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The myth of the First Thanksgiving has a powerful hold on the imagination of modern (white?) Americans. Historians have long pointed out that the reality of those first few years of the Plymouth Colony does not really support the myth, but, like all good myths, it persists. Ousamequin (more often called Massasoit), a paramount chief or king of the Wampanoag, was present at that first, three-day feast. He had allied with the settlers, possibly to gain support in a clash with the Narragansett people nearby, support that he needed because an epidemic had roughly halved the number of Wampanoag in the preceding decade.
The epidemic meant that the land where the pilgrims landed was not occupied, and a key idea for the pilgrims was that God had providentially cleared the land for them to take over and farm. However, quite apart from the epidemic, it was being left fallow to allow the soil to regain fertility, a fundamental practice of the Wampanaog people and many other Native American tribes. Different ideas about ownership, among other factors, were behind the pilgrims’ treatment of the Wampanoag, who had a complex and successful system for providing themselves — and starving pilgrims — with food. That system is the subject of this episode.
Notes
- Mike Wise’s book is Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, from the University of Arkansas Press.
- Yes, I’ve done Thanksgiving, and turkeys, before. Before I re-plug my own offering, you really should find time to read Tom Nealon’s piece Stuffed. That done, here’s the re-plug: What a bunch of turkeys.
- Here is the transcript.
- The banner image is from Massasoit Meeting English Settlers, an illustration in Lives of Famous Indian Chiefs by Norman B. Wood, 1906.
