The other day, I was at the local store and they were blasting Christmas music over the speakers. I will admit that Christmas is my favorite holiday of the year, but stores always leap between Halloween and Christmas, sometimes seamlessly, forgetting Thanksgiving.
Now, as a history buff, I do know that the history of Thanksgiving often gets lost in the shuffle, as many cultures claim to have celebrated it before any one else in America. And, in that same vein, I realize the history of the pilgrims and their landing in Massachusetts is taught falsely to school children.
The Mayflower pilgrims were on a chartered mission by King James I to land in Virginia. Having been blown off course, they landed off the coast of Cape Cod and created their own settlement, seeing it as providence, despite the fact that a large number of their fellow travelers were pirates, not missionaries. They managed to survive through the first harsh winter and celebrated a feast day, despite many of their numbers having returned to England. That is the actual truth of the Pilgrims. The rest is a myth.
This year, as Thanksgiving approaches, it is time to reflect back on that first celebration and recount the true history of those who landed and the native tribe who helped them live through that first winter and later regretted it.
Overlooking the chilly waters of Plymouth Bay, modern tourists swarm park rangers as they recount the history of Plymouth Rock - the famous symbol of the arrival of the Pilgrims here four centuries ago.
Nearby, others wait to tour a replica of the Mayflower, the ship that carried the Pilgrims across the ocean.
On a hilltop above stands a quiet tribute to the Native Americans who helped the starving Pilgrims survive. Few people bother to visit the statue of Ousamequin - the chief, or sachem, of Wampanoag Nation whose people once numbered somewhere between 30,000 to 100,000 and whose land once stretched from Southeastern Massachusetts to parts of Rhode Island.
Long marginalized and misrepresented in the American story, Wampanoags are braced for what is coming this month as the country marks the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving.
But the actual history of what happened in 1621 bears little resemblance to what most Americans are taught in grade school. There was likely no turkey served. There were no feathered headdresses worn. And, initially, there was no effort by the Pilgrims to invite the Wampanoags to the feast they had made possible.
Just as Native American activists have demanded the removal of Christopher Columbus statues and pushed to transform the Columbus holiday into an acknowledgment of his brutality toward Indigenous people, they have long objected to the popular portrayal of Thanksgiving.
For the Wampanoags and many other Native Americans, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.
Because while the Wampanoags did help the Pilgrims survive, their support was followed by years of a slow, unfolding genocide of their people and the taking of their land.
To learn the history of the Wampanoags and what happened to them after the first Thanksgiving, a visitor has to drive 30 miles south of Plymouth to the town of Mashpee, where a modest, clapboard museum sits along a two-lane road. Outside, there is a wetu, a traditional Wampanoag house made from cedar poles and the bark of tulip poplar trees, and a mishoon, a native canoe.
Inside the three-room house sits Mother Bear, a 71-year-old Mashpee Wampanoag, hand-stitching a deer skin hat. She has lived her whole life in this town and is considered one of the keepers of the Wampanoag version of the first Thanksgiving and how the encounter turned into a centuries-long disaster for the Mashpee, who now number about 2,800.
That story continues to get ignored by the roughly 1.5 million annual visitors to Plymouth’s museums and souvenir shops. The Wampanoag museum draws about 800 visitors a year.
The Wampanoags, whose name means “People of the First Light” in their native language, trace their ancestors back at least 10,000 years to southeastern Massachusetts, a land they called Patuxet.
In the 1600s, they lived in 69 villages, each with a chief, or sachem, and a medicine man. They had “messenger runners,” members of the tribe with good memories and the endurance to run to neighboring villages to deliver messages.
They occupied a land of plenty, hunting deer, elk and bear in the forests, fishing for herring and trout, and harvesting quahogs in the rivers and bays. They planted corn and used fish remains as fertilizer. In the winter, they moved inland from the harsh weather, and in the spring they moved to the coastlines.
They had traded - and fought - with European explorers since 1524.
In 1614, before the arrival of the Pilgrims, the English lured a well-known Wampanoag - Tisquantum, who was called Squanto by the English - and 20 other Wampanoag men onto a ship with the intention of selling them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto spent years trying to get back to his homeland.
During his absence, the Wampanoags were nearly wiped out by a mysterious disease that some Wampanoags believe came from the feces of rats aboard European boats, while other historians think it was likely small pox or possibly yellow fever.
Known as “The Great Dying,” the pandemic lasted three years.
By the time Squanto returned home in 1619, two-thirds of his people had been killed by it. English explorer Thomas Dermer described the once-populous villages along the banks of the bay as being “utterly void” of people.
In 1620, the English aboard the Mayflower made their way to Plymouth after making landfall in Provincetown. The Wampanoags watched as women and children got off the boat.
They knew their interactions with the Europeans would be different this time.
The Wampanoags kept tabs on the Pilgrims for months. In their first winter, half died due to cold, starvation and disease.
Ousamequin, often referred to as Massasoit, which is his title and means “great sachem,” faced a nearly impossible situation, historians and educators said. His nation’s population had been ravaged by disease, and he needed to keep peace with the neighboring Narragansetts. He probably reasoned that the better weapons of the English - guns versus his people’s bows and arrows - would make them better allies than enemies.
In the spring of 1621, he made the first contact.
By the fall, the Pilgrims - thanks in large part to the Wampanoags teaching them how to plant beans and squash in a mound with maize around it and use fish remains as fertilizer - had their first harvest of crops. To celebrate its first success as a colony, the Pilgrims had a “harvest feast” that became the basis for what is now called Thanksgiving.
The Wampanoags were not invited.
Ousamequin and his men showed up only after the English in their revelry shot off some of their muskets. At the sound of gunfire, the Wampanoags came running, fearing they were headed to war.
Told it was a harvest celebration, the Wampanoags joined, bringing five deer to share. There was fowl, fish, eel, shellfish and possibly cranberries from the area’s natural bogs.
In his book, This Land Is Their Land, author David J. Silverman said schoolchildren who make construction-paper feathered headdresses every year to portray the Indians at the first Thanksgiving are being taught fiction.
The Wampanoags did not wear them. Men wore a mohawk “roach” made from porcupine hair and strapped to their heads.
For those tribe members, Thanksgiving kicked off colonization and brought disease and servitude.
Mother Bear, a clan mother whose English name is Anita Peters, tells visitors to the tribe’s museum that a 1789 Massachusetts law made it illegal and “punishable by death” to teach a Mashpee Wampanoag Native to read or write.
She recounts how the English pushed the Wampanoag off their land and forced many to convert to Christianity.
Wampanoag land that had been held in common was eventually divided up, with each family getting 60 acres, and a system of taxation was put in place - both antithetical to Wampanoag culture.
Much later, the Wampanoags, like other tribes, also saw their children sent to harsh Native boarding schools, where they were told to cut their long hair, abandon their “Indian ways,” and stop speaking their native language.
Peters said at least two members of her family were sent to Carlisle Native school in Pennsylvania, which became the first government-run boarding school for Native American children in 1879. Its founder, Civil War veteran and Army Lieutenant Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, was an advocate of forced assimilation, invoking the motto: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
Today's descendants consider the welcoming of the Pilgrims as the tribe's biggest mistake.
In 1970, they created a “National Day of Mourning” that has become an annual event on Thanksgiving for some Wampanoags after planners for the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower landing refused to let them debunk the myths of the holiday as part of a commemoration. By then, only a few of the original Wampanoag tribes still existed.
In the 1970s, Mashpee Wampanoags sued to reclaim some of their ancestral homelands. But they lost, in part, because a federal judge said they were not then officially recognized as a tribe.
Mashpee Wampanoags filed for federal recognition in the mid-1970s, and more than three decades later, in 2007, they were granted that status. (Gay Head Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard are also federally recognized.)
In 2015, about 300 acres were put in federal trust for Mashpee Wampanoag under President Barack Obama. That essentially gave them a reservation, although it is composed of dozens of parcels that are scattered throughout the Cape Cod area and represents half of one percent of their land historically.
But President Donald Trump’s administration tried to take the land out of trust, jeopardizing their ability to develop it.
Mashpee Wampanoag tribal officials are still awaiting final word from Department of Interior - now led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head the agency - on the status of their land.
Some tribal leaders said a potential casino development would bring much-needed revenue to their community. But without the land in trust, it diminishes the tribe’s sovereignty.
They also worry about overdevelopment and pollution threatening waterways and wildlife.
When she was 8 years old, Peters said a schoolteacher explained the Thanksgiving tale. After the story, another child asked, “'What happened to the Indians?'"
The teacher answered, ‘Sadly, they’re all dead.’”
“No, they’re not,” Peters said. “I’m still here.”
She and other Wampanoags are trying to keep their culture and traditions alive.
Five years ago, the tribe started a school on its land that has about two dozen children, who range in age from two to 9. They learn math, science, history and other subjects in their native Algonquian language. The tribe also offers language classes for older tribal members, many of whom were forced to not speak their language and eventually forgot.
Wampanoag Meeting House, built in 1684, is one of the oldest Native American churches in the eastern United States and many of their ancestors are buried in the surrounding cemetery.
History has not been kind to these people. Still, they persevered and found a way to stay.
Comments