Posted on November 25, 2021
This is an update of my post published on November 25, 2010:
Painting By Jennie A. Brownscombe
Many people in the U.S. are familiar with the story of the “first Thanksgiving” – which was a gathering held in 1621, a large feast, a 3-day celebration of a bountiful harvest. The gathering included around 50 European colonists and about 90 Wampanoag.
The first Thanksgiving was not a holiday. And unfortunately, it was not as friendly and peace-loving between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans as the typical story suggests.
It's true that at least one Native American from the Wampanoag tribal group had helped the "Pilgrims." (Folks we now call the Pilgrims were English colonists who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower; the colonists included a group of radical Puritans - folks who were called "separatists" because they had separated themselves from the Church of England.)
The Native who had been so helpful to the Pilgrims was Tisquantum, also known as Squanto. He was apparently the last of the Patuxet band - a group that was part of the Wampanoag tribal confederation before they were wiped out by a series of plagues, previously unfamiliar illnesses caught from the European colonists.
Squanto was super helpful to the colonists because he knew some English.
And how, you may ask, did this Native man know English? Well, Squanto had been kidnapped, taken to Europe, and enslaved by an English sea captain. At some point Squanto regained his freedom, worked in England for a shipbuilder, and worked as a translator on an English ship. Eventually he was able to travel back to what we now call North America - only to find that his entire people had been wiped out by disease.
Because of his familiarity with the English language, Squanto was able to act as a middleman between the English newcomers and Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem. He is also said to have taught the colonists about planting and using some of the New World food plants that were unfamiliar to them.
To learn more about the Wampanoag people, check out this informational site.
It is also true that the Wampanoag and the English colonists had an official alliance - a political alliance - for a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately, it wasn't very long before there was a lot of tension and increasing violence between the European transplants and the various Native tribes who already lived on the continent.
What about some of the more problematic "Thanksgivings" that occurred?
The leaders of the Plymouth colony declared "Thanksgiving" hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, for all sorts of reasons. Many of those declarations of Thanksgiving had nothing to do with harvest and did not occur in November, or even in the fall. Most of them were not feasts, but rather times of fasting and prayers. A few of the Thanksgiving declarations were - yikes! - celebrations of a "victory" over Native villages or tribes. And what the settlers saw as a "victory" might be better classified as a massacre! The history of the relations between the "Pilgrims" and the Native Americans is for the most part pretty grim.
That is why many Native Americans consider today a Day of Mourning.
The history of Thanksgiving-the-modern-holiday, on the other hand, is not so very grim. The holiday as we now know it, a time of gathering together and feasting, held on the last Thursday of November, was begun by Abraham Lincoln. Because various states and communities celebrated harvest feasts, some of which were called "Thanksgiving," at various different times of the fall, historians believe that Lincoln (looking forward to a Union victory in the Civil War) might have wanted to declare a federal Thanksgiving holiday in order to unite the states into one country.
To learn more about the history of Thanksgiving, see this post.
To see one Native's point of view about Thanksgiving, check out this video.
Now let's talk about..the food!
The Wampanoag divided food production between men and women—the men hunted and fished, and the women gathered nuts, fruits, shellfish, and they did the farming of the “three sisters”—beans, squash, and corn.
With that particular food-production split, it turns out that the women were responsible for around three-fourths of the tribe's food!
Mmm....the Traditional Thanksgiving Feast!
Lest you Americans think you are eating a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal—you with the turkey and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie—not so much! To be traditional in the sense of traditional-to-1621, you would have to serve venison (deer), ducks, goose, shrimp, lobster, fish (including eel—yum!), mussels, clams, and perhaps seals, eagles, and swans!!!! Oh, yeah, a lot of meat!
It may be that there was wild turkey, too, but our best source doesn't list turkey in his description of the feast.
There were no potatoes, milk, or sugar, and not much flour. So there was no pie of any sort, no cranberry sauce as we know it (which requires sugar), little or no gravy (which requires flour), little bread.
Still, there was probably stewed pumpkin, radishes, beans, squash, grapes, walnuts, plums, berries, watercress, lettuce, carrots, and a kind of fried cornbread.
Fun Links
- Here is an article about how Wampanoag children played and learned.
- Here are some coloring pages showing historically accurate Wampanoag and Plymouth colony clothing and culture.
- And here are some recipes for Wampanoag and Plymouth colony dishes.
Also on this date:
More about Thanksgiving:
- traditional Thanksgiving menu items such as seals and eels
- why some call this day the National Day of Mourning
- anniversary of Thanksgivukkah
- Turkey-Free Thanksgiving
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