Thanksgiving has passed. It offered us not only a moment of celebration but also an opportunity for reflection. Often remembered as a festive day of harvest and shared meals, the holiday also carries a complex history—one that intertwines generosity, survival, and profound injustice. This blog presents a three-part exploration: the origins of the first Thanksgiving, the subsequent unravelling of Indigenous autonomy, and the resilience and perspectives of Native Americans today. In tracing this arc, the essay invites readers to understand the holiday beyond nostalgia, acknowledging both historical truths and contemporary significance. It encourages a more informed, empathetic engagement with a tradition that continues to shape American identity and conscience.
The Encounter: origin, Myths, And the Making of Thanksgiving
Map of Wampanoag Homelands and Early Plymouth Settlement (1620–1621)
The approach of winter in New England carries a particular stillness—the kind that narrows time, that gathers people inward, that invites both memory and imagination. It is in this landscape of austere beauty that the story of Thanksgiving first took shape. Long before it became a national holiday, long before it adorned dining tables and cultural rituals, it lived as a brief, fragile moment of coexistence between two peoples who saw the world through entirely different cosmologies.
To understand the origins of Thanksgiving, we must begin not with the Pilgrims, but with the natives of this land—the Wampanoag. For thousands of years, the Wampanoag Confederacy thrived along the shores of present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They cultivated corn, beans, and squash—the Three Sisters—fished the coastal waters, and revered the cycles of nature with a spiritual and ecological intimacy. Their society was orderly, interconnected, and resilient. They lived by reciprocity, by the implicit understanding that what one takes from the earth one must return in gratitude or stewardship.
But the world the Pilgrims encountered in 1620 was not the flourishing Wampanoag world of a century earlier. Between 1616 and 1619, a mysterious epidemic—likely brought by European traders—swept through the region, killing nearly two-thirds of the Indigenous population. Whole villages were emptied; fields lay untended. In William Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’, he described the landscape as “a new-found Golgotha,” a chilling testament to the devastation.
Into this wounded land arrived the Mayflower, carrying a community battered by storms, hunger, and disillusionment. The Pilgrims did not come as conquering settlers. They came as refugees—religious dissenters escaping persecution in England and economic hardship in the Netherlands. They landed in December, unprepared for the fierceness of the New England winter. By spring, half of the original 102 passengers were dead. They were physically weak, spiritually exhausted, and dangerously ignorant of the land they hoped to inhabit.
Archival Image: Artistic Reconstruction of Early Plymouth Colony
It was in this moment of mutual vulnerability that the paths of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag first crossed. The Wampanoag sachem Ousamequin—known to the English as Massasoit—was a leader of immense pragmatism. He had lost many warriors and was facing threats from rival tribes. The Pilgrims, though weak, could be potential allies in a shifting geopolitical landscape. Thus, in March 1621, Massasoit approached the settlers with an extraordinary proposition: peace, alliance, and mutual assistance.
The meeting was orchestrated and translated by Tisquantum—known to history as Squanto—a Patuxet man who had been kidnapped by an English explorer years earlier, taken to Spain to be sold as a slave, freed by friars, travelled to England, and finally found his way back home, only to discover his entire village wiped out by disease. His life, shaped by tragedy and uncanny survival, made him both a bridge and a paradox: a man who had seen the world of the English from within, yet whose heart lay with the land of his ancestors.
The peace treaty Massasoit signed with the Pilgrims in 1621—one of the earliest diplomatic agreements between Europeans and Native peoples—was simple but profound. It pledged mutual protection, peaceful dispute resolution, and respect for each other’s autonomy. For a brief moment, the arrangement worked. The Pilgrims learned to plant corn with fish as fertilizer, to find edible plants, to manage the land’s rhythms—knowledge imparted by Wampanoag hands. In return, the Pilgrims offered the Wampanoag access to European goods and, more importantly, a strategic alliance in a volatile region.
It is in this window of precarious harmony that the event we now call “the First Thanksgiving” occurred. The Pilgrims, after their first successful harvest, arranged a feast of gratitude in the autumn of 1621. It was not yet a national holiday, nor was it imbued with the symbolic weight it carries today. It was simply a communal expression of relief—a celebration of survival.
Historical accounts suggest that Massasoit arrived unexpectedly with about ninety Wampanoag men. Whether invited or self-invited is still debated by scholars, but their presence transformed the gathering into something larger, more communal, more significant. The Wampanoag brought venison; the Pilgrims contributed fowl and newly harvested vegetables. There were contests, footraces, games, and, one imagines, tentative conversations across the cultural divide.
There is a quiet dignity in imagining that scene: two peoples, so different in worldview yet bound by immediate needs, sharing a meal in the fragile hope that coexistence might endure. Edward Winslow, one of the Pilgrim chroniclers, later wrote:
“We entertained and feasted our Wampanoag friends, and they went out and killed five deer which they brought to the plantation.”
From the Wampanoag perspective—preserved in oral traditions—the gathering was less a “Thanksgiving” than a political encounter, a reaffirmation of alliance, and an opportunity to observe these newcomers whose numbers were still small, but whose intentions remained uncertain.
The truth of 1621 is neither the saccharine tableau found in schoolbooks nor a dark conspiracy awaiting inevitable betrayal. It is a moment of sincerity, of pragmatism, of mutual need—real, human, and therefore complex.
“We brought ourselves to their table so that peace might live a little longer, though we did not yet know the cost of that peace.” This, a paraphrased sentiment from modern Wampanoag elders, captures the emotional memory.
As the feast ended and winter approached once more, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag returned to their respective lives. For several decades, the treaty held. There were misunderstandings, tensions, violations, and reconciliations. But the fundamental spirit of the early years—cooperation born from necessity—would later be overshadowed by the tides of colonial expansion.
Yet it is important, in our present moral clarity, not to retroactively strip 1621 of its humanity. That moment of shared sustenance, of gratitude, of cross-cultural encounter, did happen. It was earnest. It was hopeful. It was a fleeting bridge suspended over the chasm of history.
And every November, as kitchens warm and tables lengthen, the United States returns—knowingly or not—to that first fragile gesture of trust on unfamiliar soil.
This is where the story of Thanksgiving begins—not with triumph, but with vulnerability, not with conquest, but with coexistence. The question that history asks, and that this essay must follow, is how such a moment of shared humanity slowly yielded to a very different future.
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