Summary

The complexities of Native American relations with American settlers have been purposefully left out of American popular memory in favor of a more simplistic narrative, which is manifested by the creation of the Thanksgiving holiday. I seek to examine whether perspectives on Thanksgiving, in relation to Native Americans, have changed through time or differ by region by analyzing various newspaper articles across the United States.

As someone who grew up in Massachusetts, I have always heard the sanitized story of the arrival at Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving: Native Americans taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn and before winter, had a large feast symbolizing their allegiance to each other. I even remember in third grade singing with my class at a Thanksgiving pageant about Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims.

As I grew older, I recognized that there was something fundamentally missing in my education: I live in a state whose name derives from the name of a tribe and many cities have retained their indigenous names and yet, Native Americans were always portrayed as existing in the past, never the present. Tribes in Massachusetts have continued to be a part of the Commonwealth, but I never once learned more about their presence in the 21st century, not even in AP U.S. history in high school.

Only through outside research and college courses, I realized that the origin of Thanksgiving I learned all throughout my life was purposefully crafted to exclude indigenous narratives. The lack of diverse perspectives of historical events remains an issue today and this project seeks to take into account the biases that have impacted the representation of Thanksgiving in the media.

Credits

Kelli Aquino, Anthropology and History Concentrator, Class of 2022