"For native people, every day is a day of thanksgiving," Theobald said. "There are 500 different tribal groups within the U.S. and each one has its own special and unique traditions of celebration. But there is a basic underlying belief that everything is a gift. Giving thanks for everything is simply part of daily life: for water, air, the earth, animals and plants, stars and all living and non-living things including the landscape; for having stories to tell and a family to tell them to. So the idea of Thanksgiving is not a day of specific observance. It is a sense of cultural and personal identity for native people. The gifts of the land are not natural resources, i.e. things to be used or consumed. The Wampanoag's sharing their knowledge of how to raise corn was not just a 'friendly gesture'; it was a sharing of spirituality."

My own assumption about the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving
was that, of course, it was the first on this continent. It never occurred to me that native people had been celebrating harvest festivals for thousands of years before the Europeans came and did not need European help in knowing how to give thanks.

Theobold also noted that Thanksgiving is a popular "Indian time" for us non-native people.

"For three weeks in November, the museum is packed with school tours. It represents the same frustration for us that I've heard a number of black people express about non-black people designating one month as 'Black History Month,' as if that history weren't real and ongoing all year. It's a real dilemma for those of us involved in education: Do we allow ourselves to resent the relegating of Native Americans to background for the Pilgrims and all the stereotypes and myths that go with the non-native story of the 'First Thanksgiving' or do we see the interest during this month as an opportunity to educate?"

Although the gathering at Plymouth may actually have been for treaty making, it had the markings of a harvest festival. Thanksgiving for the Pilgrims and Puritans was typically a religious observance occasioned by specific difficulties or events and marked by prayer and fasting. As one colonist's letter describing a Thanksgiving Day feast during the Revolutionary War mentions, Grandmother Smith on that occasion "did her best to persuade us that it would be better to make it a Day of Fasting & Prayer in view of the Wickedness of our Friends & the Vileness of our Enemies."

Given the textbook illustrations I grew up with, it never occurred to me
that Europeans were in the minority at that 1621 gathering in Plymouth. Massasoit, Sachem of the local Wampanoag tribe, brought 90 braves to that event; the ravages of disease during the winter of 1620-21 had left not more than 50 Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims' contribution to the feast owed great thanks to Squanto, the Wampanoag who befriended them and taught them how to grow the corn and fish and forage. What school child does not know the name of Squanto and his role in aiding the inherently superior European settlers to overcome initial hardships and adversity? Racism needs to be carefully taught and this cameo appearance by Squanto has been a prime lesson in that curriculum.

How many school children know the reason Squanto knew English? I certainly never knew that in 1615 he and 26 other Pawtuxet (the Wampanoag name for Plymouth) and Nauset Indians were taken by the English Captain Thomas Hunt and sold into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto subsequently escaped to England and made his way back to Pawtuxet six months before the Pilgrims arrived only to find his people wiped out by the smallpox which Captain Hunt's vessel had also brought. Slavery, of course, was something that I was brought up to believe was the problem of the South and was what gave the North its great moral advantage in the Civil War. It is part of the Untold Story.

It is also part of the Untold Story that Plymouth is where the head
of Massasoit's son, Metacom, called by the English "King Philip," was brought and placed on a stake for public display following the 1675 conflict known by the victors as King Philip's War. Jill Lepore's 1998 book, The Name of War, explores the meaning of the conflict itself, the identity issues at stake on both sides and the ways in which the memory of the struggle was used even in the 19th century to justify continued fear of native people and their continuing internment and removal.

I grew up within five miles of the site of the killing of 700 Pequot men, women and children by colonial troops in 1637. The occasion was the Green Corn Ceremony thanksgiving festival - Schemitzun - now a public annual festival under the sponsorship of the Mashantucket Pequots. To commemorate this "victory over the enemy" in 1637, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony proclaimed the first official "Thanksgiving Day" which was then celebrated by New England colonists for the next hundred years.

The current fourth-Thursday-in-November model of an urbanized and consumer-oriented national holiday has lost both its harvest festival core and its religious import, except for the sparsely attended local ecumenical services which still seem mandatory. It is still a day for feasting, although as fewer and fewer people know how to cook for four, let alone for 40, it is not the family gathering it was. But it is the busiest airport day of the year and I suspect that has to do with the memory of "home" as being central to economic as well as emotional life. The homes the English colonists established were farms and therefore centers of local economic life. The New England landscape that is so central to my sense of beauty and identity - the stone walls and meadows which destroyed the native people's way of life, introducing ideas of bounded ownership and domesticated herds of animals - is now threatened by new economic forces of urban sprawl and housing developments.

Stereotypes are debilitating to both sides.
But as one of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum's resource papers points out, it scarcely does any good to have the stereotypes of ignorant, naked savages replaced by ones of brutal, greedy whites. Our children need better options from us than that. But it is hard. As Elizabeth Theobald pointed out to me, the concept of grace and the tradition of giving thanks in both native and Christian traditions should be a point of possible mutual understanding and companionship.

One of the pieces in Thanksgiving: A Native Perspective (Oyate, Berkeley, 1995, 1998) which Theobald's staff gave me to help make up for my enormous cultural deprivation and lack of knowledge includes an excerpt from Marilou Awiakta's book Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother's Wisdom. Awiakta (Cherokee) describes two attitudes toward Native people that were evident during colonial times. One was that of companion, "a desire to coexist peacefully, as beans and squash do with corn. The other was the attitude of use and consume, as lethal to the concept of democracy as the corn borer is to the grain."

Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony
in 1636 and settled in the area which he named Providence, Rhode Island. I remember Roger Williams as being persecuted for his religion and as a representative of the struggle for religious freedom. What I didn't know was that when Williams arrived in the Bay area, he preached on two major themes: the separation of church and state and the invalidity of the king's patent to seize land. Both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay rejected his insistence that just title could be had only by buying the land directly from the Indians. Awiakta sees Roger Williams as a companion and peacemaker in those difficult days and someone who earned the trust of the Narragansett from whom the Rhode Island colony purchased land. The fact that he was doing this at the time of the Pequot War indicates the deeper tragedy that Europeans could have been companions on life's journey rather than conquerors and establishers of a new economic and social order.

The hope, vision and commitment to work toward relationships based on just stewardship of the land as our common responsibility to God and our mutual care for the local community is something for which I can be most thankful, although I have come to realize how resistant I am even to naming the history which so complicates the mythic and racist views of my own identity with which I grew up. Beginning to learn and talk about the Untold Story and the traditional native worldview, with which I find much to identify, has been difficult but necessary for me as someone who wants to be part of rebuilding a sustainable economy and community in the place which I, too, call home.