Schoolchildren are typically taught that Thanksgiving dates back to 1621, and the Pilgrims sharing a meal with the friendly native Americans, who helped the colony survive in the new world.
Now that I am older, I have discovered there are things I learned that were sort of incomplete or downright inaccurate. Thanksgiving is one of those things.
I watched a documentary on Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire the other evening. I learned that up until Julius Caesar took power as a dictator of the empire, it had been a republic, governed by a Senate chosen by the people.
In most school classes, when world history is taught, we only hear about what a great general Ceasar was and how he was assassinated while going to the forum.
The narrator of the film quoted the Roman statesman, lawyer, and scholar, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had this to say about the fall of the Roman Empire and the role played by Ceasar:
“To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to always remain a child.”
Cicero
History, then, is important to all of us. Not only does it help to inform, but knowing what truly happened in a given period of time helps to put things in context. And it leaves me with a question – How do we resolve the contradiction in history, the real loss, and suffering of Native people, with our own long-held family traditions?
Thanksgiving 2022 marks the 401st anniversary of that first Thanksgiving, but, in reality, Thanksgiving feasts predate Plymouth, and the peace celebrated that day was tenuous.
Settlers in Berkeley Hundred, in what is now Virginia, celebrated their arrival with a Thanksgiving as far back as 1619, according to National Geographic.
And decades before that, Spanish settlers and members of the Seloy tribe broke bread in Florida with salted pork, garbanzo beans, and a Mass in 1565, according to the National Parks Service.
Others pinpoint 1637 as the true origin of Thanksgiving, since the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governor, John Winthrop, declared a day to celebrate colonial soldiers who had just slaughtered hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children in what is now Mystic, Connecticut.
For most Americans, this Thanksgiving day is celebrated by eating a roast turkey, but this was more of an occasion for religious observance in past centuries. The Pilgrims would most likely have considered their sober 1621 day of prayer the first actual Thanksgiving, according to the History of Massachusetts Blog.
When the Mayflower arrived on the coast of Massachusetts in 1620, There were 102 colonists. However, the 53 pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving were the only colonists to survive the first winter in the New World. Disease and starvation struck down half of them.
These pilgrims made it through that first winter with the help of the local Wampanoag tribe, who taught them how to grow and harvest the local plants and wild animals.
Besides fowl and deer, guesses can be made based on the types of food they often wrote about, such as mussels, lobsters, grapes, plums, corn, and herbs.
The so-called guests at the feast included 90 Wampanoag Indians from a nearby village, including their leader Massasoit. Actually, it is not known if the tribe was invited, or just showed up.
However, the enduring holiday has also nearly erased from our collective memory what happened between the Wampanoag and the English just one generation later.
Massasoit and the Wampanoags allied with the English settlers after Plymouth was established and fought with the newcomers against the French and other local tribes. But the alliance became strained over time.
As thousands of English moved to Plymouth, more and more land was taken over, driving the Native American people from their ancestral homes. Authorities asserted control over “most aspects of Wampanoag life,” according to the book “Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today’s Northeastern United States.”
Another sad fact is based on a study published in Science Direct in 2019, that estimates the population of indigenous people in New England had been reduced by 90 percent by 1620, in what the colonists called the “Indian fever.”
According to the study, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 marks the onset of disease epidemics that resulted in the loss of the majority of indigenous people living in the Americas over the subsequent century.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
