Cultural Awareness Why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving

That the Mayflower reached Cape Cod in November 1620 and found a wilderness lightly populated by primitive heathens is, of course, a myth. Instead they encountered a full blown civilization, one with roads connecting multifamily summer villages, stored crops and fallow fields. The Thanksgiving story, a fable of the same native peoples generously helping the Pilgrims through their first winter by teaching them to plant corn, then celebrating their success with a feast of venison and game, is as mythical. According to historian, David Silverman, European mariners called "explorers" preceded the Pilgrims as slavers who raided the Wampanoag coast for years prior to 1620. Then the Pilgrims introduced themselves to the Wampanoags by desecrating graves and robbing underground storage bins. In the fall of 1621 native leaders extended their hand not out of innate friendliness, but because they needed allies against their Narragansett rivals after the Wampanoags suffered a devastating epidemic introduced by the Europeans. Perhaps telling the real history of Thanksgiving should be a new holiday tradition. Book: This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving Related Article: The Invention of Thanksgiving

The first national day of Thanksgiving was declared by Abraham Lincoln in 1850 in order to unify a country polarized by the civil war.

"In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, 'with a large increase of freedom,' would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans 'in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands' to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving." - Heather Cox Richardson Article: Thanksgiving is the Quintessential American holiday…But Not for the Reasons We Generally Remember.