People had been in the Americas for least 12,000 years and according to some Native traditions, since the beginning of time. One is that history doesn’t begin for Native people until Europeans arrive. What are the most poignant inaccuracies in this story? It’s bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny. That’s the story-it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They felt that not only their classes, but society in general was making light of historical trauma which weighs around their neck like a millstone. They felt like their people's history as they understood it was being misrepresented. Wampanoag adults have memories of being a kid during Thanksgiving season, sitting in school, feeling invisible and having to wade through the nonsense that teachers were shoveling their way. I've had a great many conversations with Wampanoag people, in which they talk about how burdensome Thanksgiving is for them, particularly for their kids. How did you become interested in this story? This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of ThanksgivingĪhead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. We spoke with Silverman, a historian at George Washington University, about his research and the argument he makes in his book. Wampanoags today remember the Pilgrims’ entry to their homeland as a day of deep mourning, rather than a moment of giving thanks. Known as King Philip’s War (or the Great Narragansett War), the conflict devastated the Wampanoags and forever shifted the balance of power in favor of European arrivals. For 50 years, the alliance was tested by colonial land expansion, the spread of disease, and the exploitation of resources on Wampanoag land. When the pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, the sachem (chief) Ousamequin offered the new arrivals an entente, primarily as a way to protect the Wampanoags against their rivals, the Narragansetts. Silverman’s book focuses on the Wampanoags. Beyond that, Silverman argues that the telling and retelling of these falsehoods is deeply harmful to the Wampanoag Indians whose lives and society were forever damaged after the English arrived in Plymouth. It’s a tradition that pulls on a history passed down through the generations of what happened in Plymouth: local Native Americans welcomed the courageous, pioneering pilgrims to a celebratory feast.īut, as David Silverman writes in his new book This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, much of that story is a myth riddled with historical inaccuracies. In Thanksgiving pageants held at schools across the United States, children don headdresses colored with craft-store feathers and share tables with classmates wearing black construction paper hats.
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