Fact check: The Pilgrims actually killed Indians, making Thanksgiving a holiday originated in oppression. Rated: Mostly False.
The Puritans committed a genocide. The Pilgrims often get blamed for it. People get satisfied with this blame and move on.
The more we blame the Pilgrims, the further from truth telling we get because now there's no motivation to investigate the Puritans, the actually guilty party behind the evil Thanksgiving. White people can't afford generalizations about our ancestors- we have to know which ancestor did what and to who. How will we take responsibility for genocide if we don't face history accurately?*
*Though this doesn't negate that the word "pilgrim" may be triggering to people of color, a generic term used colloquially as interchangeable with the Puritans (two U.S. Presidents have even confused the two groups); even in their day, lower-case "p" pilgrims was once used as a generic term for both Puritans and Pilgrims.
We need to let people know there are no sacred cows in American history.
Jefferson,
Franklin, they were total white supremacists who wanted America white (and certainly not "men of their time," because other white people disagreed with them). And Columbus was very much a Hitler, or worse, because Hitler didn't even rape children and help establish
child prostitution rings. And just as some cities have
changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day, Thanksgiving needs to recognize how New England today is the result of the systemic genocide of Native Americans. We need to use it as an occasion to give reparations that Natives want (monetary, land, healing, power over their resources and destiny, centering of voices, truth-telling, etc, not one-off and on one day but as a process, and year round). But we should not be so iconoclastic that we conflate the Puritans and the Pilgrims.
the Pilgrims didn't kill Indians for Thanksgiving, it was the Puritans. I think that's an important distinction to make. The Pilgrims who landed on the shore and fasted with the Wampangoag (that's not a typo for "feast", they actually had a three-day *fast*) were peaceful white folks, and the Puritans were bloodthirsty extremists. It's like the difference between moderate Muslims and extremists. When the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony had Thanksgiving, it was with the Indians. When the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony had Thanksgiving, it was thanking God for winning a genocidal war against the Indians. Two very different Thanksgivings, reflecting two very different cultures.
*Not that it made much difference to Natives like Will Rogers who understandably
regret letting any Americans on shore.
One
author quotes Plymouth Governor William Bradford, who was the Pilgrim leader, as he described the war which led to the Thanksgiving. But while the author almost makes it sound like Bradford endorsed the war, in actuality, he was only
describing it. The war, led by Puritans leaders John Endecott and John Winthrop, was led by bands of Puritan butchers and it was Puritan
Winthrop who was the governor which Bradford describes as declaring "a day for Thanksgiving" for winning this war. Pilgrim leader Bradford actually
criticized this war as fueled by ignorance about natives; Bradford likely could have had no sway over the hotheaded Endecott, because Endecott's own men
tried to stop him from raiding Indians, and they were ignored.
The Puritans and their ways eventually overtook the peaceful Pilgrims, just as the peaceful Quakers and Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had their voices drown out by the aggressive money-and-power lovers. They just weren't interested in empire, in subjugating, quantifying, and regulating bodies, and in the kill-or-be-killed world, they all ended up losing power in government. Quakers and Pilgrims sat by as aggressive and ethnocentrist factions within them took advantage of their newfound freedom when greedy, power-hungry people took the helm after the utopian leaders like Bradford died (Pilgrims) or quit politics in protest of the French and Indian war (Quakers). These aggressive mobs taking Indian lands acted with impunity in Plymouth (leading to King Philip's War), and Indian Boarding Schools proliferated in Quaker lands. And then there is the issue of those who sat passively by as potential for justice turned to self-serving silence in the face of injustice; the masses needs then, as now, to be reckoned with. But their utopian ancestors - the ones at Plymouth who protested bigoted whites going to war with Indians, the ones in Quaker lands who instead of condemning Indian religions sought to
learn from them because they already saw them as "communing with the inner light," they need to be recognized and honored.
The first generation of Pilgrims at Plymouth were a mostly peaceful time, due to the leadership of Gov. Bradford and Wampanoag leader Massasoit. Pilgrims could be, and
were, executed for the murder of Indians, and sometimes Indians received
more lenient punishment than Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were not perfect; there were often political reasons for this fair treatment. And the Pilgrims certainly thought they were the hottest shit. According to womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, they saw themselves as defenders of their ancestor's folk culture which had been tainted by Catholicism, represented by the high Anglican Church/Church of England. There was also petty theft. They also almost starved one year soon after they landed, and went looking for Indian help. They happened upon an
empty Wampanoag village (that turned out was abandoned, but they had no way of knowing this) and after realizing no one was home,
out of desperation, stole from a granary and graves. One Pilgrim said "we meant to have left some beads and other things in the houses as a sign of peace and to show we meant to trade with them," but left in a "haste...but as soon as we meet the Indians, we will pay them back for what we took" (Loewen,
Lies My Teacher Told Me, pg. 86). (Sounds like a self-serving rationalization to me.)
Despite these several survival attempts involving petty theft of empty villages, which continued, half of the Pilgrims died within the first year, including that winter of starving. This happened before the first Thanksgiving dinner, with the Wampangoag, which took place in in 1621.
In 1637, over a decade after the first Thanksgiving, the Puritans went to war with the Indians- it was called Pequots war. It was ethnic cleansing. The Puritans celebrated it as Thanksgiving. *This* isn't the one that we celebrate as a Holiday, and it's important not to conflate the two. The Pilgrims present a good opportunity to show that we can't just say "well the Puritans were just people of their time," or "well Indians were hostile so they had to defend themselves," because not all white people were getting into fights with Indians and stealing their land and slaughtering them; the Pilgrims prove this. Because of the Pilgrims, apologist arguments justifying racism don't work.
After the deaths of Massasoit and Winthrop, just a few years apart in the 1660s,
the Pilgrims lost their stabilizing forces that had maintained peaceful relations, and became more like their aggressive Puritan cousins in
their ways- they hungered for land, English cultural domination, and they treated Natives more harshly during sentencing. This went against their ancestral culture which
told them to behave like good Christians toward the Natives, something which Puritan culture had lacked. Josiah Winslow, for instance, was the son of a Pilgrim who dealt fairly with the Natives; Josiah, unlike his father, however,
undertook evil land dealings; he was thus more Puritan in his style. By the 1690s, the Pilgrims lost their charter and were absorbed completely into Puritan culture.
We celebrate and romanticize the first Thanksgiving (the Pilgrim one). We ignore the second one (the Puritan one). We should not do either. The Puritan one lays bare the violence of whites and their twisted logic, whose justifications and motivations are the inherited legacy of New Englanders' white Yankees. We inherited Puritan culture, not Pilgrim culture, and we must reckon with it. So this claim that Thanksgiving originated in genocide may not be true, but it has an important element of truth in it that we must be reckoning with. That's why I rate this claim as "mostly false."
Yet the Pilgrims who washed ashore, probably looking lost as hell (they had aimed for Virginia), offer a strain of whiteness not defined by inhumane desire for control and consumption. They represent a potential: that first generation who managed to have fair dealings with Natives all the way down to their criminal justice system. Whites must be looking at the Amish, the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Pilgrims, and reckon with this element as well [they were not perfect]. Some of these groups not only resisted slavery but on principle resisted any dealing with people or companies related to the slave trade. What made them different? How can they be a model, however a limited one? These are questions we should also be thankful to deal with, from ancestors we Euro-Americans should be thankful to have.
Sources: "The Truth About Thanksgiving" by Richard Shiffman on Huffington Post
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas
Further reading on the Puritans [must-reads for white Americans]:
American Nations by Colin Woodward [start with this easy-to-read one]
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer [an epic]
"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history." – James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 92.
