Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday of November, a time when extended families and friends across the country get together with various festivities.
People generally trace the first Thanksgiving back to even before the U.S. came to be between the Wampanoag tribe and the Pilgrims in modern day Massachusetts in 1621. Although, once the U.S. became a nation, it wasn’t nationally recognized until 1789.
YouGov and Huffington Post conducted a survey of 1,000 US adults a week before Thanksgiving to attempt to get a grasp of who actually celebrates the holiday. Within the survey, 15 percent did not celebrate it with a margin of error of 4.6 percent.
Although there are still many people who recognize the holiday based on this figure, there’s not a clear consensus.
One such group that agrees with this is the United American Indians of New England who has marked the fourth Thursday of November as a national day of mourning and has gathered in Plymouth, Mass. every year since 1970.
At a gathering in 2011, Mooananum James, a co-leader of the group said, “According to popular myth the Indians and the Pilgrims, who were the best of pals, sat down and had a wonderful dinner to enjoy the Pilgrims bountiful harvest. Everyone lived happily ever after, the end. About the only true thing in the whole mythology is that these pitiful European strangers would not have survived their first several years in New England, were it not for the aid of the Wampanoag people. What Native people got in return for this help, was genocide, the theft of our lands and never ending repression. Today, as we did in 1970, we mourn the loss of millions of our ancestors and the devastation of our beautiful land and water and air.”
Aside from the problematic history of Thanksgiving, is there a cultural value to it at all?
There certainly is for the people who celebrate it. Having time off from their busy schedules and spending time with their loved ones and it also tends to have a sentimental value as well. Tradition has a way of entrenching ones childhood.
One would be naïve to think that the Thanksgiving story doesn’t pervade the benefits of it.
This problem is increasingly important when sometimes, people can’t even rely on schools to give alternative perspectives of U.S. history. That is clearly being displayed in Jefferson County, Colo. where the school board began making proposals in September to alter the curriculum of Advanced Placement history courses. The school board called to remove course materials that, “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Thanksgiving isn’t going anywhere anytime soon but people can at least be honest with themselves and each other and not whitewash history in half-truths. Like the late historian Howard Zinn once said, “History is important. If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday.”