The Other Side of Thanksgiving

For most Americans, Thanksgiving feels like a warm inhale. Food, family, televised rituals, and marketed gratitude. The holiday is designed to feel uncomplicated.

For Indigenous people, it isn’t. For many Native nations, Thanksgiving is a yearly reminder of betrayal and loss, a date that opens old wounds American culture prefers wrapped in cartoon feathers and parade floats. That tension is what created the National Day of Mourning in 1970, a gathering that began when truth was censored and has grown into a counter-narrative grounded in historical accuracy.

The story started with Wamsutta Frank James, a Wampanoag leader invited to speak at a Pilgrim anniversary banquet. He prepared a factual, honest account of what colonization meant for his ancestors: enslavement, theft, and mass death. Organizers rejected it. They wanted a speech that matched the holiday fantasy. Instead, he delivered it outdoors. Thousands joined him. That one silenced speech became the foundation for an annual event at Plymouth Rock, an Indigenous-led insistence that truth belongs in the country’s public memory even when it disrupts the choreography.

The Day of Mourning is not anti-Thanksgiving. It is anti-amnesia. It functions as a corrective lens. When families are carving turkeys, Indigenous elders are standing in cold wind, drumming and praying, naming the history that the national holiday edited out. It is not bitterness. It is the refusal to let silence do what violence already attempted.

To understand why this matters, the textbook story has to be dismantled. Most people grew up with a polished narrative: peaceful Pilgrims and helpful Wampanoag sharing a meal in 1621. The truth is sharper.

• The Pilgrims were not thriving settlers—they were starving colonists who arrived on Wampanoag land after half their group died.
• The Wampanoag were not hosting a celebration; they were a nation decimated by European disease and facing political pressure on all sides.
• The alliance that formed between them was not friendship. It was survival calculus. Squanto taught them how to grow food. They survived the winter.
• Both sides attended the 1621 feast, but it functioned more like a diplomatic cease-fire than a symbol of unity.

What followed is the part that rarely makes it into school plays. As colonial settlements expanded, the alliance disintegrated. Tension escalated into King Philip’s War, one of the deadliest conflicts in early American history. The outcome was catastrophic for Native nations in New England.

• Land was seized.
• Sovereignty collapsed.
• Survivors were enslaved or scattered.
• The Wampanoag, whose assistance had kept the colonists alive, became targets of domination.

Over time, as the nation sought cohesion, Thanksgiving was rebranded. Abraham Lincoln declared it a national holiday during the Civil War, framing it as a unifying ritual for a fractured country.

• The brutal colonial past was sanded down.
• The complicated alliance became a fairy tale.
• The Native losses became invisible.
• Gratitude remained, but the cost of that gratitude—paid by Indigenous nations—was pushed out of view.

Yet the Wampanoag people still exist. Descendants still live in the same region. Archaeological research continues to reveal the depth of their society before colonization. Oral histories and community records preserve what mainstream narratives erased. For them, Thanksgiving is evidence of survival, not a celebratory myth. The National Day of Mourning exists because survival deserves accuracy, not decoration.

Thanksgiving itself continued evolving into what Americans recognize now.

• The industrial era turned it into a commercialized anchor at the start of the holiday season.
• The 1930s cemented its place on the calendar during Roosevelt’s push to stabilize economic cycles.
• The media age added televised parades, football games, and imagery that substituted nostalgia for nuance.
• By the late 20th century, the holiday had fully migrated from a historical event into a cultural performance, largely disconnected from its origins and deeply connected to ritualized family tradition.

The National Day of Mourning operates as the counterweight. It restores the missing half of the story. It is not about guilt. It is about accuracy. A nation cannot evolve on a foundation made of myth. A country built on Indigenous land should be able to tell the truth about how that land changed hands. Mourning is not weakness. It is clarity. And clarity is the only way to prevent repetition.

Every year, as turkey-themed centerpieces go up across the country, a crowd assembles at Plymouth with drums, banners, and stories that were never meant to disappear. They do not gather to ruin anyone’s dinner. They gather because remembrance is an act of survival. Because truth, spoken consistently, eventually becomes part of the national memory whether the country wants it or not.

Thanksgiving can hold gratitude. It can hold family, harvest, quiet moments, and good meals. But it also has to hold history. When a nation finally stops choosing the comforting story over the accurate one, the healing begins where it always should have—at the place where someone finally dared to tell the truth.

Sources That Don’t Suck:

United American Indians of New England

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

Wamsutta Frank James Archives

Plymouth Plantation Records

Smithsonian Magazine

National Park Service – Plymouth Historical Materials