When I was a young girl, my family and I shuttled up to Connecticut for every Thanksgiving. The drive up was arduous— 2 hours felt like a near eternity then— but when we arrived at my grandparents’ house time stood still. My father would help my grandmother with the turkey, and my mother and I would ice cupcakes together. I can still remember how the rosemary, sage, and buttercream frosting tasted, and how sitting down with my family filled me with warmth. Comfort, I learned, was the feeling of my family’s calloused hands entwined in mine as we said grace.
I still celebrate Thanksgiving with love and home-cooked meals— just last Sunday, I hosted a “Friendsgiving.” My mother, stepfather, and I cooked for 7 hours straight; I buttered the turkey and iced cupcakes just as my parents had so many years ago. We were fueled by laughter and pure determination, stopping only to welcome people into our home. My friends brought their own food to the table, each dish a symbol of their own Thanksgiving memories. We spent the entire night laughing, bound together by love and a ridiculous amount of food.
Thanksgiving has shaped my definitions of family and friendship. I have come to associate it with the warmth of home: no matter how difficult the year was, I always had a seat at someone’s Thanksgiving feast. But things are not like they used to be— I can no longer love Thanksgiving with the wholehearted innocence that I once had. I love my friends and family, but how can I love Thanksgiving when it signifies conquest and misery?
America’s popular understanding of Thanksgiving is flawed. The notion that the Pilgrims lived harmoniously alongside Native Americans erases centuries of Native American oppression and genocide. The reality of the first Thanksgiving dinner is that it was preceded by enslavement and disease. English explorers enslaved the Patuxet people and sailed home to England, tainting the New World with smallpox to eradicate those who had escaped.
By the time the Pilgrims arrived, only one Patuxet Indian remained: Tisquantum, more popularly known as Squanto. His enslavement in England made him both a savior and a translator for the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims had recently lost much of their population during the “Starving Time,” so Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to cultivate food. He negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe, allowing for a celebratory feast between the two communities.
But the peace and cooperation ended at that feast. As increasingly more Dutch and English zealots immigrated to America, tensions rose between the indigenous people and the foreign settlers. The colonists seized land, captured Native Americans for enslavement, and murdered those unfit for slavery. Peace between the Native American people and the colonists was impossible. In an act of rebellion against the English people, the Pequot tribe killed English traders. Though their deaths are often painted as the cause of the Pequot war, those deaths were the culmination of decades-long conflict between Indian peoples that was exacerbated by the presence of the Dutch and the English.
In 1637, over 400 men, women, and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival. Hours before the celebration, the enraged colonists attacked the Pequot people in their sleep, shooting and beating the men to death, and burning the women and children alive. In what historians call “The Mystic Massacre,” over 400 unarmed Pequot people were murdered within an hour.
The next day, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared “A Day Of Thanksgiving” to celebrate. Cheered by their “victory,” the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over sold into slavery, while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with as many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England, and bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible.
Following another successful raid against the Pequot people, churches announced a second day of “thanksgiving” to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the severed heads of Natives were kicked through the streets. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts — where it remained on display for 24 years.
Thanksgiving serves as a national day of mourning for modern day Native Americans. It is a painful reminder of the prejudice that massacred tribe after tribe, of the genocide that defined their race, and nearly wiped them from the Earth. As Americans, we must separate our love for our family from the definition of Thanksgiving. We can enjoy homemade meals, cherish our loved ones, and give thanks without Thanksgiving. In order to live justly, we must remember the REAL history, and make an effort to change.
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