A THANKSGIVING FOR THE TRUTH
UNLEARNING THE MYTH, HONORING THE RESISTANCE
Growing up in Oklahoma, I learned Thanksgiving the way most American children do: as a heartwarming origin story, a sepia-toned tableau of Pilgrims and Indians sharing corn and turkey in a spirit of mutual goodwill. It was presented as the foundational moment of American generosity, a feel-good fable that conveniently glossed over the genocide, land theft, and centuries of systematic oppression that followed. We traced our hands to make paper turkeys, we wore construction paper headdresses (a practice that now makes me cringe), and we recited the sanitized narrative of grateful settlers and helpful Natives breaking bread together in 1621. It was American mythology at its finest—simple, digestible, and utterly dishonest.
But mythology, no matter how deeply embedded in the national consciousness, cannot withstand the persistent voice of truth. And for over fifty years, Native Americans have been standing up, pushing back, and demanding that the real story be told—not the one that makes us comfortable, but the one that actually happened.
The Myth We Were Sold vs. The History We Ignored
The traditional Thanksgiving narrative is a masterclass in historical airbrushing. We were taught that the Pilgrims, those plucky religious refugees fleeing persecution, landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, struggled through a brutal winter, and were saved by the benevolent Wampanoag people, who taught them to plant corn, fish, and survive in the New World. The following autumn, in 1621, they all gathered for a three-day feast to celebrate the harvest—a beautiful, multicultural potluck that symbolized cooperation and friendship.
What a lovely story. What a convenient lie.
Here's what they left out: Before the Pilgrims even landed, European explorers had been kidnapping Native people and selling them into slavery for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims, within days of arrival, robbed Wampanoag graves and stole their corn and beans. The Wampanoag, led by Ousamequin (known to the English as Massasoit), were not motivated by charity or naïveté when they formed an alliance with the Pilgrims. They had been decimated by European diseases—plagues that had wiped out entire villages before the Mayflower even arrived—and faced threats from rival tribes. The alliance was a calculated political strategy: gain an ally with guns to ensure survival. The Wampanoag provided most of the food for that 1621 gathering, including five deer, and likely showed up not as invited guests but in response to the sound of English musket fire.
The peace, such as it was, lasted barely a generation. By 1675, the relationship had deteriorated into King Philip's War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in American history relative to population. The English systematically destroyed Wampanoag villages, sold survivors into slavery in the Caribbean, and displayed the head of Metacom (King Philip), Massasoit's son, on a pike in Plymouth for twenty years. The Wampanoag were nearly annihilated. This is the epilogue that never makes it into the elementary school pageant.
The traditional Thanksgiving narrative is not just incomplete; it is a deliberate erasure, a national myth designed to absolve the colonizers and render invisible the genocide of Indigenous peoples.
The Speech They Couldn't Silence
The modern reckoning with Thanksgiving's true history began in 1970, during Massachusetts' celebration of the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. A Wampanoag elder named Wamsutta (Frank) James was invited to speak at a state banquet. It seemed like a gesture of inclusion, a nod to the Native perspective. But when the organizers reviewed his speech in advance, they panicked. James had written the truth. He detailed the epidemic that had devastated his people, the land theft, the broken treaties, the suffering. He refused to perform the role of the grateful Indian, thankful for colonization. State officials deemed his speech "too inflammatory" and offered him a sanitized, government-approved replacement.
Wamsutta James refused. He would not allow words to be put in his mouth. Instead, he and a group of Native activists gathered on Cole's Hill, overlooking Plymouth Rock, and held their own event: the first National Day of Mourning.
His suppressed speech is a document of searing clarity and moral force. He opened by identifying himself as "a Wampanoag Man," proud of his ancestry and a product of poverty and discrimination. He acknowledged the occasion with "mixed emotion," recognizing it as a time of celebration for white America but "a heavy heart" for his people. He recounted the Pilgrims' immediate acts of grave robbery and theft, and Massasoit's fateful decision to welcome them: "This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end."
James dismantled the myth of the savage Indian, insisting on the full humanity of his people: "Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh." He declared that despite centuries of cultural destruction and the near-extinction of their language, "Our spirit refuses to die." And he issued a promise: "Before too many moons pass we'll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us."
The speech was a refusal to be complicit in his own erasure. It was an act of resistance, a reclaiming of narrative, and a declaration that Native people would no longer be silent spectators to their own history.
The National Day of Mourning: A Counter-Narrative Tradition
Since that day in 1970, Native Americans and their allies have gathered annually in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day for the National Day of Mourning. It is both a solemn spiritual observance and a political protest. Participants honor ancestors who suffered and died from genocide, land theft, and brutalization. They fast from the day before until the demonstration concludes. They march through Plymouth's historic district. And they speak—only Indigenous people are invited to address the crowd—about history, about ongoing struggles, about sovereignty, treaty rights, environmental destruction, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and the intergenerational trauma of the boarding school era.
The National Day of Mourning is not a rejection of gratitude. Native cultures have always practiced thanksgiving—long before the Pilgrims arrived. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people have the Thanksgiving Address, "The words that come before all else," spoken at the start of all gatherings, acknowledging every part of creation from the people to the sun and water. Many tribes held multiple harvest ceremonies throughout the year, expressing gratitude to Mother Earth. The difference is that these practices are rooted in reciprocity and respect, not conquest and colonization.
What the National Day of Mourning rejects is the sanitized myth, the false narrative that erases violence and suffering in favor of a comforting fairy tale. It insists that if we are to give thanks, we must first tell the truth.
The Resurgence: Reclaiming Sovereignty, Language, and Identity
The resistance that began on Cole's Hill in 1970 was part of a broader movement—the Red Power Movement—that reshaped the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the U.S. government. Inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Native activists in the 1960s and 70s asserted tribal sovereignty, cultural identity, and treaty rights through direct action.
In 1969, a multi-tribal coalition called Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island for 19 months, demanding the abandoned federal prison be used for a Native American cultural center and university. In 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan traveled to Washington, D.C., presenting a Twenty-Point Position Paper calling for the restoration of treaty-making and the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; when ignored, activists occupied BIA headquarters for six days. In 1973, AIM and traditional Oglala Lakota seized Wounded Knee, South Dakota—the site of the 1890 massacre—and engaged in a 71-day armed standoff with federal authorities, demanding the Senate investigate failed treaty obligations.
These actions were not symbolic gestures. They forced legislative change. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 ended the disastrous Termination Policy and granted tribes greater autonomy. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 protected the right to practice traditional religions. The movement sparked a cultural revival—a resurgence of language, spirituality, art, and education.
Today, that resurgence continues and accelerates. It is defined not by assimilation but by nation-building. Tribes are establishing language immersion schools, where Navajo, Ojibwemowin, and other languages are the primary languages of instruction. The 2024 National Plan on Native Language Revitalization calls for $16.7 billion over ten years to fund these efforts. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is being integrated into land and resource management. Tribes are asserting co-stewardship of public lands. The appointment of Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) as Secretary of the Interior in 2021 placed a Native voice at the highest levels of executive decision-making for the first time in American history.
The modern Native American movement is not focused on merely surviving colonization. It is focused on thriving—on reclaiming Indigenous ways of life, governance, and traditional knowledge as viable, vibrant paths forward.
Leonard Peltier: A Long-Overdue Reckoning
His release marked a great recognition of the injustices of the past and the struggles of Native people. It was an acknowledgment, however belated, that the government's treatment of Indigenous activists during the Red Power era was not justice but repression. It was a crack in the edifice of denial, a small but significant step toward accountability.
A Thanksgiving for the Truth
So here we are, in 2025, still grappling with a holiday that means vastly different things to different people. For many Americans, Thanksgiving remains a day of family, food, and football—a secular celebration of gratitude largely disconnected from its historical origins. For Native Americans, it is a day of mourning, a reminder of genocide, broken treaties, stolen land, and cultural destruction. And for a growing number of Americans—those who have listened, learned, and unlearned—it is a day of reckoning, an opportunity to confront uncomfortable truths and honor the resilience of Indigenous peoples.
I am grateful that Native Americans stood up and pushed back. I am grateful that Wamsutta James refused to be silenced. I am grateful for the activists who occupied Alcatraz, who marched on Washington, who stood at Wounded Knee, who gather every year on Cole's Hill. I am grateful for the language keepers, the water protectors, the treaty defenders, the storytellers who refuse to let the truth be buried.
This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for the truth—messy, painful, and necessary. I give thanks for the resistance, for the resurgence, for the refusal to disappear. And I give thanks for the opportunity to unlearn the myths I was taught and to honor the real history of this land and its original peoples.
Because if gratitude means anything, it must be rooted in honesty. And if we are to move forward as a nation, we must first be willing to look back—not at the sanitized myth, but at the full, complicated, often brutal truth.
The Pilgrims did not "discover" America. They arrived on land that had been inhabited for thousands of years by peoples with rich cultures, complex societies, and deep spiritual traditions. The "First Thanksgiving" was not a harmonious beginning but a brief moment of uneasy alliance in a story that would end in dispossession and death for countless Indigenous people.
But the story does not end there. Because Native peoples are still here. They are reclaiming their languages, their lands, their sovereignty, their identities. They are building nations, not asking for permission. They are telling their own stories, in their own voices, on their own terms.
And that, more than any myth, is something worth celebrating.
So this Thanksgiving, let us give thanks for the truth-tellers. Let us honor the mourners on Cole's Hill. Let us listen to the voices that have been suppressed for too long. Let us acknowledge the land we stand on and the peoples who stewarded it long before us. Let us commit to a future rooted not in erasure but in recognition, not in myth but in justice.
Because a nation that cannot face its history cannot heal. And a holiday built on a lie cannot nourish the soul.
But a Thanksgiving for the truth? That is a feast worth sharing.