It’s that time of year again! We gather with family- smaller gatherings this year- stuff our faces, watch some football, and maybe, if it’s still in the family tradition, talk about what we’re thankful for. But in recent years, there has been a bigger push, especially in our schools, to dig a little bit deeper into why we gather, what we actually celebrate, and what really happened back in 1621. This has led to some pushback, especially among lawmakers. Tom Cotton of Arkansas recently claimed liberal “charlatans” were rewriting history, stating “Too many have lost the civilizational self confidence needed to celebrate the Pilgrims.”
We all know that the pilgrims came here for religious freedom, right? What many of us don’t know is that they actually fled Europe in search of a place where they would be permitted to practice extreme religious intolerance. Yet those, like Cotton, who do not wish to see the Pilgrims’ good name besmirched, do have a point. The voyage across the Atlantic required tremendous courage. When they were forced to land on Cape Cod, rather than their intended destination further south, they took the extraordinary step of drafting and signing the Mayflower Compact, which organized them into a body politic, and became the document by which they self-governed. Despite a high mortality rate, the colonists survived, with the help of the Wampanoags. This story of gritty survival against the odds is a heroic tale, one not undeserving of celebration. But the pilgrims were only one group that attended that famous harvest feast in 1621, and relations between the groups were not as friendly as the traditional portrayal would have us believe.
The pilgrims did not discover happy Native Americans living in a paradise- they discovered a shattered community still reeling from a deadly plague, most likely smallpox. The Wampanoag did not aid the pilgrims out of simplistic kindheartedness, but out of a knowledge that their world was changing rapidly, and a new ally might come in handy. Even as their numbers dwindled due to poor nutrition and inadequate shelter in the cold, the new arrivals were still able to mount armed expeditions against other Indian groups on behalf of the Wampanoags. Their militarism increased as new colonists arrived. Weakened by sickness and intertribal conflict, many native villages were abandoned in the face of the colonists’ aggression. A decade after they landed, the colonists embarked on an extermination campaign, burning villages and killing hundreds of Pequots. Governor William Bradford announced that from then on, Thanksgiving would be a celebration of “the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”
So perhaps we have the history of what we celebrate a bit wrong, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate, right? After all, Thanksgiving is about giving thanks! But is it? Our Thanksgiving is a variation of a traditional harvest festival, celebrating the season’s bounty before the hard winter. We’ve come a long way from celebration of a harvest. The date of Thanksgiving was fixed as the fourth Thursday in November by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in celebration of Union victories in the war. Now, American Thanksgiving is more often described as “food, family, and football” than as an opportunity to give thanks for a harvest or a victory. In recent years it has ceased to even hold that meaning, as Black Friday shopping deals have steadily encroached on the holiday. At least we can all be thankful for the great deals we’re getting.