Decolonizing the Thanksgiving Myth
Let's decolonize the Thanksgiving Myth!
Shall we start with Squanto, the "kindly native" who helped the pilgrims by teaching them how to grow vegetables?
The famous indigenous person who helped the Mayflower Pilgrims was a member of the Patuxet named Tisquantum, but he was called "Squanto" by the settlers. He spoke English because he had been kidnapped and trafficked to Spain, sold to monks, made his way to England, and from there back to Massachusetts. While he was gone, the entire Patuxet tribe had died of a communicable European disease, so he was taken in by the Pokanoket Wampanoag tribe. When the pilgrims arrived and tried to settle on the Patuxet land, he went with Samoset (Pokanoket) and Chief Massasoit (Massachusett), served as a mediator and then stayed with the Plimouth settlement for about a year and a half to help them survive... which ended because a fever (again, probably a disease that was not previously here in North America) eventually killed him. Or he was poisoned by Massasoit or Wamsutta, Massasoit's son. There's no proof to say for sure either way - it was a brief illness and there was some reason to suspect foul play, but no solid evidence has survived.
The Pokanoket and Massachusett people chose to ally with the settlers partly so that the Narragansett (northern Rhode Island) would not do so and thus encroach on the Cape Cod tribes to fill the voids being left by indigenous folks dying of European epidemics.
As for the story of the "first" Thanksgiving, the most reliable account we have says that they managed to grow "Indian corn" and a mediocre amount of barley, and hunted turkeys as well as fishing. The 90 sympathetic Native people who came to partake in a harvest feast with the 53 surviving pilgrims brought five deer. The gathering lasted three days and they played games and hunted together.
All that said, it wasn't even the first Thanksgiving held by European settlers in North America - that was May 27, 1578 in Newfoundland. (Or possibly St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, but that one isn't well-documented.) We also have accounts of the Popham Colony in Maine celebrating a Thanksgiving in 1607, the Jamestown Colony in Virginia celebrating Thanksgiving services in 1607 and 1610, the Berkeley Hundred Colony in Virginia in 1619.
The Berkeley Hundred celebration was a bit premature, as the settlement was abandoned in 1622 after the Powhatan tribe attacked on May 22, 1622 as retaliation for settler aggression and land appropriation, as well as for the death of Matoaka (a.k.a. Pocahontas) who died at age 20 after being taken to England as a child bride.
Good news for your menu, though!
Turkey, cranberries, pumpkin, and squashes are indigenous to New England, so your menu bears some resemblance to the 1621 festival.
Don't bother with the weird buckle hat that we all made out of construction paper... those literally never existed. The hat they wore - called a capotain - had no buckles, was not worn by everyone, and was a more conical version of a top hat. Also, they wore colorful earth-toned clothing, not plain black and white.
DISCLAIMER:
Some of this is probably not 100% accurate, because sources themselves are being decolonized and reinterpreted in context of what we know now. The propaganda machine of American Identity & Culture is a powerful one.
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