This “holiday” has a troubling origin. Here’s what you should remember.
Thanksgiving is my favorite American tradition. I love mashed potatoes and cranberries, I love turkey and green bean casserole, and I really freaking love pumpkin pie. My mouth waters just thinking about it. It can’t be commercialized like Christmas or Halloween. It’s about family, and being grateful, right? To celebrate the coming together of the colonists — I mean pilgrims — of the Mayflower, and Native Americans of the Squanto and Wampanoag after a brutal winter? At least, that’s the version we’ve been taught.
Surprise! Thanksgiving wasn’t so cute! It wasn’t a bunch of smiling faces sitting at a dinner table talking about how wonderfully the turkey has been cooked! Hell, there wasn’t even a turkey!
Historians dispute this multi-cultural love fest we all celebrate as just a mutually beneficial dinner between struggling communities. The colonists were, in fact, contemptuous of the “Indians,” whom they regarded as uncivilized and satanic heathens, and the peace between the tribes and the early settlers was short lived.
A band of Puritans invaded the Pequot tribe’s Green Corn Festival where they shot, clubbed, and burned alive 700 native men, women, and children. This slaughter, according to Robert Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, was the real origin of Thanksgiving — which Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop created in 1637 after hundreds of people were murdered.
Are we celebrating the genocide of a race? Or the survival of a struggling nation? The troubling origins of Thanksgiving makes me wonder how most of America refuses to acknowledge this fatal blow to the indigenous people. Not long after the genocide, they were enslaved, raped and abused. Their population dwindled, and the country we grow to love was built upon the backs of the people who were here before us, who helped us. “Thanksgiving” celebrates a moment when things were peaceful, but even that peace was only necessary in order to get the Natives’ help. After they got that help, you know what happened next.
Isn’t it pretty f--ked up to say that I still love Thanksgiving? Do not tell me you don’t, even after learning this. Don’t tell me now you will immediately protest anything having to do with family, food, and football, and that the sight of turkey makes you think racism!
Does the average American family even think about the origins of this holiday? I’m afraid not. We celebrate Thanksgiving as a day to be grateful, and eat. Not much else. It’s a much different holiday compared to Christmas, Halloween or Easter. There isn’t a bunch of buying/receiving useless shit. It’s quite the opposite, and that’s why I love it. And I will always love it for that, and celebrate it for that reason. But, I also will take part in the “National Day of Mourning,” because I am not celebrating the horrific deaths of indigenous people, or their decline.
I will strongly protest the celebration of Thanksgiving as a day of “coming together through adversity” or anything to do with Pilgrims and Native Americans bonding through friendship, because that’s simply not the truth. I hope people can realize that.
Instead, we can celebrate something entirely unrelated, like the gathering of family and good food. Celebrate this contemporary version, but remember that this country was not founded through harmony. Remember the indigenous who died, and respect the ones who are alive. Acknowledge the origin of Thanksgiving and mourn it. Know the truth, and distribute the truth. Know that there’s a difference between the Thanksgiving you know, and the one that actually happened 378 years ago.
Neelam Khan is a sophomore studying screenwriting and producing. Will you continue to celebrate Thanksgiving? Email her at nk852613@ohio.edu.
