This Land Is Their Land

Most of us who are not Wampanoag or American Indian will never fully grasp the raw emotions indigenous people associate with Thanksgiving. Yet the nation can and should move toward such an understanding. Doing so will be a small step toward creating a more welcoming environment for Indians in the national culture of the United States after generations of hostility and indifference. Taking Indian people’s perspectives into account will also shed light on how fundamentally the nation’s character has been shaped by white people’s conquest and ongoing subjugation of Native America. Failing to come to terms with the hubris and destructiveness of that process—or, worse, seeing it as a glorious part of America’s supposed greatness—conditions the people of the United States to perpetuate those evils in new forms. If how we tell history is one of the ways we shape our present and future, we can do no better than to rethink the myth of the First Thanksgiving and its role in the Thanksgiving holiday.

Wampanoags themselves are conflicted about their people’s cameo in this tradition. Roland Mooanum James, who has succeeded his late father, Frank, in leading the National Day of Mourning protest, has no use for the Thanksgiving celebration. As he declared at the 2017 rally, “Today we say, ‘no thanks, no giving.’ ” His position has a great deal of support among contemporary Wampanoags, though the number of tribal members who attend the National Day of Mourning has declined over the years as it has addressed a greater range of ills sometimes only tangentially involving Native people. Some Wampanoags now acknowledge their collective mourning in other family and community gatherings. Darius Coombs of Mashpee says that some of his tribespeople set aside Thanksgiving to recognize those they’ve lost. Others also address what they’ve lost, because, as Aquinnah’s Jonathan Perry explains, so much of the prosperity for which other Americans are thankful came at Native people’s expense. This feeling of victimhood is especially poignant given that Wampanoag communities still suffer high levels of poverty, with all its associated ills, while living in the shadow of sometimes garish wealth. Wampanoag people in southeastern New England are faced daily with the sight of outsiders’ extravagant coastal estates, occupied for only six or eight weeks in summer, built atop places where the ancestors are buried and where some of them fished, hunted, and gathered within memory. The image sickens and depresses. And yet there is no escaping it or the sense that other Americans revel in it. Around the time of Thanksgiving, one cannot drive past neighbors’ lawns or go to the store without confronting happy Pilgrim and Indian decorations, or turn on the television, radio, or computer without being bombarded with Pilgrim and Indian themes. The symbols of inequity, ingratitude, and injustice that time of year are relentless, even if the National Football League’s Washington Redskins club isn’t playing in one of the televised holiday games.1

At the same time, some Wampanoag people take pride in the attention their people receive during the Thanksgiving season and see it as an opportunity to educate the general public. As Mashpee’s Bethia Washington puts it, “We always get called in the month of November … The positive thing about this time of year is that we are thought of. That opens the door to greater learning and understanding.” She is disappointed, though, that “then we’re not here the rest of the year.” Some of the Wampanoag staff at the Plimoth Plantation living history museum paint their faces black in mourning the week of Thanksgiving to open conversations with museum patrons who expect patriotic themes. Having observed these interactions firsthand, I’m struck by the patience, thoughtfulness, and sense of responsibility of the Wampanoag interpreters, who say that change comes one mind at a time.2

The Mashpee Wampanoag tribal chairman Cedric Cromwell captured these ambiguities effectively in a 2012 address. He remarked, “The Thanksgiving holiday is a complicated day for our people. We are forever intertwined with the American Thanksgiving myth, however inaccurate it may be. Some of our people choose to observe this day as a Day of Mourning. Some choose to celebrate in a thoroughly American way. Many choose a different path, spending the day with family and friends but acknowledging our unique history and connection to this day.” The response of Aquinnah’s Linda Coombs to the question of how Wampanoags observe Thanksgiving is “you could talk to ten people and get ten different answers.” Yet nearly all of them, she emphasizes, believe “that the whole concept of Thanksgiving as it’s generally seen or practiced in this country is kind of like a superficial layer over what’s really on the ground.” In other words, it is a sugarcoating of the past and present abuses of Native people by European colonists and their successors.3

A growing, critical mass of progressive educators have begun doing away with Pilgrim pageants and depictions of indigenous people as relics of the past. Instead, their students reflect on the history of colonialism and the modern issues confronting Native America, particularly the Wampanoags. The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s leading institutions for advancing tolerance and justice for the most vulnerable members of American society, has rightly criticized traditional grade-school celebrations of Thanksgiving as damaging to Native and non-Native students alike. It contends that festive Pilgrim and Indian imagery, and Thanksgiving pageant depictions of friendly Indians consenting to colonialism, “contributes to the indoctrination of American youth into a false narrative that relegates indigenous peoples to the past and thus turns real human beings into costumes for a few days a year. It’s not just bad pedagogy; it’s socially irresponsible … Teaching about Thanksgiving in a socially responsible way means that educators accept the ethical obligation to provide students with accurate information and to reject traditions that sustain harmful stereotypes about indigenous people.” In recent years, educators have developed numerous resources to heed this call, including lesson plans that treat the evolution of American Thanksgiving celebration as an object of study itself, and that link the events of the 1620s to the ongoing struggles of the Wampanoags and other Native peoples to defend and regain their land, sovereignty, and cultural self-determination.4

Nevertheless, there is still a very long way to go. In my college courses, half or more of the students (largely ages eighteen to twenty-two) still report having performed in Thanksgiving pageants as children. I’ve come across one reason why during the fifteen years that I’ve been contributing to workshops to help primary and secondary school social studies teachers enhance their content. Those instructors have widely complained that they feel woefully underprepared to address Native American history even as they recognize its glaring absence in their curricula. At the same time, the statewide standardized tests that largely dictate their lessons require little knowledge of the Native American past. So instead of incorporating indigenous people into American history writ large and using their experiences to challenge the dominant narratives, social studies teachers commonly set aside a week or two in November to stumble through the Pilgrim-Wampanoag story and then drop Indians from consideration. These educators come from every corner of the United States: red states and blue states; urban, rural, and suburban. It’s the same set of issues practically everywhere.

Fixing this problem in the schools, never mind society as a whole, requires political action at several different levels. Parents need to withhold their children from Thanksgiving pageants if the teachers insist on putting on these performances despite all the evidence of the damage it causes. Teachers have to pressure their book-purchasing committees for texts that incorporate Native actors more robustly and accurately. They must insist on maps that not only depict Native people but place them in the right place at the right time, as opposed to textbook illustrations that portray America as an empty continent claimed by two or three imperial powers, waiting for the United States to absorb it as if by divine will. Educators of every level must call on state-level test-making agencies to design questions reflecting what we know to have been true: that Native people had a dynamic history of thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans; that they remained numerous and powerful well into the mid- to late nineteenth century; and that their experiences from then until now provide a powerful corrective lens to the self-congratulatory theme of progress that has so often driven American history telling.

Wampanoag people have offered up many thoughtful ideas about what such reforms might look like in American accounts of the First Thanksgiving. There is nearly unanimous opinion that the pageants must go. “As Native Americans,” writes Mashpee’s Paula Peters, “we endure regular acts of cultural degradation from children dressed up for Halloween in outfits that are a reflection of our traditional regalia, to team mascots of sports fans wearing feathers and face paint mocking ancient spiritual rites and traditions.” It’s bad enough when such insults take place out in public. It’s downright intolerable in an educational setting like school. Mashpee’s Ramona Peters counsels that teachers of young children should dispense with the Thanksgiving myth and focus more on the sentiment of being thankful. “Gratitude is the most powerful Thanksgiving story, from my perspective as a Wampanoag,” she emphasizes. “When young children grasp gratitude in a real way, beyond ritual, our country will be greater.” Her recommendation is to spare young students not only the mythmaking but also the disturbing history of epidemics, betrayal, and war. That is best left until the upper grades, when students are more mature. She does not advocate getting rid of the holiday—not at all. She contends that “we can all be proud that our country has a national holiday centered upon simply being thankful.” She just does not want it attached to damaging misrepresentations of her people and inaccurate, sanitized history.5

Among the most common Wampanoag hopes is for the general public to acknowledge their existence today, outside the November “National Native American Heritage Month” observed since 1990, instead of assuming that they somehow disappeared shortly after the First Thanksgiving. “We don’t count in the everyday life of America,” asserts Linda Coombs, “and I think that perception has to change.” When Mashpee held its own “thanks giving” in December 2016, tribal citizens and friends paid gratitude to the Creator that “we are still here,” with Chairman Cromwell reminding everyone that “our people have remained on this land for generations and will continue to thrive and prosper for many more.”6 What if, instead of propagating a linear history that associates American progress with Indian extinction, our Thanksgiving lessons taught a circular history in which the ancient indigenous past fed into the age of encounter and colonialism and in turn led to the modern decolonization efforts of the Wampanoags and other Native people? Changes of this sort would go a long way to creating a more inclusive, truthful, and healing holiday. “I can actually envision a day when a ‘National Day of Mourning’ will no longer be necessary,” muses Paula Peters, “as acknowledgement of our history from a balanced perspective will bring closure to old wounds.” She delivered these thoughts in 2009 to a surprisingly receptive audience of Massachusetts Mayflower descendants that tends to be guarded about the reputation of its ancestors. If that group can receive her words constructively, the rest of us can, too.7

Even the town of Plymouth, whose tourist industry depends on tying an uplifting Pilgrim story to the greatness of the United States, has begun to come around, albeit grudgingly and incrementally. Native people have given it little choice. In 1997 Plymouth police pepper-sprayed a crowd of National Day of Mourning protestors and roughly arrested twenty-five of them for marching without a permit (something the town had never required of them) and unlawful gathering. The police department’s explanation was that it was trying to avoid trouble of the sort that occurred the previous year when Indian marchers disrupted the town’s Pilgrim Progress procession by colonial descendants in period costume. Instead, the officers’ overreaction drew a lawsuit by the United American Indians of New England, which organizes the National Day of Mourning, charging police brutality, and threats of an economic boycott of the town. Facing a potentially expensive public relations disaster, Plymouth agreed to a settlement, which included paying for and displaying two new plaques demanded by the protestors. One, mounted on Cole’s Hill near the Massasoit statue, commemorates the National Day of Mourning. It acknowledges that for many Indians “Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their cultures. Participants in the National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggle of Native peoples to survive today.” A second plaque, in Post Office Square, is dedicated to Metacomet (King Philip), son of Ousamequin. It addresses how he “called on Native people to unite to defend their homelands against encroachment,” only to go down to defeat to the English, who killed him, mutilated his body, displayed his severed body parts, and sold his wife and son into slavery. Without question, Plymouth’s celebratory attractions like the Pilgrim Hall Museum, the Mayflower II replica, and Plymouth Rock dwarf these testimonials to the darkness of colonialism. Yet the plaques are an unprecedented step toward balancing the historical ledger. The extent to which Plymouth and the state of Massachusetts includes Native voices and perspectives in the 2020 quadricentennial events marking Plymouth colony’s founding will be telling of whether this episode was part of a revisionist trend or a sidebar to the same old story. As the indigenous elder Tall Oak counsels, Thanksgiving and the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing should be times for introspection and reflection rather than celebration.8

National Day of Mourning Plaque. Photograph by Melissa Doroquez.

A year after the 1997 National Day of Mourning descended into a melee in which Plymouth police arrested twenty-five protestors only to face accusations of brutality from the United American Indians of New England, the two sides reached a settlement. The town of Plymouth dropped all charges, paid the UAINE’s legal charges, donated money to Indian education programs, and installed the above and opposite plaques. In exchange, the UAINE withdrew the threat to sue for damages. The content of the plaques says it all.

Metacomet (King Philip) Plaque. Photograph by Bill Coughlin.

The current American struggle with white nationalism is not just a moment in time. It is the product of centuries of political, social, cultural, and economic developments that have convinced a critical mass of white Christians that the country has always belonged to them and always should. The myth of Thanksgiving is one of the many buttresses of that ideology. That myth is not about who we were but how past generations wanted us to be. It is not true. The truth exposes the traditional tale of the First Thanksgiving as a myth rather than history, and so let us declare it dead except as a subject for the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture. What we replace it with will tell future Americans about how we envision ourselves and the path of our society. We should think wisely and compassionately about our choice, together.