The Friendly Indian™: How Textbooks Turned Genocide into a Children’s Story
#nativeamericanheritagemonth
Thanksgiving, as it is popularly imagined in the United States, is less a fixed historical event than a dense tangle of myth, memory, violence, and selective amnesia. The familiar tableau of buckle-hatted Pilgrims and anonymous “friendly Indians” gathered around a groaning table bears only a distant relationship to the fragile 1621 diplomacy between the Wampanoag and the English at Patuxet, the Wampanoag homeland on what colonists renamed Plymouth. Historians of New England, Wampanoag chroniclers, and Indigenous activists have shown that the holiday as we know it took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when antiquarian interest in early Plymouth sources was mobilized to produce a national story of providence, peaceful coexistence, and destined expansion. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) aptly describes the “First Thanksgiving” narrative as a myth that crystallized only in the mid-1800s, when selective readings of 1621 harvest accounts fueled an American imagination hungry for origin stories that smoothed over conquest.
The historical record for the 1621 harvest gathering is remarkably thin. A brief passage in Edward Winslow’s contribution to Mourt’s Relation and a retrospective note by William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation. Neither uses the word “Thanksgiving” in the sense of a recurring annual holiday. Nineteenth-century writers and politicians nonetheless elevated this episode into a foundational national feast. Diana Karter Appelbaum’s Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, an American History and James W. Baker’s Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday both show how New England elites in the 1840s–60s, amid sectional crisis and the run-up to civil war, seized on Plymouth narratives to craft a unifying, Protestant-inflected festival of family and piety. Sarah Josepha Hale’s long campaign for a national Thanksgiving, conducted through editorials in Godey’s Lady’s Book, fused nostalgic domestic imagery with the Plymouth story, encouraging readers to imagine themselves as heirs of Pilgrim fortitude and benevolence, rather than of slaveholding and land theft. Baker argues that by the time Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a regular national Thanksgiving in 1863, amid the carnage of the Civil War, the Plymouth feast had already been retrofitted as an origin myth: a story of interracial harmony and divine favor that could be invoked to sacralize the Union and soothe anxieties about internal fracture.
NMAI’s Native Knowledge 360º materials emphasize that the “First Thanksgiving” story, as circulated in school plays and popular media, emerged out of this nineteenth-century myth-making rather than out of Wampanoag oral histories. In this invented tradition, Plymouth stands in for the entire continent; complex Indigenous polities are reduced to a single generic “tribe”; and the asymmetries of power, weaponry, and epidemic disease are minimized or erased. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has argued that such origin myths are integral to what she terms the “settler colonial frame” of U.S. history. They naturalize conquest by recoding invasion as partnership and dispossession as welcome. The 1621 story, then, is not simply misremembered; it has been actively curated to support a narrative of rightful possession and benevolent settlement.
Recent studies have partly redressed the long absence of Wampanoag voices from this story. Silverman’s This Land Is Their Land reconstructs the political, military, and ecological context in which Ousamequin (Massasoit) and his people entered into a defensive alliance with the English in 1621, following catastrophic epidemics that had devastated Wampanoag communities along the coast. Silverman emphasizes that the gathering we retrospectively call “Thanksgiving” was, from a Wampanoag perspective, one episode in a longer, fraught period of negotiation, diplomacy, and surveillance. When English gunfire signaled a harvest celebration, Wampanoag men arrived armed, responding to what might have been a call to arms as much as an invitation to dinner; the three-day gathering allowed both sides to assess one another’s numbers, weapons, and intentions.
Lisa Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin, which retells King Philip’s War through the intertwined lives of the Wampanoag leader Weetamoo and the Nipmuc scholar James Printer, further dislodges the image of timeless harmony by showing how quickly the alliance at Plymouth unraveled under English expansion, land fraud, and violent assertion of sovereignty. For contemporary Wampanoag communities, the 1621 event is therefore remembered not as a moment of pure gratitude but as part of a continuum of survival strategies in the face of catastrophic depopulation, encroachment, and eventual war.
NMAI’s Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving stresses that the Wampanoag had longstanding daily and seasonal practices of giving thanks, rooted in relationships with land, waters, and more-than-human kin, long before any English ships arrived. The 1621 gathering, when seen from this vantage point, is neither the “first” thanksgiving on that land nor the origin of Native gratitude; it is a brief, strategically negotiated moment in an Indigenous cycle of ceremonies that colonization would increasingly constrain.
Harvest ceremonies are nearly universal in agrarian societies, and both the Wampanoag and the English brought such practices with them to the 1621 meeting. Wampanoag thanksgiving rituals, as NMAI and Wampanoag educators emphasize, are tied to specific seasonal events, the first planting, the ripening of strawberries and corn, the harvesting of cranberries and shellfish, and are embedded in a larger ethic of reciprocity with the land. Colonists, for their part, inherited a Reformed Protestant tradition of special “days of thanksgiving” and “days of humiliation and fasting,” proclaimed in response to providential events such as military victories or crop failures. Appelbaum and Baker both show that these occasional observances gradually shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward regularized autumn festivals emphasizing domestic warmth and national unity rather than collective repentance.
By the time Lincoln established a recurring late-November Thanksgiving in 1863, the holiday functioned as a kind of civil sacrament; a moment when the nation paused to affirm divine favor and familial cohesion in the midst of war. Baker demonstrates how twentieth-century presidents, advertisers, and civic organizations further standardized the holiday’s rituals (family meals, parades, football games) producing what he calls a “biography” of Thanksgiving as a national institution, even as Native communities experienced ongoing dispossession. Set against Wampanoag and other Indigenous thanksgiving ceremonies, this national holiday appears not as an inevitable culmination but as one ritual formation among many, one that has often overwritten and marginalized Indigenous calendars of gratitude.
The iconic harvest table of American imagination, laden with turkey, corn, squash, and cranberries, rests quite literally on stolen land. Silverman details how the English presence at Patuxet was made possible by epidemic diseases, likely leptospirosis or other infections, that killed an estimated two-thirds to ninety percent of coastal Wampanoag populations between 1616 and 1619, leaving fields and villages depopulated and inviting English interpretations of “vacant” land. Jean O’Brien’s Dispossession by Degrees traces how, across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indigenous communities in New England, such as the Christianized Indians of Natick, lost land not in a single moment but through a series of legal maneuvers, debts, and town incorporations that gradually rendered them invisible in local records.
Dunbar-Ortiz situates Thanksgiving within a broader pattern in which U.S. national holidays commemorate the consolidation of settler claims to land; Columbus Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving each marking points in the narrative of rightful possession, while obscuring treaties broken, reservations shrunk, and Native nations removed. Brooks’s account of King Philip’s War underscores that the same Wampanoag and Nipmuc homelands romanticized in Thanksgiving pageants were, within two generations of Plymouth’s founding, sites of brutal warfare, enslavement, and forced migration. The price of the harvest table, then, is measured not only in the initial epidemics and land cessions but in centuries of legal and military pressure that turned Indigenous homelands into colonial property and later into tourist landscapes and suburbs.
Thanksgiving’s language of gratitude cannot be disentangled from the Christian missionary projects that accompanied colonization. Linford D. Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening charts how Native communities in southern New England navigated, appropriated, and resisted Protestant evangelization from the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, often adopting Christian practices on their own terms rather than simply submitting to Puritan designs. Yet colonial authorities repeatedly used theological language to justify dispossession. English prosperity was framed as a sign of divine favor, Native losses as providential judgment or inevitable decline. Days of thanksgiving proclaimed after military victories against Native nations sacralized conquest by thanking God for the “subduing” of enemies.
O’Brien’s work on Natick shows how “praying towns” were designed to reorganize Indigenous social life along Christian and English agrarian lines, with attendant shifts in gender roles, governance, and land tenure. In this context, gratitude becomes a disciplinary expectation. Native converts are encouraged to express thanks for salvation and “civilization” while surrendering land and autonomy. Contemporary Wampanoag and other Native theologians and cultural practitioners, however, insist on older, place-based traditions of thanksgiving that predate and outlast missionary frameworks, reasserting gratitude as a practice of relationality rather than submission. NMAI’s Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving foreground these longstanding Indigenous theologies of gratitude as a counterpoint to the national holiday’s Christianized civil religion.
The idealized Thanksgiving table; multi-generational, harmonious, gathered around a home-cooked feast acquires a different resonance when read against the history of Indigenous family separation. David Wallace Adams’s Education for Extinction and Brenda J. Child’s Boarding School Seasons document how, from the late nineteenth through much of the twentieth century, federal and church-run boarding schools removed Native children from their families, sometimes for years at a time, with the explicit goal of erasing Indigenous languages, religions, and kinship structures.
Child’s close reading of Ojibwe family correspondence reveals how holidays became nodes of longing and negotiation; parents pleading for their children’s return for harvest and winter ceremonies, children writing home about substitute feasts and Christian observances at school, administrators weighing such requests against assimilationist priorities. In many institutions, Thanksgiving and Christmas were staged as model occasions of “civilized” domesticity, with students rehearsing Euro-American table manners and Christian hymns for visiting officials, even as they remained cut off from their own families’ ceremonies of thanks. Adams underlines the psychological and cultural scars left by this regime, in which the very idiom of family celebration was weaponized to restructure Native affective life. For descendants of boarding school survivors, Thanksgiving can therefore be a painful reminder of state-orchestrated absences behind the myth of the happy, intact family.
Thanksgiving iconography has long obscured the gendered labor that produces both settler and Indigenous feasts. In U.S. visual culture, white women appear as domestic angels; carving turkeys, setting tables, embodying gratitude, while Native women, if present at all, are flattened into eroticized “Indian princesses” or anonymous figures on the periphery. Indigenous scholarship has insisted on a different narrative. Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin foregrounds Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag saunkskwa (leader), whose political and military leadership during King Philip’s War challenges patriarchal assumptions embedded in both colonial sources and later historiography. Dunbar-Ortiz similarly stresses that in many Eastern Woodlands communities women held primary responsibility for agriculture, including the cultivation of the “Three Sisters” crops (corn, beans, and squash) that anchor both Indigenous and settler harvests.
Yet Thanksgiving mythology often recodes this labor as Pilgrim achievement, marginalizing Indigenous women’s expertise in land management, seed selection, and food preservation. In the twentieth century, Indigenous women activists such as Mary Crow Dog (Mary Brave Bird), whose memoir Lakota Woman recounts her role in the American Indian Movement, have explicitly linked gendered labor, mothering, and political struggle, including critiques of national holidays that celebrate conquest. Their accounts remind us that Indigenous women have long been at the forefront of both ceremonial life and resistance, even as sentimental Thanksgiving narratives continue to erase or stereotype them.
The contrast between a standardized, commodity-heavy Thanksgiving menu and Indigenous foodways lies at the heart of contemporary work on Native food sovereignty. In Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States, Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover define food sovereignty as the right of Indigenous peoples to control their own food systems, from land and water access to seed saving and cultural protocols. They trace how U.S. policies, from forced relocation and reservation rations to commodity food programs, actively undermined traditional diets, contributing to high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other health disparities.
(Oglala Lakota), in The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, advances a practical decolonizing project; re-center Indigenous ingredients and techniques while consciously excluding colonial staples like wheat flour, dairy, and refined sugar. His recipes for wild rice, game, and seasonal plants offer an alternative vision of a harvest feast grounded in local ecologies rather than in industrial agriculture and global supply chains. Recent media profiles of Sherman’s restaurants and nonprofit work emphasize how such culinary projects are framed not as boutique trends but as movements for community health, cultural revitalization, and sovereignty.
In this light, the canonical Thanksgiving table, with its factory-farmed turkey, canned cranberry sauce, and sweetened pumpkin pies, appears as a material record of colonial disruption. Indigenous foods are present but often estranged from the relations and responsibilities that once governed their cultivation and consumption. Food sovereignty movements seek not only to insert “Native dishes” into the holiday but to transform the underlying relationships to land, labor, and non-human kin.
Visual culture has been crucial in naturalizing the Thanksgiving myth. Jennie Augusta Brownscombe’s painting The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth (1914), held by Pilgrim Hall Museum, and her related work Thanksgiving at Plymouth (1925), in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, provide classic examples. Brownscombe depicts modestly seated, deferential Native figures at the edges of a devout English prayer scene, their clothing modeled not on Wampanoag attire but on Plains stereotypes, a conflation that signals how “the Indian” is treated as a generic type rather than a specific nation. Later reproductions of these canvases in schoolbooks and holiday ephemera helped standardize the trope of the passive, grateful, vanishing Indian.
Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want (1943), although not explicitly labeled a Thanksgiving scene, became one of the twentieth century’s dominant images of the holiday: a white, middle-class family gathered around an abundant table, framed as an embodiment of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” Rockwell’s canvas, widely reproduced in magazines and war-bond posters, connects Thanksgiving to wartime patriotism and consumer plenty, with no Indigenous presence at all.
Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian helps explain how such images operate within a longer history of non-Native Americans adopting and parodying Indianness,.from the Boston Tea Party to fraternal orders and children’s organizations,.while excluding real Native people from the nation’s symbolic center. In textbooks and cartoons, the “friendly Indian” at Thanksgiving becomes a costume, a caricature, an emblem of primitive hospitality that clears the way for settler claims to land and belonging.
Modern advertising has amplified these visual tropes, packaging Thanksgiving as a consumable nostalgia. Baker and Appelbaum both trace how, in the twentieth century, print ads, radio spots, and television commercials associated the holiday with branded turkeys, canned goods, and kitchen appliances, selling not only foodstuffs but an idealized vision of home. Rockwellian imagery was endlessly recycled; beaming grandmothers serving golden birds, smiling nuclear families, and autumnal color palettes that promised emotional warmth through consumption.
These campaigns often borrowed pseudo-Indigenous motifs (teepees, feather headdresses, “Indian corn”) to authenticate their seasonal aesthetic while leaving actual Indigenous history unmentioned. NMAI’s Rethinking Thanksgiving resources call attention to how such marketing contributes to a “harmless” stereotype of Indians as premodern and picturesque, existing primarily in the past or as decorative themes. Thanksgiving nostalgia thus becomes a commodity through which corporations profit from a sanitized past, even as Indigenous communities continue to contest land theft, environmental racism, and cultural appropriation in the present.
Football has become one of Thanksgiving’s central rituals, with nationally televised NFL games framing the holiday as an occasion for athletic spectacle and patriotic display. For decades, some of the most prominent teams in these games used Native American imagery and slurs as mascots, linking Thanksgiving to the ongoing debate over sports-related racism. Psychologist Stephanie Fryberg’s influential study “Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots” demonstrates that exposure to such mascots depresses self-esteem and limits possible self-concepts among Native youth, even when the imagery is ostensibly “positive.”
Position statements by organizations such as the American Psychological Association and the Association on American Indian Affairs have drawn on this research to call for the retirement of Native mascots across sports levels. When fans gather on Thanksgiving to cheer for teams whose histories are entangled with caricatured Native imagery, they participate, often unwittingly, in a ritual that celebrates settler triumph while subordinating Indigenous identities to entertainment. The gradual renaming of high-profile teams has therefore become one small but symbolically significant site of decolonizing Thanksgiving’s sports culture.
School classrooms have been among the most powerful engines of Thanksgiving myth. Debbie Reese, in her widely circulated ERIC Digest “Teaching Young Children about Native Americans,” argues that classroom role-plays of the “First Thanksgiving,” construction-paper headdresses, and romanticized stories of Pilgrim-Indian friendship give young children a distorted and damaging conception of Native peoples as one-dimensional, historical, and interchangeable.
In response, NMAI’s Native Knowledge 360° initiative has produced inquiry-based units such as The “First Thanksgiving”: How Can We Tell a Better Story? and American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving, which provide primary sources, Wampanoag voices, and critical questions designed to help students recognize myth-making, situate 1621 within longer Indigenous histories, and see Native nations as present-day neighbors rather than vanished helpers. Guides like Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving offer teachers concrete strategies for shifting from costume-based activities toward lessons that foreground sovereignty, environmental stewardship, and contemporary Indigenous issues.
Decolonizing Thanksgiving in the classroom thus involves more than adding an “Indian perspective” to preexisting scripts; it requires rethinking whose stories anchor the curriculum, how holidays are framed, and how young people learn to connect history to present-day struggles over land, resources, and representation.
Since 1970, the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) have organized the National Day of Mourning on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth each Thanksgiving Day, directly contesting the mythology unfolding a few streets away in commemorative events. The observance originated when Wampanoag activist Wamsutta (Frank B.) James was invited to speak at a state banquet marking the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival, only to have his prepared remarks deemed too critical and suppressed. Rather than deliver a sanitized speech, James and fellow organizers gathered outside to denounce genocide, treaty-breaking, and ongoing racism, inaugurating an annual counter-ceremony.
UAINE describes the National Day of Mourning as both a memorial for Native ancestors and a protest against contemporary injustices, from environmental destruction and mass incarceration to attacks on Indigenous children and transnational struggles such as Palestinian dispossession. The event’s speeches, marches, and communal meals model a different way of marking late November: one that refuses reconciliation without truth and that links historical violence at Plymouth to ongoing forms of colonialism. For many Indigenous people and allies, participating in or learning about the National Day of Mourning has become an essential corrective to the sentimental narratives still taught elsewhere.
Contemporary Thanksgiving scenes often unfold in suburbs built on former Indigenous homelands, sometimes just miles from reservations where poverty, jurisdictional struggles, and environmental harms remain acute. Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous People’s History of the United States underscores how the story of U.S. expansion (from New England to the Midwest, Plains, and West) depends on a series of land cessions, removals, and military campaigns that render Native presence peripheral to the nation’s self-image. O’Brien’s and Brooks’s detailed regional studies remind us that New England’s “disappearing Indian” narrative was produced not by actual disappearance but by legal and rhetorical strategies that reclassified Native people as poor whites, “colored,” or otherwise outside the category of Indianness.
On many reservations, the late-November calendar is shaped not only by federal holidays but by hunting seasons, community feeds, and tribally organized ceremonies that may or may not align with U.S. Thanksgiving. Cultural Survival’s coverage of Indigenous perspectives on the holiday notes that for some Native communities, Thanksgiving is explicitly a day of mourning and protest, while for others it is reframed as a celebration of cultural survival and continuity, incorporating traditional dances, foods, and language use. The view from the reservation is thus neither uniformly oppositional nor assimilative; it is shaped by local histories, economies, and political strategies, all of which complicate monolithic depictions of Indigenous responses to the holiday.
Twentieth-century Thanksgiving has increasingly been entangled with militarism, from Rockwell’s wartime Four Freedoms paintings to the ritualized honoring of veterans and active-duty soldiers during football broadcasts and parades. Freedom from Want, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, functions not only as an image of domestic bliss but as wartime propaganda, reassuring viewers that American abundance and family life are worth defending abroad. Baker notes how mid-century presidents used Thanksgiving proclamations to praise military service, frame foreign policy, and cast the United States as a benevolent global actor.
For Indigenous veterans and communities, this militarized Thanksgiving rhetoric is deeply ambivalent. Native people have served in the U.S. armed forces at high rates, even as the same government has violated treaties, taken land for bases and testing, and failed to deliver promised healthcare and housing. Dunbar-Ortiz and other Indigenous scholars point out that reflexive “thanks to the troops” can obscure Native resistance to militarized borders, resource extraction, and the use of Indigenous lands for warfare training and nuclear testing. Decolonizing Thanksgiving therefore involves questioning not only the colonial past but contemporary alignments between holiday gratitude and national military power.
Despite, or because of, Thanksgiving’s fraught history, many Indigenous individuals and communities have developed their own ways of marking the day. Cultural Survival highlights Wampanoag and other Northeastern traditions of holding multiple thanksgivings across the year, tied to specific ecological events such as the strawberry harvest, and notes that some families either ignore the fourth Thursday in November altogether or repurpose it as a space for cultural affirmation. Some Indigenous households gather extended kin for meals that center traditional foods, language, and prayer, explicitly framing the occasion as a celebration of survival rather than of Pilgrim-Indian harmony. Others prioritize attending the National Day of Mourning, local protests, or community service events.
NMAI’s resources underscore that there is no single “Native position” on Thanksgiving; instead, there is a spectrum of practices shaped by tribal tradition, geography, family history, and political strategy. Recognizing this diversity is itself a corrective to monolithic depictions of Indigenous peoples in holiday discourse. It also invites non-Native observers to see that the choice is not between uncritical celebration and personal guilt, but between participating in national amnesia and aligning with Indigenous-led efforts to reframe the day.
In the last decade, digital platforms have become key arenas for re-narrating Thanksgiving. Indigenous activists, artists, and educators use hashtags such as #NoThanksNoGiving, #LandBack, and #NationalDayOfMourning to circulate counter-histories, call attention to contemporary struggles, and share resources for decolonizing family and classroom practices. Organizations like Cultural Survival and NDN Collective regularly publish online articles and toolkits that invite readers to “relearn” Thanksgiving, support Indigenous-led events, and connect the holiday to broader movements for land and water protection.
These digital interventions often take hybrid forms. Meme sets juxtaposing Brownscombe’s First Thanksgiving with images from the National Day of Mourning; downloadable zines for teachers and parents; Instagram carousels that pair historical timelines with links to contemporary campaigns; livestreams from Cole’s Hill and other protest sites. NMAI’s online NK360º materials, housed on easily navigable websites and shared via social media, demonstrate how major institutions can leverage digital tools to amplify Indigenous scholarship and pedagogies. In the process, they challenge the monopoly of printed textbooks and broadcast media over Thanksgiving’s narrative, opening space for more nuanced, accountable storytelling.
In recent years, many schools, museums, and cultural organizations have adopted land acknowledgments as part of their events, including Thanksgiving celebrations. While these statements can serve as a starting point, Indigenous leaders and historians caution that they risk becoming empty rituals if not accompanied by concrete action. Native Governance Center’s widely circulated guide Beyond Land Acknowledgment argues that institutions should shift their focus from crafting eloquent statements to developing action plans that include returning land, sharing governance, funding Indigenous-led projects, and changing internal policies.
Cultural Survival likewise urges non-Native people to “decolonize” their Thanksgiving practices by learning local Indigenous histories, supporting Native businesses and organizations, challenging racist mascots and curricula, and engaging in long-term relationships with Indigenous communities rather than one-day gestures. Moving beyond land acknowledgment, then, involves recognizing Thanksgiving as an annual reminder to assess how resources, decision-making power, and cultural authority are distributed, and to shift those structures in ways defined by Indigenous nations themselves.
For individuals, this may mean re-telling the Thanksgiving story at the dinner table using Wampanoag and other Native sources; donating to Indigenous-led organizations working on land defense, language revitalization, food sovereignty, and survivor support; pressing school boards and local media to adopt NK360º and other decolonizing resources; or committing to ongoing political action around treaty rights, environmental justice, and the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people. For institutions, it may mean returning land or buildings, restructuring boards and curricula, and entering binding agreements with tribal nations rather than offering symbolic recognition.
Thanksgiving, when viewed from Wampanoag and broader Indigenous perspectives, is not a simple story of gratitude shared between Pilgrims and Indians, nor merely a holiday that can be redeemed by better recipes or more inclusive table settings. It is a ritual site where narratives of providence and progress have long been staged to justify conquest, even as Indigenous peoples have crafted counter-rituals of mourning, celebration, and resistance. The 1621 harvest gathering at Patuxet becomes, in this light, one moment in a centuries-long history of negotiation, warfare, diplomacy, land theft, survival, and resurgence.
By tracing the invention of the “First Thanksgiving” myth, foregrounding Wampanoag and Indigenous historiography, and analyzing the holiday’s entanglements with land, Christianization, boarding schools, gendered labor, food systems, visual culture, sports, pedagogy, and digital activism, we can better understand why Thanksgiving remains so contested. The National Day of Mourning, Indigenous food sovereignty movements, NK360º curricula, and online campaigns like #NoThanksNoGiving do not merely protest a single holiday; they challenge the structures of settler colonial memory that Thanksgiving epitomizes.
For non-Native people, the task is not to indulge in paralyzing guilt or to imagine that one can step outside history by ignoring the day. Rather, it is to accept Thanksgiving as a recurring opportunity to practice truth-telling, redistribute resources, support Indigenous sovereignty, and re-learn gratitude as a practice of reciprocal responsibility rather than possession. Only then can the language of “thanks” begin to align with justice.
References:
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American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2012, americanindian.si.edu/nk360/resources/American-Indian-Perspectives-on-Thanksgiving.
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Baker, James W. Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. University of New Hampshire Press, 2009.
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It's interesing how you deconstruct this myth, like debugging a complex historical algorithm.
Niawen, Rogue Art Historian, for this exquisite article.
I am grateful for you, your words, your tutelage, and for that last little paragraph talking me out of calling off the day and sitting in silence for the atrocities exacted upon the great Nations of truly remarkable Indigenous peoples.