November National Day of Mourning

By Burju Perez

Honoring Native People

This November, as we honor Native People, let us not forget to call out white settler colonialism and its propaganda campaign that is the American holiday of Thanksgiving. We were all taught that cherished origin story of harmonious unity in 1621 when English Pilgrims and the local Wampanoag people shared a bountiful harvest feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts. This whitewashed narration paints a simple picture of generosity, cross-cultural friendship, and divine providence. The truth is far more complex. When viewed through the lens of the Wampanoag Nation, Thanksgiving transforms from a foundational celebration of peace into a moment of strategic necessity, and ultimately, a prelude to cultural collapse, dispossession, and war. The true story of the 1621 gathering is not one of peace, but of politics, diplomacy, and the irreversible tragedy of colonization.

The Wampanoag before Plymouth

To understand the Wampanoag’s decision to engage the English, one must first recognize the catastrophic state of their world prior to 1621. For generations, the Wampanoag (the People of the First Light) thrived across what is now southeastern Massachusetts, governing sophisticated societies with deep traditions of gratitude tied to seasonal harvests. Yet, decades before the Mayflower arrived European vessels had already introduced devastating infectious diseases. Between 1616 and 1619, a massive plague, known as the Great Dying, swept through the coastal communities, killing an estimated 75 to 90 percent of the population. The village of Patuxet, where the Pilgrims ultimately settled, was a ghost town, its fields cleared but its people gone. 

This demographic devastation left the Wampanoag Nation politically vulnerable. The neighboring Narragansett Nation, who had been less affected by the plague, began asserting dominance and threatening the sovereignty of the Wampanoag people. Led by their Massasoit (Great Sachem), Ousamequin, the Wampanoag were in a precarious position, desperately needing a military and political counterweight. When the colonizers arrived in 1620, their weakness was immediately apparent; nearly half of them died during the first winter, yet still  they were potential allies against the threat of the Narragansett.

The Alliance minus the Invitation

The pivotal moment in Wampanoag-English relations was not the harvest gathering, but the Treaty of Mutual Protection signed in March of 1629. This strategic alliance stipulated that the two groups would aid each other in the event of an unjust war. However, the terms of the treaty already contained subtle indicators of the unequal power dynamic to come, including a clause that required the Wampanoag to leave their weapons behind when visiting Plymouth, an imposition not placed on the English.

Central to this alliance was Tisquantum, known to the colonizers as Squanto. Tisquantum was one of dozens of Wampanoag kidnapped in 1614 by an English Captain, Thomas Hunt and sold into slavery in Spain. He escaped, lived in London, then eventually returned home, only to find his village annihilated by the plague. His knowledge of English and the local terrain made him an invaluable interpreter and guide for the Pilgrims, teaching them critical agricultural skills like how to fertilize crops with fish, which proved essential for the colonizers survival. However, Ousamequin saw Tisquantum as a powerful diplomat whose history and independent actions couldn’t always be trusted. 

The famed harvest gathering in autumn of 1621 was not a joint celebration planned by mutual invitation. The only surviving contemporary accounts are written by Pilgrims. They detail a small celebration by the colonizers after their first successful harvest. The turning point, according to many historians analyzing these accounts, came when the Wampanoag arrived. Upon hearing the colonizers repeatedly discharging their muskets in a “military exercise,” Ousamequin and approximately ninety of his warriors appeared at the settlement. The Wampanoag, interpreting the gunfire as a sign of attack or conflict, arrived as part of their defense treaty obligations and as a show of force, not as invited dinner guests.

Recognizing the Wampanoag’s unexpected presence, and the fact that ninety warriors could easily overwhelm the roughly fifty surviving colonizers, the English swiftly turned the situation into a diplomatic necessity. The Wampanoag, in turn, went out and killed five deer, which they brought back to share, effectively transforming the English harvest celebration into a three-day diplomatic negotiation and a show of mutual strength for regional audiences.

From Alliance to Genocide

The peaceful co-existence established by the 1621 treaty didn’t last. As the English population swelled with new arrivals, their religious and cultural arrogance intensified. The English colonists viewed Native peoples as "savages" and "heathens" and saw the Great Dying as a sign that their God favored their colonization of the land. The colonizers soon disregarded the terms of the treaty and began encroaching aggressively on Wampanoag land, imposing their laws, and demanding Native submission to English authority. In other words, colonizers started doing colonizer shit!

The escalating land disputes and cultural clashes culminated in 1675 with King Philip’s War (Metacom’s War), named after Ousamequin’s son, Metacom (or Philip), who had succeeded his father as Massasoit. Metacom understood that the continued existence of the English settlements represented an existential threat to the Wampanoag way of life. The war was one of the deadliest conflicts in American history relative to population size, resulting in the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans. Upon the English victory in 1676, Metacom was captured and executed, his head displayed on a pike in Plymouth for decades. The defeated Wampanoag were scattered, enslaved, or forced into subjugation, losing their political power and becoming strangers in their own ancestral land.

National Day of Mourning

The transformation of the complex 1621 diplomatic encounter into the simplistic American Thanksgiving myth occurred much later, particularly in the 19th century, when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. The romanticized narrative of a peaceful "first Thanksgiving" served a clear political purpose: to foster a sense of national unity and historical justification for the concurrent federal actions against Native nations, masking the violence of westward expansion and the ongoing theft of Indigenous land.

For many Native Americans today, the fourth Thursday in November is not a celebration, but a National Day of Mourning. Since 1970, Native activists and their allies have gathered annually at Cole’s Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock to commemorate the genocide, displacement, and loss of culture experienced over four centuries of colonization. This day serves to honor ancestors and protest the racism and oppression that Native communities continue to face, simultaneously acting as a reminder that the Wampanoag Nation, despite centuries of systemic assault, has survived and continues to fight for its sovereignty and recognition.

The true story of the 1621 gathering is not just a cute little story of shared food but a profound historical lesson in diplomacy born of crisis. Ousamequin and the Wampanoag made a calculated, necessary alliance to survive immediate regional threats. The English, despite the generosity and life-saving aid they received, soon prioritized their expansion over their treaty commitments. To fully understand Thanksgiving requires acknowledging the Wampanoag perspective: that the shared harvest was merely the fleeting, uneasy overture to a long, violent campaign of dispossession that followed. Recognizing this difficult history is the first step toward a more honest and ethically grounded national remembrance.

Written by Tamara Rose

References

First Nations Development Institute https://www.firstnations.org/news/understanding-thanksgiving-from-our-side-of-the-table/

NativeHope.org https://blog.nativehope.org/what-does-thanksgiving-mean-to-native-americans

Potawatomi.org The true, dark history of Thanksgiving. https://www.potawatomi.org/blog/2020/11/25/the-true-dark-history-of-thanksgiving/

Silverman, D. J. This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Treaty and Harvest Celebration. https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/thanksgiving/sq4ss1.html

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving. https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/informational/rethinking-thanksgiving