The Real Story of Thanksgiving

When I was a schoolkid, we were taught all about Thanksgiving. Pretty much everything was wrong.

We were told the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Nope. They first landed at Cape Cod. They came to Plymouth about a month later, but they didn’t land on the Rock.

Then our teachers said the Pilgrims nearly starved that first winter. They didn’t. They weren’t exactly healthy, but they weren’t starving to death. They had plenty of seafood, and they also had all the food they stole from Native American winter stores.

Our teachers said the Indians (my school hadn’t caught up to terms like Native American or indigenous people yet) saved the Pilgrims that winter by feeding them. Well, if you consider theft to be a form of giving, then yes, I suppose the Wampanoag indirectly fed the Pilgrims. Truth is, they were hanging back through the winter, watching the white folks who’d moved into one of their abandoned villages. They’d already been hard hit by Europeans, who just a few years before had been busily enslaving them and giving them diseases that wiped out alarming numbers of them. They knew that white folks could be dangerous. But this batch had women and children with them, which made the Wampanoag think they were peaceful. Continue reading “The Real Story of Thanksgiving”

The Real Story of Thanksgiving
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