Do you celebrate Thanksgiving? I see more Friendsgiving invitations than the Thanksgiving one I’m used to. I lived in the States and had my fair share of Turkey Day, as my father likes to call it, but I never actually knew the history. I just gobbled up the massive spread of food that has so much potential stigma for how a recipe is made such as mac & cheese or collard greens gone wrong.
These recipes are almost set in stone, cranberry sauce, candied yams, pecan pie or sweet potato pie, cornbread, the very specific mac & cheese, the stuffing, and the obvious big ass turkey. White people’s Thanksgiving isn’t the same as the beautiful black Thanksgiving, and let’s be honest — black Thanksgiving is absolutely fire. It wins every time.
Hold up though, wasn’t Thanksgiving a kind of celebratory feast of some sort? Didn’t it have something to do with Indigenous natives and Pilgrims? How did this turkey come into it and why is it getting boycotted every now and then? Well, let’s start with a little history.
Thanksgiving History
It was a harvest festival celebrated by the Pilgrims, the English settlers who traveled to America on the Mayflower that ended its travels in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. These Pilgrims established the Plymouth Colony, the very first permanent English colony in New England and the second in America.
This settlement served as the capital of the Plymouth Colony, which developed as the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts and they didn’t fare well. Half of the Pilgrims died during their first winter due to cold, starvation, and disease.
The Wampanoags, or “People of the First Light” in their native language, can trace their ancestry for eons to southeastern Massachusetts, a land which they have called Patuxet. Under the Wampanoag’s watchful eye, they noticed the women and children of the Pilgrims and concluded they didn’t come to their land to fight.
Wampanoag and the people of Patuxet have been trading, and fighting with the Europeans since 1524. In 1614, the English took a very popular Wampanoag named Tisquantum who was named Squanto by the English, and 20 others of his tribe onto their ship with the intention of selling them as slaves in Malaga, Spain.
During the years that Tisquantum tried to return to his people, the Wampanoags were nearly wiped out during what was known as “The Great Dying”. A pandemic that lasted three years and was likely started by rat feces, smallpox, or yellow fever from the boats of the European settlers. Tisquantum, known by the diminutive variant of Squanto, finally returned to his people in 1619. He sadly learned that two-thirds of his people, the Patuxet have been wiped out by it.
Ousamequin, often referred to as Massasoit (or Great Sachem, which means Great Leader), was chief of the Wampanoags and was urged by Tisquantum to become allies with the Pilgrims. The alliance of the Wampanoags and Pilgrims brought agricultural knowledge from Ousamequin and his people to the Pilgrims whose foreign seeds failed in this new land.
The Pilgrims learned how to plant squash, beans, and maize (Which is a growing method called 3 Sisters) and other techniques of using fish remains as fertilizer. With that tremendous Indian knowledge came the Pilgrim’s first harvest of crops which was celebrated as a success and this became the basis of what is now called Thanksgiving.
Yet, the Wampanoags were not invited to this celebration. The English Pilgrims shot off their muskets in the air during their celebration. At the sound of gunfire, Ousamequin and the Wampanoags came running to aid; fearing war was at hand. On the contrary, they were then told it was a harvest celebration and the Wampanoags joined bringing five deer to share, with fowl, perhaps turkey, and fish.
"While the celebrants might well have feasted on wild turkey, the local diet also included fish, eels, shellfish, and a Wampanoag dish called nasaump, which the Pilgrims had adopted: boiled cornmeal mixed with vegetables and meats. There were no potatoes (an indigenous South American food not yet introduced into the global food system) and no pies (because there was no butter, wheat flour, or sugar)." - Philip Deloria (November 18, 2019). ‘The Invention of Thanksgiving'
It wasn’t all happy-ending material with what ensued. Tension, strife, and differences took hold. A simple look back at this, Thanksgiving kicked off colonization.
Later history proved ugly and very sinister, with the death punishment to anyone who teaches a Wampanoag how to read and write, or the conversion to Christianity which became a pray-or-die situation, or the infamous Indian boarding schools and the demise of their language and culture, slowly being erased. 123
Thanksgiving and a Continuous Fight
Frank James, a well-known Aquinnah Wampanoag activist, said that his people’s welcoming an alliance with the Pilgrims in 1621 was “Perhaps our biggest mistake”.
Here is part of a very insightful and suppressed speech that would have been delivered on September 10, 1970, at Plymouth, Massachusetts on the 350th Pilgrim descendants anniversary by Wamsutta (Frank B.) James:
“We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people” 4
In the 1970s, the Mashpee Wampanoags sued to reclaim some of their ancestral homelands. But they lost, in part, because a federal judge said they weren’t then officially recognized as a tribe. 5
“For the Wampanoags and many other American Indians, the fourth Thursday in November [Thanksgiving] is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.” - Dana Hedgpeth
The Mashpee Wampanoags filed for federal recognition in the mid-1970s, and more than three decades later, in 2007, they were granted that status.
In 2015 a federal trust was put in effect for the Mashpee Wampanoag consisting of 300 acres under President Barack Obama. It gave them a reservation that was a scattered land acquisition that represented half of 1 percent of their ancestral land in the Cape Cod area.
This history is just a small percentage of Indians that have been so massively wronged. In such a small area of Cape Cod, and, Plymouth Bay became a small preview and effects that spread across the rest of the United States. Nonetheless, with these incredible hardships and heavy stories the Mashpee Wampanoag and countless other Indigenous tribes are still fighting for their land, culture, and history.
The Tradition
Now, here is where I lost my time, concentration and to be honest, my comprehension.
In short, there were several proclamations declaring Thanksgiving a thing. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Samuel Adams, John Adams (I’m not sure if these two are related), Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and, Ulysses S. Grant all had a hand in keeping this tradition alive by rectifying, appointing, observing, declaring, renewing, voting, issuing, publishing, acknowledging, drafting, adopting, or proclaiming in some fucking way through Congress, the House of Representatives, the Constitution, Legislature, or some body of government or political entity that Thanksgiving is a praise to God and to give thanks to God for… Well you know, the long lineage of harvest celebrations, and again, my comprehension is shot at this point but it basically became a religious observance with an astute ignorance of who the fuck helped out with that initial harvest in the first place… My goodness!
For the majority of Americans, Thanksgiving is a celebration through food, and don’t find it a religious celebration or a commemoration of Pilgrim lineage. Or is it a whitewashing of genocide and injustice against Indigenous Americans? For other Americans, it is a National Day of Mourning. An acknowledgment of the genocide, conquest, and erasure of Indigenous culture, knowledge, and people. Just like any polarity, there is another side where there are some Indigenous peoples who celebrate a similar thanksgiving under the name ‘Wopila’ a celebration appreciated by Native Americans of the Great Plains that has been practiced for centuries and runs in tandem with Thanksgiving.
Depends on where you are from and what you stand for, but either way, the history of Thanksgiving is an interesting one that most of us aren’t aware of.
The turkey seems more dry and harder to swallow now doesn't it?
Stick with a guineafowl, they taste better in my opinion.
Gravy-ly yours,
The Greasy Pen.
Thank you for reading.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/11/04/thanksgiving-anniversary-wampanoag-indians-pilgrims/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squanto
https://web.archive.org/web/20121224003144/http://www.pilgrimhallmuseum.org/pdf/TG_What_Happened_in_1621.pdf
http://www.uaine.org/suppressed_speech.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/03/25/archives/land-suit-of-indians-dismissed-by-judge-he-upholds-jurors-in-action.html