Unthanksgiving Day

“Like the Columbus myth, the story of Thanksgiving has morphed into an easily digestible narrative that, despite its actual underlying truths, is designed to reinforce a sense of collective patriotic pride.” (Dina Gilio-Whitaker)

Rethinking the myth of Thanksgiving resources

An educator friend reached out to me asking for recommendations for her students to talk about the myth that is Thanksgiving. So, like all other resources here on my website, I decided to create this one. I’ll be updating it periodically. I can’t say I think too much about this holiday or any other one since I didn’t grow up celebrating any of them. As a kid I knew it was a problematic holiday but hadn’t acquired the vocabulary to explain why. Over the years I have been able to express to family and friends the myth we were all taught while going to these colonial educational institutions as kids. I’m grateful this myth wasn’t taught to us within our home but unfortunately, lies are still pushed on children within the educational system. Why continue to perpetuate this “holiday” myth for the sake of “giving thanks,” on this day? It would be like celebrating “Columbus Day” and “Indigenous Peoples Day” on the same day. One doesn’t cancel out the other. Instead, abolish this holiday (and Columbus Day). Let’s instead uplift Indigenous perspectives and stories. Also, have these difficult conversations with family members. Enjoy.

Toolkits

• Unlearning the History of Thankstaking – Curated by Neftalí Duran  for the  I-Collective (PDF)

Articles

• Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving, Native Knowledge 360, National Museum of the American Indian
• Book Excerpt: The Real Thanksgiving Story That old Pilgrims’ tale may have been an early example of fake news, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, November 21, 2016
• The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue, Claire Bugos, November 26, 2019
• Here’s why Thanksgiving is a day of mourning for indigenous people of Massachusetts (article with video)
• Read the “Suppressed Speech Of Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, Wampanoag” on a blog maintained by Tupac Enrique (Izkaloteka)
• Rethinking Thanksgiving toolkit (2022)
• American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving (pdf)
• Read and discuss the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address with your students. This expression of gratitude is recited by Haudenosaunee people at community gatherings throughout the year.
• Native History: It’s Memorial Day—In 1637, the Pequot Massacre Happened 
• You Cannot Give Thanks for What Is Stolen, Joseph Pierce (Cherokee), 2022

Books

• Apess, William. Eulogy on King Philip: as pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal Street, Boston / by the Rev. William Apes. Boston: The author, 1836
• A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest, second edition; New York: The author, 1831
• This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, David J. Silverman
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen *Chapter 3 focuses the Thanksgiving myth; pdf download available of older edition

Resources for children

• How to talk to little kids about Thanksgiving, explained by a Native American children’s author (2022)
• Are you talking to your little ones about Native and Indigenous communities this Thanksgiving? (2022)

Organizations

• Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe website
• UNITED AMERICAN INDIANS OF NEW ENGLAND & Watch [LIVE] National Day of Mourning 2021 (November 25, 2021, 12PM ET) *happens every year
• National Day of Mourning 2022

Indigenous Media

• The Red Nation
• Indian Country Today
• Native American Calling
• National Native News
• Native News Online
• High Country News
• Indianz

Primary Resources

Here are some of the most well-known primary resources often cited related to this holiday. These can be seen in person at the Newberry Library, an independent research library focused in the Humanities located in Chicago, Illinois. It is free to visit and open to the public and all that is needed is to register for a readers account to access materials in-person. Their hours are Tuesday-Saturdays, 10-4pm. To learn more about doing research here, go to their Use the Collection in-person page.

• A son of the forest : the experience of William Apes, a native of the forest : comprising a notice of the Pequod tribe of Indians / written by himself. Apess, William, 1798-1839. 1829
• A relation or Iournall of the beginning and proceedings of the English plantation setled at Plimoth in New England, by certaine English aduenturers both merchants and others. : With their difficult passage, their safe ariuall, their ioyfull building of, and comfortable planting themselves in the now well defended towne of New Plimoth / As also a relation of fovre seuerall discoueries since made by some of the same English planters there resident. … With an answer to all such obiections as are any way made against lawfulnesse of English plantations in those parts. 1622 *one of the only contemporary sources for “the first Thanksgiving,”
• A brief history of the Pequot War: especially of the memorable taking of their fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 / Written by Major John Mason, a principal actor therein, as then chief captain and commander of Connecticut forces ; With an introduction and some explanatory notes by the Reverend Mr. Thomas Prince ; [Nine lines from Psalms] Mason, John, 1600-1672. 1736
• The generall historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles : with the names of the adventurers, planters, and governours from their first beginning an ⁰ 1584 to this present 1626 : with the proceedings of those severall colonies and the accidents that befell them in all their journyes and discoveries : also the maps and descriptions of all those countryes, their commodities, people, government, customes, and religion yet knowne : divided into sixe bookes / by Captaine Iohn Smith. Smith, John, 1580-1631. 1627
• [Chronicles of the Pilgrim fathers of the colony of Plymouth, from 1602-1625. Alexander Young. Boston. 1841. Ayer 150.5 .M4 Y7 1841]. Published by Alexander Young in 1841, Chronicles of Our Pilgrim Fathers was a narrative history of Plymouth and the New England region covering the first quarter of the 17th century. The work was especially significant due to a footnote where Young re-printed a December 1621 letter by Edward Winslow describing a feast in which Pilgrims rejoiced for a successful harvest and were joined by about 90 Wampanoag men. In Young’s telling, “This was the first Thanksgiving.” The rest, as they say, is history.Yet while this feast did occur, it didn’t happen the way many of us have been taught. The 90 Wampanoag people who engaged in the feast didn’t do so in a peacemaking effort, to celebrate Pilgrim settlement, or to give thanks for the Pilgrims. Hearing gunfire, they showed up to honor a mutual-defense pact they’d made with the Pilgrims and defend them in battle (the Pilgrims, it turned out, had been shooting off their firearms for fun).

  And from the Pilgrim’s perspective, the feast was probably meant as a minor celebration of a successful harvest. No Wampanoag people were invited, and the event didn’t immediately kick off an annual tradition. In fact, it wasn’t until 1863 that Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday and the stories about a mythical tradition began to develop.

  Young’s footnote and the Thanksgiving myth it inaugurated have had significant impacts on the way our nation understands the history of settler-Native relationships and violence. The story casts Pilgrims as the pious, thriving, and peaceful founders of the nation, while conveniently placing Indigenous people as props that would disappear. But the fabled celebration of peace erases the many instances of settler-colonial violence that would come after–and the fact that Wampanoag people continue to live in their homelands today. Likewise, it served as a way to conveniently draw attention away from settler-colonial violence in the West and, later, Jim Crow violence in the South.

Videos

• Let’s talk about the myth of Thanksgiving, real history tiktok creator @Modern warrior (video)
• A Wampanoag retelling of Thanksgiving, Indian Country Today (video)
• The Harsh Truth About Thanksgiving | NowThis, 2019 (video)
• Thanksgiving ‘National Day Of Mourning’ For Some, 2014 (video)
• This Land Is Their Land, George Washington University History Professor David Silverman on This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, 2019. In his book he recalled the peace treaty between the Plymouth colony and the Wampanoag tribe that started in 1621 and lasted until 1675 and included the first Thanksgiving (video)

Documentaries related to Native & Indigenous Histories

• The Canary Effect (2006) is a documentary that explores a variety of topics, including various policies from the United States government that have negatively affected Native American people over the years. It touches on the economic marginalization these communities have faced, along with the media’s refusal to report on various stories of death by suicide and Columbine-style school shootings that have occurred among Indigenous youth. Directed by Robin Davey and Yellow Thunder Woman, it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006. The Canary Effect is free to watch on Youtube, here.
• Project Chariot (2013) puts a spotlight on when the United States government wanted to experiment with nuclear testing in Alaska during the 1950s and ’60s. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission planned to detonate thermonuclear bombs at a site near the Indigenous village town of Point Hope. People from Point Hope protested the plan and eventually stopped it from happening. While no detonation happened, it was later revealed that the site was radioactively contaminated by another secret experiment in which the government buried several thousand pounds of radioactive soil in the same area without telling nearby people. A 1996 report from The New York Times points out that the cancer rate in the area was much higher than the national average. Project Chariot is free to watch on Vimeo, here.
• The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo (2009) is a documentary that tells the history of when the United States Army marched over eight thousand Navajo men, women, and children at gunpoint through three hundred miles of desert in the Southwest to a prison camp in eastern New Mexico. Hundreds of people died from starvation and exposure to the winter elements. You can order it or watch parts on YouTube.
• Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding Schools (2016) focuses on the history and brutality of American boarding schools that tried to “kill the Indian” in Native peoples, as put by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt. These institutions forced assimilation onto people who were unwillingly taken from their families; their hair was cut, they were made to wear military uniforms, along with being forced to learn and speak English. Many were punished physically and sexually abused at the boarding schools. The documentary is broken into two parts and can be viewed for free here.
• Our Sisters in Spirit (2018) focuses on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) epidemic, a crisis that hard largely gone uncovered by the media. There is systemic violence that has led to a disproportionate number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, many cases which have never been solved. According to information from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database, Native Americans and Alaska Natives represent only 0.8% of the U.S. population, but in 2017, they made up 1.8% of missing persons cases. The documentary is free to watch on YouTube.