Q&A: This Book Explores 'The Troubled History of Thanksgiving'
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In This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth County, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (2019, Bloomsbury), Professor David J. Silverman takes on one of the insidious myths in American history: the story of the first Thanksgiving. Using primary source accounts from both the English and the Natives, Silverman takes a nuanced, thoughtful approach to unpacking the shameful and bloody history of the holiday. Silverman, who teaches Native American, Colonial American, and racial history at George Washington University, spoke with Zelda Zerkel-Morris and the National about children’s pageants, American mythology, and reactions to the book from both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Silverman’s upcoming book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States will be published by Bloomsbury in February.
To begin, I’d love to ask you about the genesis of the book. What made you want to tackle such a mainstay in American culture?
Back when I was a beginning scholar, I wrote a book about the Wampanoags of Martha's Vineyard. When I was writing that book, I reached out to the modern-day Aquinnah Wampanoag community, and one of the things they told me was how difficult the Thanksgiving season was for them, because it was a holiday in which their own country was, at minimum, making light of their own historic ordeals, and at worst, was celebrating their death and dispossession.
They said it was especially difficult for them when they had kids in the schools, because then it wasn't just neighbors putting up decorations of Pilgrims and Indians, car dealerships, or whatever they were. Authority figures who were supposed to know something about history, propagating a history that was that involved them effectively conceding to colonialism. The kids would come home, and they'd say, “My teachers said that we welcomed this and that we're all gone.” It seemed to me that a book setting the story straight was important.
I also work regularly with teacher training institutes on the subject of the American Revolution, but what they always want to ask me about as an expert in Native American history is the history of Thanksgiving, because it's the one cameo native people make every year in the curriculum. It seemed to me, I could reach an awful lot of people through the teachers if I wrote a book that was compelling and accessible to them.
I'm glad that you mentioned how much the story is taught to kids, there’s a great part in the introduction where you ask why a child with the last name Silverman should be expected to identify more with the pilgrims than with the Natives.
I can remember participating in a Thanksgiving pageant in grade school and singing My Country Tis of Thee, in which we praise the Pilgrims as my fathers. They're not my fathers! I have nothing to do with them.
It’s hard to find nuance in discussions of the relationship between the Native Americans and the English. A lot of more recent depictions remove agency from the Natives and portray them as victims. Your book seems to try and remedy this.
My job is to try to recapture a complex past with as much complexity as possible. Human beings are three-dimensional figures, and all groups of people have noble qualities and ignoble qualities, and I'm supposed to capture those to the best of my ability. The vast majority of Wampanoag people who have told me they've read the book love it, but there is a critical mass, a minority, that don't like my honest depiction of power plays between indigenous people. And the point I'm always trying to make is, look, that's how colonialism works. It plays divide and conquer against indigenous people. If you don't acknowledge that dynamic, you can't understand how colonialism works.
Why did it feel important to begin the book before the arrival of the English, in what you describe as the “Old World” of the Wampanoags?
I think it's important in a couple of different ways. When you're doing Native American history, you're not just teaching, you're also trying to break down inherited myths. Among the inherited myths that are so pervasive in American society is that native people were people without history until the whites showed up, that they're kind of frozen in this prehistoric stasis, which is patent nonsense. To paint them in three dimensions as a dynamic people with hot history, not just frozen in time, depicts a true concept. It also helps the reader to understand what's lost.
A big part of the discussion of the Old World is the plague and the emotional toll it took on the surviving Natives. They experienced something we might think of as PTSD now, which very few colonial histories take note of.
Well, and it's interesting, there's no lack of material in the written record about it. Among the things that strike the English the most when they get there is how depopulated the land is, and how many skeletons there are above ground. But then they start asking Native people about it, and the Native people don't want to talk about it. To the extent they do talk about it, you could tell they are shellshocked. They can't grasp what has happened to them.
You have the beginning before the arrival of the English, and then you discuss the Red Power movement in the 1970s and the establishment of the National Day of Mourning. Did meeting with modern-day members of the Wampanoags inspire these kind of “bookends” of their colonial history?
When I wrote my first book I ended it in the late 19th century, and Wampanoag people told me they wished I hadn’t done that. They said, “Any time a historian doesn't take it to the present, it reinforces the prejudice of the broader public that we're gone.” It really hit me, and I said, okay, when I have this history under my belt a bit more, I'll revisit it.
The book deals with an American mythology, not merely the story of the first Thanksgiving, but with figures like Sacajawea and Squanto that have so much pseudohistory around them. What is it like as a historian to engage with those kinds of topics?
Well, it's a mixed bag. There are some folks, overwhelmingly on the right, who assume that my political agenda is to tear the country down. And, you know, to the extent that white supremacy has been a foundational element of the United States from the beginning, they're 100% correct. But my agenda isn't to destroy the country. It’s to make it better. When I speak to groups I know have a rightward-leaning political bent, which I do as often as I can, because I think it's important to have these discussions, I make it very clear to them what my job as a historian is, that I am not advancing the political agenda of the Wampanoag people or Native American people or the Native studies movement or any of these things. I'm just trying to get this history as right as I possibly can.
When I present this work—even to a very skeptical audience—I find they're convinced by it. The evidence is overwhelming. What they struggle with is, if this is true, what do we do with it? What I always say is this history doesn't lend itself to one policy prescription or another. It doesn't mean you're for big government or small government, but it does command us to rethink our history education and our national narratives.
In the book, you mention that a dinner did happen between the Wampanoags and the English, but neither side thought of it as an important moment in their relationship. Why do you think it is that this specific story has captured the American imagination and become so insidious?
Oh, I don't think there's any question about it. It allows us to propagate a story of bloodless colonialism. The United States, since World War Two, has liked to think of itself as the global leader in opposition to genocide, and as a beacon of human rights. Before World War Two, it did not think of itself that way. If you go to the United States Capitol and look around at the artwork, the white people of this country were triumphalist in their crushing of native people. But post World War Two, that became a very uncomfortable heritage. With the mass immigration of the late 19th and early 20th century, it wanted to style itself as a melting pot. Genocide doesn't lend itself to a melting pot metaphor, so the way the country has approached the history of colonialism and Native people is just to ignore it.
And the image of everyone breaking bread together makes it easier to do that.
I have had this conversation with adults innumerable times now. It doesn't matter what their background is, doesn't matter what their political persuasion, religious persuasion is. When I say to them, Do you really think that a shared meal is an appropriate symbol of Native American and Euro American relations? Almost every single person says no. And I'll say, and are your kids taught that in school? Yes. Were you taught that in school? Yes. Were your parents taught that in school? Yes. What the hell are we doing? We all know better, and yet we keep on doing the same.
Zelda Zerkel-Morris holds a BA in History from DePaul University. A contributor to The National and her conversations with include authors Sasha Vasilyuk and Alice Austen.
