As Thanksgiving approaches, I become increasingly excited for a break from school, going home to my family and a feast of home-cooked food. One thing I don’t really think about when Thanksgiving time rolls around are pilgrims, Christopher Columbus or Native Americans. What was once the “reason for the season” in relation to Thanksgiving has taken a back burner for most families — and for good reason. If you told me as a child that I would get half a week off from school to celebrate mass murder in the name of thankfulness, I would have laughed in your face.
What was once an American holiday to celebrate the help that Native Americans gave to white settlers in 1621, which led to successful harvests, has now become a gluttonous excuse to take off work and go midnight sale shopping the next day. Do I agree with the original branding of Thanksgiving? No, but I also disagree with where Thanksgiving as a holiday is today. America has, for the most part, moved away from celebrating early pioneers and pilgrims because of the obvious cruelty to Native Americans. However, instead of turning Thanksgiving into just a holiday to be extra thankful, we made it a day to plan a shopping spree for unneeded excess that is synonymous with American culture.
The history of the first Thanksgiving is rocky, but we know this much; Thanksgiving started as a celebration of the ingenuity and struggle of the first European immigrants in America. Since then, figures such as the Plymouth Rock pilgrims and the Wampanoag Natives have been recognized as heroes in the story of the first successful harvest and feast in the New World.
However, some historians believe that the first feasts did not align with what we’ve learned in school. In fact, the feasts originated from a mass slaughter of the Pequot Tribe when it was celebrating its own harvest festival in Massachusetts Bay. From that point on, settlers would have feasts of “thanksgiving” after routine killing sprees of Native Americans. Pilgrims and Puritans believed that the death of Native Americans was “God’s destruction."
Fast forward 200 years, and figures like President Theodore Roosevelt still carried this belief, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are.”
It's wild to think that this mindset lasted so long, but it’s even crazier that we still celebrate the holiday that goes along with it. In Plymouth Rock, to this day, Native Americans protest and fast on Thanksgiving to show their justifiable discontent with the holiday. This day is known as the National Day of Mourning, yet I never learned about this in 13 years of primary education. Instead, we are raised watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in happy ignorance.
Even though Thanksgiving has mostly been rebranded as a day for family togetherness and giving thanks, why would we continue these things under the guise of “Thanksgiving” when it is common knowledge that the background of Thanksgiving was detrimental to so many people? It is like celebrating the Holocaust, says journalist Robert Jenson. Of course, no one means any harm and everyone loves a tradition of no school and feasting, but it would be more ethical to end this holiday, or at least rename it.
Especially since the “nice version” of a day for family and food has been tainted too. Thanksgiving has slowly transformed in the past few years to a time of exclaiming your thankfulness and then greedily fighting for sales at midnight. Stores have capitalized on the holiday of Black Friday in the scariest way of making people feel the need to go out and buy more material things immediately after claiming to be thankful for the things they already own. If you’re going to have a sale, just have a sale, we don’t need a holiday precursor. People will shop no matter when for a bargain, especially before Christmas. The hypocrisy of it all is just too much to keep up with honestly.
Americans have the reputation of being dumb and selfish, but we need to stop voluntarily promoting this opinion. The first step would be to stop the holiday of Thanksgiving. Maybe this means simply changing the name and the printing of happy pilgrim turkeys on paper plates, or maybe it is the government declaring schools and offices stay open on the fourth Thursday of November. No matter how we go about it, it has to be done because it is not too much to ask that we stop celebrating the times when early Americans decimated earlier Americans.