Thanksgiving in the United States

Thanksgiving in the United States is a national holiday built on Native peoples’ land and knowledge, Black people’s coerced and underpaid labor, and a settler story that later stripped out most of the conquest that made it possible. The modern image of a peaceful 1621 “Pilgrim and Indian” feast is a 19th‑ and 20th‑century invention that pushed aside centuries of Native dispossession, enslaved African labor in New England and the broader colonies, and repeated “thanksgiving” celebrations held after violent campaigns against Indigenous nations.

From the start, the food, land, and labor that made English survival possible grew out of Wampanoag, Narragansett and other Native people’s agricultural systems, and quickly out of enslaved and bound African and Indigenous workers as New England and the broader colonies adopted slavery. Later generations turned this history into a sentimental family tableau, with school pageants and textbooks presenting Thanksgiving as racial harmony rather than as a moment inside a much larger story of conquest and exploitation.

1.Origins in Native foodways and colonial dependence

Long before 1620, Wampanoag, Massachusett, Narragansett and other peoples along what is now New England’s coast held seasonal harvest observances, sharing stored corn, beans, squash, and hunted game in cycles tied to the land and water. Their agricultural systems—raised cornfields, clam beds, controlled burns, and seed‑saving—fed dense Native communities for centuries and underwrote the food that English settlers would later describe as miraculous abundance. Early English accounts, including those of Edward Winslow, describe Native generosity in teaching planting techniques, sharing seed, and trading food during the colonists’ first desperate years, making clear that English “harvest” celebrations were only possible because they were grafted onto these preexisting Native systems.

The 1621 gathering in Plymouth that later generations retroactively named the “First Thanksgiving” was a local diplomatic and military occasion: an English harvest celebration attended by Wampanoag men, likely armed and present as part of a fragile alliance under Massasoit. Contemporary records did not treat it as a founding national ritual, but as one among many days of thanks—often proclaimed by colonial authorities in response to specific events, including safe arrivals and military victories.

2.Days of thanksgiving and colonial violence

In 17th‑century New England, “thanksgiving” days were as often tied to war as to harvest. After the 1637 Mystic Massacre, in which English and allied Native forces killed hundreds of Pequot people, the Massachusetts Bay authorities declared a day of thanksgiving to celebrate the victory. Similar proclamations followed other campaigns against Native nations during the Pequot War and, later, King Philip’s War in the 1670s. These observances treated Indigenous defeat and death as occasions for collective gratitude, embedding violence into the practice while later retellings moved that violence offstage.

At the same time, New England and other colonies deepened their dependence on coerced labor. By the mid‑17th century, Puritan households held enslaved Africans and Indigenous captives, some taken during those very wars. The “thanksgiving” tables of prosperous colonists increasingly included food planted, harvested, cooked, or served by enslaved and bound workers. Yet later representations removed these Black and Native cooks and laborers from the scene, replacing them with white Pilgrim families and an undifferentiated “Indian” guest.

3.Enslaved and Black labor in the making of the holiday

As the British mainland colonies shifted toward plantation economies in the South and a commercial‑agricultural mix in the North, enslaved Africans and their descendants became central to food production and preparation. Rice, indigo, tobacco, and later cotton in the South—and grain, livestock, and coastal trade in the Mid‑Atlantic and New England—relied on enslaved labor. Enslaved women and men cleared fields, planted and harvested corn and other staples, tended livestock, milled grain, and cooked in both elite and modest households, including for seasonal feasts.

By the 18th and early 19th centuries, regional “days of thanks” and harvest feasts in Northern states and communities were commonplace, and they sat atop economies already transformed by slavery, Black maritime labor, and, later, free Black workers’ wage labor. Black cooks in both North and South shaped the dishes that would later be coded as “traditional Thanksgiving food”—roasted meats, pies, stews, and, in Southern households that observed autumn feasts, preparations of sweet potatoes, greens, and cornbread. Yet the sentimental print culture that grew up around Thanksgiving in the 19th century rarely credited these hands, presenting the feast as the expression of white domestic virtue.

4.Nationalization, Civil War, and a sanitized narrative

The modern American Thanksgiving was nationalized during the Civil War. After decades of lobbying by writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale for a common harvest holiday to unify the country, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation in 1863 establishing a national day of thanksgiving in November. The timing, in the midst of war, tied the holiday to Union victory and national redemption, but the story that flourished in postwar decades centered not on emancipation or Black citizenship but on an imagined, racially harmonious colonial past.

Late‑19th‑century schoolbooks, popular magazines, and lithographs fixed the tableau of buckled‑hat Pilgrims peacefully feasting with vaguely represented “Indians.” This iconography took hold precisely as Reconstruction was being dismantled, Native nations were being confined to reservations or subjected to the reservation and boarding‑school systems, and Black political power was being violently suppressed. Thanksgiving pageants in schools taught white and immigrant children that the United States was founded in mutual consent and gratitude, sidelining both Indigenous dispossession and the centrality of Black labor and struggle to the nation’s survival and wealth.

5.Twentieth‑century contestation and re‑telling

In the 20th century, Native activists, scholars, and communities increasingly challenged the official Thanksgiving story, pointing to the Pequot War, King Philip’s War, and the broader history of broken treaties and land theft behind the myth. Since 1970, the National Day of Mourning observance in Plymouth has called attention to what the holiday obscures, linking past and present struggles over land, policing, and environmental harm. Black writers and historians highlighted parallel erasures: the way Thanksgiving rhetoric of national unity glossed over Jim Crow, racial terror, and the exploitation of Black workers whose labor made American plenty possible.

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, families and communities—Native, Black, immigrant, and white—adapted the day in different ways: some refusing the holiday, some using it to teach truer histories, others focusing on gathering and mutual aid while rejecting the founding myth. The whitewashed story has not disappeared from advertising or school celebrations, but it now sits alongside a growing body of scholarship, art, and activism insisting that any honest account of Thanksgiving must center the land it stands on, the peoples displaced, and the Black and Indigenous labor that filled its tables.

The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.

6.References