On the fourth Thursday of each November, Thanksgiving rolls around. For many, it’s a holiday meant for enjoying a good meal with family and friends. However, because it’s taught with assumptions and forgotten perspectives, Thanksgiving has a complicated history with Native Americans.
The First Thanksgiving happened during the fall of 1621, where at least 90 Wampanoag joined 52 English people at Plymouth, Massachusetts to celebrate a successful harvest.
While the story describes a peaceful celebration between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, that peace was short-lived. Within a decade, the Wampanoag lost their political independence and most of the territory. Furthermore, most retellings fail to include a Native American perspective. For some Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a painful reminder of European colonization. During the 1970s, the Native American civil rights movement had increased visibility in America. That led to the United American Indians of New England creating the first “National Day of Mourning,” an annual protest that comforts the harmful stereotypes from the myths of Thanksgiving. At Plymouth Rock on Cole’s Hill, they gather the feet of a statue of Grand Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag to remember and reflect.
Many harmful stereotypes about Native Americans persist because of various reasons, including elementary school. To dress up as a Native American, many children were asked to bring brown paper sacks and instructed to create headbands filled with Native American designs and feathers. However, Dennis W. Zotigh, a cultural specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, notes that the costumes degraded the Wampanoags’ descendants and bore no resemblance to the Wampanoag clothing during the First Thanksgiving. He states wearing the feathers had significance, but the feathers in elementary school were “simply mockery, an educator’s interpretation of what an American Indian is supposed to look like.”
For children, the Thanksgiving reenactments are their most active encounter with Native American history, leading them to associate Thanksgiving with Native American culture. While Zotigh notes that the children are too young to understand the truth, he wants classrooms to share the actual facts before high school graduation. The happy celebration in elementary school creates compromised integrity, stereotypes, and cultural misappropriation. As a member of the Kiowa Gourd Clan and San Juan Pueblo Winter Clan, Zotigh knows how these Thanksgiving myths have caused great harm to the cultural self-esteem of generations of Native Americans.
Zotigh questions why should Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. He gathered a variety of different answers ranging from expressing thankfulness for another year together, celebrating elders, enjoying time with loved ones, and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Notely, some said that everyday is Thanksgiving as each day is a day of thanksgiving to the Creator. While Zotigh doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, he takes advantage of the holiday to spend time with friends and family.
Ironically, Thanksgiving is during American Indian and Alaskan Native Heritage Month. What’s more, the day after Thanksgiving is Native American Heritage Day. To most, that day is Black Friday.
