Anna Suzuki
Thanksgiving, like most holidays, is a time when families gather to express togetherness and gratitude.
“[Thanksgiving is] about … getting together with the family,” said junior Cohen Tabler. “Out of all the holidays, it’s the main one that’s about being with your family, being with your loved ones.”
However, these feelings of harmony and unity at the dinner table mask a centuries-long tradition of abuse of Native Americans.
Originating in the fall of 1621, the Thanksgiving tradition comes from an alleged three-day feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts, between the Pilgrims and the local Wampanoags. However, according to Christophe Boucher, an associate professor of Native American history at the College of Charleston, the feast was originally only meant for the Pilgrims, not the Wampanoags. The narrative of Thanksgiving and tradition of togetherness was only created after Wampanoags joined the feast after hearing colonists fire guns during their celebration.
“If you start thinking about it, it is messed up that we celebrate [Thanksgiving],” said junior Tyler Sterry. “Is it this peaceful gathering between … Natives and white [people]? I mean, clearly our history contradicts that.”
Additionally, the ideas of unity and togetherness found in the traditional Thanksgiving narrative aren’t based in truth, with the Pilgrims holding heavy prejudice against Native Americans. Similarly, the Pilgrims and Wampanoags also had many disagreements, such as on how to use land or on the control of European livestock that actively destroyed Native American crops.
Only 50 years after the original event of Thanksgiving, these disagreements between Pilgrims and Native Americans erupted into a war, primarily due to the increasing population of the Pilgrims. The war would forever change the Pilgrims’ view of Native Americans, seeing them as savages and pests that needed to be eradicated.
“After [the] original celebration, if it was a celebration, there [were] centuries of mistreatment of Native Americans,” Sterry said. “[They faced lots] of racial prejudice by white [people].”
In following centuries, Native Americans have continued to suffer from the impacts of colonists’ abuse and the actions of many United States institutions. In the 1830s, in an attempt to get more land to grow cotton, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were brutally marched off their land on the Trail of Tears and onto reservations.
On these reservations, starvation was common, and disease easily wiped out Native American populations, making their culture almost impossible to maintain. Additionally, due to boarding schools implemented on the reservations, which Native Americans were forced to attend, what was left of their culture was almost destroyed. Native American children were forced to learn English, convert to Christianity, unlearn their Indigenous traditions and instead learn the traditions and customs of white people.
Today with “inclusivity” being a key topic, Native American perspectives and ideas have continued to have little representation in society. In a study by Dr. Stacy L. Smith at the University of Southern California, less than 1% of speaking roles in the top-grossing films in Hollywood went to Indigenous characters. By having little representation in society, Native Americans are unable to show their culture, instead being misrepresented by false narratives and stereotypes.
“A lot of Americans, for a long time and still nowadays, they have [had] this image of [Native Americans] as … just stereotypes, as if they’re trying to return to the land,” Sterry said.
Similarly, rather than erasing Thanksgiving’s history, Americans should confront the violence and mistreatment that its traditional narrative often overlooks. Ignoring this history would further diminish Native American representation and erase the experiences that hundreds of thousands of people had.
“I don’t think we should remove [Thanksgiving] from [the country’s] history,” Sterry said. “We have to be educated about the historical mistreatment of Native Americans.”
However, recognizing Thanksgiving’s history is not the same as celebrating the holiday itself. What began as an escape from tyranny ultimately contributed to the creation of a society that persecuted hundreds of thousands of people. Rather than celebrating a holiday rooted in the starvation, displacement, disease and systematic destruction of Native American cultures, Americans should use its history as an opportunity to acknowledge the harm that European settlers inflicted on the Indigenous communities.
