The "first" Thanksgiving started with a pandemic...
Lynley Jones
(technically an epidemic, but stay with me) …and ended with a holiday spent separated from loved ones.
My roast turkey for a Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago.
Four hundred years ago this month, the pilgrims arrived in desperate shape. They’d landed in the wrong place (they’d been aiming for Manhattan where previous Dutch had already settled, but reached Cape Cod by mistake), and they were weeks behind schedule (several delays meant their arrival was in icy fall rather than summer). Sick women, children and men were beginning to die and their food stores had dwindled dangerously low. To make matters worse, the armed men on board were beginning to break into hostile factions, arguing over the best course of action given the crisis at hand.
So they decided no one could leave the ship until they hammered out an agreement about how to move forward. The men (yes, just the men) argued and debated and discussed their way to the Mayflower Compact, which they all signed and abided by. And then they began taking their first tentative steps onto shore.
But since they’d landed in the wrong place in the wrong season, their problems were just beginning. As it happened, it was an unseasonably cold November, and they had to tromp through knee-deep snow, with still more falling all around them, as they scouted out their options. It took weeks to find a suitable place to actually decamp. So the ship still had to function as home base, and all the while people on board continued to die.
But that’s not the epidemic part.
Because the real beginning of the story was actually a few years earlier. While the pilgrims were still back in Holland dreaming of religious freedom, the beginning of the story was actually happening to a different group of people near Cape Cod, in a village called Patuxet. These people were called Wampanoag, meaning the People of the First Light. Given their place on the eastern seaboard, they were the first to see the sun rise each morning, and they never forgot to thank him. They were not nomadic, as many modern Americans imagine Indians to have been. They were a settled people, living on the same sacred land their ancestors had cared for, living as they always had, farming and fishing and hunting and trading with neighbors. Thanking the sun for rising each morning, thanking the earth for her bounty. And increasingly now, trading with the various European ships that came through.
The Europeans on these ships were sometimes friendly, and sometimes a threat. It was hard to tell. The captain of at least one of them abducted Wampanoag warriors after luring them aboard with the pretext of trade, and took them across the ocean to Europe as slaves. They were taken without warning from their ancestral home, never to see their land or loved ones again. At other times there were battles and skirmishes.
And sometimes, the threat was invisible. Which brings us to the epidemic part.
At some point, Wampanoag people were exposed to a dread disease carried by the men on one of these ships. It’s not clear what the ailment was, but it’s quite clear it was deadly. Historians characterize it as a “hemorrhagic” disease, and it was so severe that the people were too sick to even bury their dead.
And there were lots of dead. A few survivors fled, and were taken in by a neighboring village. The Wampanoag believe some of the afflicted may have shape-shifted, taking the form of sea creatures and finding comfort in the balm of ocean waves. But most died in Patuxet, on the soil of their sacred home village, surrounded by the spirits of their ancestors, their bones left to lie bleaching on the earth that had cared for them for generations.
When the pilgrims arrived a few years later, they stumbled through their foggy desperation onto that very same abandoned village: Patuxet. In December 1620, after weeks of scouting the area, they were relieved to have found a flat, hospitable plot of land on which they could finally begin to settle. They worked through winter storms to build simple structures directly over the remains of the Wampanoag village, so that their own families could finally escape the hellish, disease-ridden ship. Fully half the pilgrims died that first winter anyway, their souls mingling with those of the Wampanoag that had departed life in the very same place before them. And as the weather finally warmed and winter turned to spring, it was in this soil, the very same earth which had been carefully tended by generations of Wampanoag, that the pilgrims were able to grow the food that would sustain them through their first year.
It’s not clear why the Wampanoag decided to help them. As they watched through the winter, and saw how weak and desperate the pilgrims were, they must have weighed their options. They could easily have killed them, sneaking quietly into the village and slitting their throats as they lay half-starved and exhausted. But in the end, they decided to offer assistance instead.
It was the Wampanoag who taught the pilgrims to farm the same land that had nurtured their own ancestors, and to fish in the waters that had safeguarded their departed ancestral spirits. As the pilgrims regained their strength, they gratefully learned to trust their new friends. The two peoples traded, shared and negotiated. They welcomed each other into their homes, feeding each other and providing shelter for one another. And they laid out a peace agreement which both sides would abide by for the next 50 years.
And yes, they shared a celebratory feast. At the end of the first year when, thanks to the Wampanoag, the surviving pilgrims had been restored to health, the pilgrims threw a huge party to celebrate their harvest. But they actually didn’t think to invite their Wampanoag friends. Perhaps they were too consumed with thinking about the loved ones they’d lost that year, and the others they’d left behind in Holland and England. When the Wampanoag noticed the hubbub, they showed up with 90 warriors to make sure their new friends were okay. Realizing it was a celebration, they hunted 5 deer to contribute to the feast, and stayed to join the festivities. The celebration lasted for 3 days.
So now it’s Thanksgiving 2020, and it feels like nothing is the same as it usually is. It’s been a hard year, and the dark of winter is still yet to come. We’re separated from our families, we’ve lost loved ones, and we’re struggling just to get along. And in a year when we’ve come to wrestle yet again with the hard truths of our history, it’s not clear how we should feel about the very idea of this holiday.
But here’s the truth:
America has always been a hard place to survive. This is a nation born of struggle and division. Sickness and hunger surround us every year. Some are always left out of the celebration.
- and -
Americans have always been survivors. This is a nation born of people coming together in spite of their differences. We help each other. We’re a nation of volunteers who sew masks for healthcare workers and feed the hungry. And more and more of us who were left out at the beginning step up to take our place at the table all the time.
The longer I live, the more I realize this is exactly what it means to be American. Being a fully-present American means holding both of these realities simultaneously. It means acknowledging all the darkness, including (especially) the role we play in it. And it also means, at the very same time, holding on with a vice-like grip to the dream of a more perfect union.
Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday, because the truth of America is woven throughout that story. It’s in the foods we eat, the struggle to make peace around the table, and the generosity of others we may forget to thank. It’s in the blood that courses through our bodies, fed from this very same earth beneath all our feet from the beginning. It’s what we’ve always been, and it’s what we’ve always done. It’s about remembering those who have helped us, and grasping at a better tomorrow.
That’s what Thanksgiving is about.
This year, my family is adding a new tradition to our Thanksgiving:
We’re making a spirit plate to thank the ancestors of the people who lived on our land before us. We’ll put a small amount of all the food from our feast on a plate and set it outside to give back to nature. If we notice an animal nibbling from our spirit plate, we’ll know it may be the spirit of someone who lived here before we did, and we’ll say thank you.
(If you live in a place where you can’t put a plate of food outside, consider contributing to a local food pantry in honor of the ancestors who cared for the earth beneath your feet - or apartment - before you.)
There are several sources to thank for the information in this piece:
Toasted Sister Podcast, Episode 70: The Thanksgiving Episode
Conversations with three Wampanoag women about Thanksgiving and how colonization effected their foodways, plus the work they’re doing in their East coast communities to educate and revitalize Wampanoag food. The spirit plate idea described above came from the interview with Danielle Hill, educator and cultural consultant with Heron-Hill LLC.
Mayflower, by historian Nathaniel Philbrick
The experiences of both the pilgrims and the Wampanoag during the 55-year period before, during and after the “first” Thanksgiving, through King Phillip’s War, in which the fragile early peace would be forever, tragically destoyed.
One of the very first cooking classes I created back in 2014 revolved around the true story of the “first” Thanksgiving, including both Wampanoag and “pilgrim” food as a window to understanding both perspectives on the event. To create the class, I traveled to the Plimoth Plantation and consulted afterwards with Plimoth Plantation foodways managers representing both traditions, as well as reviewing children’s books and multiple additional sources of information they recommended. (You can read the companion narrative I created for that class here.)
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