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Spotlight on Simmons

The Surprising History of Thanksgiving

Associate Professor of English Renée Bergland is the author of The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. She teaches a wide range of cultural and critical courses, including American Literature, Culture Studies, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and Native American Literature. In this essay, she describes Native American studies scholars' best guesses about what really happened on that historic first Thanksgiving Day.

By Renée Bergland

The past is lost to us. We can't quite reconstruct it, though every Thanksgiving we try, poring over recipe books, trying to remember and recreate our own family traditions. Every year the food is different, yet one thing stays consistent: most of us tend to roast turkeys (or sculpt them from tofu) in remembrance of the mythic turkey feast shared by Wampanoags and English Puritans in Plymouth in 1621.

But that 1621 Thanksgiving is as much a matter of guesswork and speculation as our own Thanksgivings - perhaps even more, since no recipes or guestlists or photographs survive. In fact, there are only a few sentences in the historical record that were written around the time of the first Thanksgiving; - and those lines give very few clues about the harvest festival that we think of as the first Thanksgiving.

One thing is certain: 41 Puritans and about 90 Indians had a party in the autumn of 1621. But they probably did not call it a "Thanksgiving"; "Thanksgivings" were Puritan religious holidays that were preceded by days of fasting and humiliation.

Thanksgiving as we know it developed a 100 years or so after 1621. Puritanical New Englanders who disapproved of religious holidays celebrated it in the end of December, as a secular anti-Christmas. Looking back at the distant past, they pounced on a few sentences in a letter from Plymouth, and imagined a holiday that celebrated the triumphant courage of the Plymouth Puritans (whom they renamed "Pilgrims").

When we reexamine the same sentences in the context of current historical understandings of first contact between Native Americans and English Puritans, there are many surprises:

  • Turkey wasn't necessarily the center of the meal. There was definitely venison, and probably quite a bit of fish. Some scholars imagine that the party was more like a traditional Wampanoag beachside clambake than an English feast because the Wampanoags outnumbered the Puritans 2 to 1. The English had spent most of their time and energy in their first year learning how to cultivate and prepare Native American foods. It is quite likely that the food  - and the party - had a distinctly Native American flavor.
  • It was definitely a party. It went on for three days. The record shows that there were also games: footraces and target shooting and other contests of skill. Also, the Puritans believed alcohol was much healthier than water, and they are unlikely to have feasted without drinking quite a bit.
  • There is no evidence that they sat at a long table. It had been quite a struggle to build the seven houses that the 41 surviving settlers shared - there had not been time to build furniture. There could have been trestle tables, but it is very hard to make a case for chairs. The party probably resembled an outdoor keg party rather than an indoor white-tablecloth affair.
  • Many might think of the English as more technologically or culturally advanced than their Native American teachers, but in the first year the English had been the ones doing the learning. The Wampanoags who showed them the ropes were comparatively more advanced in terms of agriculture and medicine, and they were far more cosmopolitan than the English, in part because they were in the midst of great cultural changes and developments brought on by more than a century of contact with Europeans before the Puritans arrived.
  • The English were quite anxious about water. Not only did they think it was unhealthy to drink too much of it, they also believed that it was very dangerous to bathe in it. The English at that first celebration probably washed their clothes before the party; the Indians probably washed their bodies. It took centuries for English settlers to adopt the strange Native American practice of bathing.
  • It is probably a mistake to think of the first Thanksgiving as the triumph of either cultural group over the other; it was a collaborative feast that celebrated a peace between the Indians and the English that would last for more than 50 years. The "Day of Mourning," staged every year since 1970 in Plymouth as an anti-Thanksgiving, mourns the entire 500-year history of colonialism, but it doesn't have much to do with the harvest festival of 1621. On the contrary, it draws more from the Puritan tradition of always pairing a day of humiliation and fasting with a day of feasting and thanksgiving.
  • Thanksgiving as we know it has its roots in the secular ancestor worship of 18th and 19th century Puritans. It became a national holiday during the American Civil War, when the editor Sarah Josepha Hale convinced Abraham Lincoln that Americans needed a "Union" holiday that would help to bring the nation together in wartime.

The Thanksgiving tradition has always been as much about constructing an American community in the present, as it has been about reconstructing an almost inaccessible past. We are free to interpret, imagine, and reinvent Thanksgiving as we see fit. This time, let's imagine a rollicking and joyful party that set the stage for at least 50 years of peaceful intercultural collaboration and mutual discovery.