This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled Historical past of Thanksgiving

Forward of the four-hundredth anniversary of the primary Thanksgiving, a brand new take a look at the Plymouth colony’s founding occasions, instructed for the primary time with Wampanoag folks on the coronary heart of the story.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging within the stability, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their folks’s friendship for one another and a dedication to mutual protection. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first profitable harvest and lifted the specter of hunger. Ousamequin and 90 of his males then visited Plymouth for the “First Thanksgiving.” The treaty remained operative till King Philip’s Battle in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the 2 events would come to an finish.

400 years after that well-known meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new gentle on the occasions that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Specializing in the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to think about tensions that developed nicely earlier than 1620 and lasted lengthy after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags’ ongoing wrestle for self-determination as much as this very day.

This unsettling historical past reveals why some trendy Native folks maintain a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a vacation which celebrates a delusion of colonialism and white proprietorship of the US. This Land is Their Land reveals that it’s time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, inform the historical past of Thanksgiving.