samoset also introduced the pilgrims to Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a Patuxet Native American and former slave who showed the pilgrims agricultural techniques. In 1621, fifty pilgrims and ninety Native Americans had an impromptu three-day feast in order to celebrate the harvest, which took place between September and November. The two groups ate turkey, geese, ducks, venison, fish, pumpkins, eels, shellfish, stews, and vegetables, and drank beer. After that, the Puritan-Native American relationship quickly deteriorated as more and more Puritan colonies sprouted in North America. Ultimately, the relationship collapsed completely in 1675 with King Philip’s War. Nothing good lasts forever.
Even before its conception, the U.S. participated in many unofficial Thanksgiving celebrations for religious motivations. Presidents and state governors decided on a whim when Thanksgiving would take place (though Thomas Jefferson refused to assign a date due to his own religious beliefs) until the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln, motivated by writer Sarah Josepha Hale, unofficially declared Thanksgiving to be on November 26. Franklin Delano Roosevelt later officially fixed the date, first in 1939 to support business owners during the Great Depression, then finally, in 1941, to the fourth Thursday of November.
So why does it matter? Who cares about the history of Thanksgiving? There is no clear answer to that inquiry, except for the eternal axiom that history matters only to those who wish to apply its lessons or mistakes to their own present and future. Can we, as high school students, really use the experience and meaning behind Thanksgiving in our own repetitive and structured lives? To the Puritans, a Thanksgiving dinner was commonplace. So why is the 1621 Thanksgiving the one immortalized into American history? Maybe, just maybe, its lessons of unity and eventual collapse can encourage us to make peace with our own strangers and outsiders this year. Or maybe, as we set our hearts down for Thanksgiving, we can take solace in the fact that the turkey meat we chew through was built on the graves of Native Americans trying to look for common ground.