New York Times · 2 days ago
Not
to rain on our Thanksgiving Day parade, but the story of the first
Thanksgiving, as most Americans have been taught it, is not exactly
accurate.
Blame
school textbooks with details often so abridged, softened or out of
context that they are rendered false; children’s books that distill the
story to its most pleasant version; or animated Thanksgiving television
specials like “The Mouse on the Mayflower,” which first aired in 1968, that not only misinformed a generation, but also enforced a slew of cringeworthy stereotypes.
High
school textbooks are particularly bad about stating absolutes because
these materials “teach history” by giving students facts to memorize
even when the details may be unclear, said James W. Loewen, a
sociologist and the author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.”
“That mind-set pervades everything they talk about and certainly Thanksgiving,” he said.
The timeline is relative.
The
Mayflower did bring the Pilgrims to North America from Plymouth,
England, in 1620, and they disembarked at what is now Plymouth, Mass.,
where they set up a colony. In 1621, they celebrated a successful
harvest with a three-day gathering that was attended by members of the
Wampanoag tribe. It’s from this that we derive Thanksgiving as we know
it.
But
it wasn’t until the 1830s that this event was called the first
Thanksgiving by New Englanders who looked back and thought it resembled
their version of the holiday, said Kate Sheehan, a spokeswoman for Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth.
The
holiday wasn’t made official until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln
declared it as a kind of thank you for the Civil War victories in
Vicksburg, Miss., and Gettysburg, Pa.
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Beyond
that, claiming it was the “first Thanksgiving” isn’t quite right either
as both Native American and European societies had been holding
festivals to celebrate successful harvests for centuries, Mr. Loewen
said.
A
prevalent opposing viewpoint is that the first Thanksgiving stemmed
from the massacre of Pequot people in 1637, a culmination of the Pequot
War. While it is true that a day of thanksgiving was noted in the
Massachusetts Bay and the Plymouth colonies afterward, it is not
accurate to say it was the basis for our modern Thanksgiving, Ms.
Sheehan said.
And
Plymouth, Mr. Loewen noted, was already a village with clear fields and
a spring when the Pilgrims found it. “A lovely place to settle,” he
said. “Why was it available? Because every single native person who had
been living there was a corpse.” Plagues had wiped them out.
It wasn’t just about religious freedom.
It’s
been taught that the Pilgrims came because they were seeking religious
freedom, but that’s not entirely true, Mr. Loewen said.
The
Pilgrims had religious freedom in Holland, where they first arrived in
the early 17th century. Like those who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607,
the Pilgrims came to North America to make money, Mr. Loewen said.
“They
were also coming here in order to establish a religious theocracy,
which they did,” he said. “That’s not exactly the same as coming here
for religious freedom. It’s kind of coming here against religious
freedom.”
Also,
the Pilgrims never called themselves Pilgrims. They were separatists,
Mr. Loewen said. The term Pilgrims didn’t surface until around 1880.
There’s no evidence that native people were invited.
Possibly
the most common misconception is that the Pilgrims extended an
invitation to the Native Americans for helping them reap the harvest.
The truth of how they all ended up feasting together is unknown.
“The
English-written record does not mention an invitation, and Wampanoag
oral tradition does not seem to reach back to this event,” Ms. Sheehan
said. But there are reasons the Wampanoag leader could have been there,
she said, adding: “His people had been planting on the other side of the
brook from the colony. Another possibility is that after his harvest
was gathered, he was making diplomatic calls.”
It is true that the celebration was an exceptional cross-cultural moment, with food, games and prayer.
The
deadly conflicts that came after, though, created an undercurrent that
is glossed over, Mr. Loewen said. Still, “we might as well take shards
of fairness and idealism and so on whenever we find them in our past and
recognize that and give credit to them,” he said.
The role of Squanto is complicated.
Tisquantum,
known as Squanto, did play a large role in helping the Pilgrims, as
American children are taught. His people, the Patuxet, a band of the
Wampanoag tribe, had lived on the site where the Pilgrims settled. When
they arrived, he became a translator for them in diplomacy and trade
with other native people, and showed them the most effective method for
planting corn and the best locations to fish, Ms. Sheehan said.
That’s usually where the lesson ends, but that’s just a fraction of his story.
He
was captured by the English in 1614 and later sold into slavery in
Spain. He spent several years in England, where he learned English. He
returned to New England in 1619, only to find his entire Patuxet tribe
dead from smallpox. He met the Pilgrims in March 1621.
There was no turkey or pie.
There
was no mention of turkey being at the 1621 bounty, and there was
definitely no pie. Settlers lacked butter and wheat flour for a crust,
and they had no oven for baking. What is known is that the Pilgrims
harvested crops and that the Wampanoag brought five deer. If fowl graced
the table, it was probably duck or goose.
The
menu may have also included cornmeal, pumpkin, succotash and
cranberries. There were no sweet potatoes in North America at the time.
Contrary to popular depictions, there were about 90 native people in attendance, almost double the number of Pilgrims by some accounts.
Correction: November 21, 2017
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a living history museum in Plymouth, Mass. It is Plimoth Plantation, not Plimouth.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a living history museum in Plymouth, Mass. It is Plimoth Plantation, not Plimouth.
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