Pilgrim myths: Don't believe everything your kindergarten teacher told you
The story could start a century earlier, in 1524, at the first known contact between Native Americans in southern New England and Europeans, in Narragansett Bay near Aquidneck Island. Tradition dictates the Pilgrims’ story starts in September 1620, with the departure of the Mayflower, packed with colonists and sailors, leaving England to set sail for the New World.īut starting there ignores years of European contact with the Native people of New England, and paints the Wampanoag and their neighbors in the broad stroke of simplicity, ignoring the complex regional relationships and politicking at play. “How are we supposed to improve on this sorry record if we don’t understand the sorry record?” asked Silverman, a George Washington University professor. The more historically accurate telling is gaining a foothold in small circles, as members of the Herring Pond, Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes Michele Pecoraro, executive director of Plymouth 400, who is helping lead the anniversary commemoration and Silverman bring the documented facts to light. It also is not the one you’ll find at Pilgrim Memorial Park in Plymouth, home of the famed Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II, a replica of the cargo ship turned people carrier the Pilgrims crammed into to cross the Atlantic. The historically accurate story of the Pilgrims and the founding of Plymouth Colony 400 years ago this month is not in most school history books. Kennedy, whose family frolicked in the home of the native Nauset and Aquinnah people on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, immortalized them in his own Thanksgiving Day proclamation, baking the plaits together like the bread broken and shared in the mythic first Thanksgiving feast.
In 1963, these two tracks crossed when President John F. Plymouth Rock sits next to Plymouth Harbor. More: Not all Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. Regardless of whether it was rooted in historical fact, it became accepted as such. On a parallel track, the story of the Pilgrim forefathers coming to the New World and founding America for religious freedom gained steam, as New England Protestants wielded the myth to gain the top spot in the country’s cultural hierarchy, above Catholics and immigrants, according to historian David Silverman in his book “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.”Īs Americans looked for an origin story that wasn’t soaked in the blood of Native Americans or built on the backs of slavery, the humble, bloodless story of the 102 Pilgrims forging a path in the New World in search of religious freedom was just what they needed, according to Silverman. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared a Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday of November, looking to reconcile a country in the throes of the Civil War. The first national Thanksgiving Day did not invoke the Pilgrims at all.
Lincoln’s first Thanksgiving Day didn't mention Pilgrims Their role in helping the Pilgrims survive by sharing resources and wisdom went unacknowledged that day, according to accounts of the toasts given by Pilgrim leaders. As for that 1621 feast - the supposed genesis of today’s Thanksgiving tradition - there was a small feast, but the Wampanoag were not invited, they showed up later. The Pilgrims spent only a few weeks of 1620 in the Wampanoag village of Patuxet, which they would rename Plimoth (now Plymouth), and they certainly didn’t step off onto Plymouth Rock. It doesn’t start there because those things never happened, despite being immortalized in American mythos for generations. It also doesn’t start a year later, with the Pilgrims and the native Wampanoag all sitting together to “break bread” and celebrate their first successful harvest and a long, harmonious relationship to come. The traditional story of Thanksgiving, and by extension the Pilgrims - the one repeated in school history books and given the Peanuts treatment in "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" - doesn’t start in 1620, with the cold and seasick Pilgrims stepping off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock.