Introduction
For hundreds of years, Americans have celebrated the origins of the country that unofficially began when the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The Thanksgiving holiday is typically a time for giving thanks to family and friends, but also to the Wampanoag tribe who taught the Pilgrims, America’s ancestors, how to survive in the New World. However, recent examinations of the origin of Thanksgiving brings to light Wampanoag oral histories that detail an entirely different narrative than the one that has been popularized in American history. The Myth of Thanksgiving often problematically oversimplifies the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, portraying tribe members as passive participants in diplomatic efforts. This reduction of indigenous involvement in a critical moment in American history reflects a broader pattern of an oversimplification of the tensions between United States citizens and Native American tribes across the country as settlers sought to seize additional land.
This research will examine newspaper references to Native Americans in the context of Thanksgiving across the United States from 1846 to 1963. During this long period of time, there was perpetual opposition between indigenous communities and the United States and in the media, the U.S. sought to minimize the impact of Native American resistance as well as the enduring Native American presence across the country. Due to these tensions evident throughout the duration of the dataset — and beyond — I seek to better understand how American newspapers attempted to reconcile both the gratitude for Native Americans as evidenced in the Myth of Thanksgiving as well as racist ideology that permeated the treatment of indigenous communities. The way that these conflicting narratives will be the most visible is through word choice in depictions of Native Americans in addition to whether indigenous people are given a passive or active voice.
However, despite these broad patterns that I hypothesize will be apparent in the dataset, there are other factors that should be considered to add additional complexity to the analysis. Even though Thanksgiving is a national holiday, Thanksgiving is celebrated in different ways throughout the United States. The dataset features newspapers from all over the country, from the West Coast to the Northeast and I will investigate whether, for varying regions, there is a particular set of words that are associated with Thanksgiving and Native Americans. In addition, recognizing the history of forced conversions, how are Native Americans described within prayer? Since this dataset covers a large span of time, do Native Americans become removed from the celebration of Thanksgiving as they are viewed as a supposed “vanishing people”?
Critical to understanding the context of the results, it will be fruitful to keep in mind the various legislative acts that impacted Native Americans across this period.
Addressing the Scope:
The intention of this research is not to solve these ongoing, complex social issues, but to serve as part of a broader movement in academia to address the United States’ colonialist legacy. These research questions are meant to help begin to fill in the gaps to understand the full extent of American colonialism and the minimization of Native Americans in the media along with the other inhumane, genocidal actions committed by the United States. Although the last newspaper dates to 1963, these issues are still relevant to indigenous communities and there should be additional research to examine whether there has been more appropriate representation and depictions of Native Americans in the media today.