I’ve been thinking about the story we tell ourselves this time of year.
The one about the Pilgrims. Pious, brave, resourceful. Fleeing persecution, they landed on a harsh shore and, through grit and faith, they built a new world. Then they invited their new Native American friends over for a nice dinner to celebrate their success.
It’s a nice story. It’s a comforting one. But it’s a profound, dangerous, and childish lie. And it’s the “original sin” of our national identity.
Let’s look at this with the eyes of an adult. Let’s do the actual, “hands-on” assessment.
The “Pilgrims” were not resourceful. They were catastrophically unprepared. They were a small, dogmatic group of people who landed in a place they didn’t understand, with a set of beliefs that were useless against a New England winter. They were arrogant, they were weak, and they were dying. They were starving to death, surrounded by food, because they were too ignorant to know how to get it.
The real story of the “First Thanksgiving” is not about our success. It’s about their compassion.
The Wampanoag (Wam-puh-NO-ag) tribe, led by Massasoit (Mass-uh-SOY-it), looked at these pathetic, sick, and dying invaders… and felt sorry for them. They could have, with minimal effort, wiped them from the face of the earth. Instead, they made a choice. They showed them grace. They taught them how to plant corn, how to fish, how to not die. They gave them the “cheat codes” to survival.
The “First Thanksgiving” was not a dinner party. It was a group of starving refugees being fed by the very people they would, in short order, betray and destroy.
And that is the real founding of our country. Without their help, the pilgrims would have failed, and people would have never settled this land after continuous loss of life, probably something akin to witchcraft and evil spirits. Or after just launching a full out war.
Trust me.
We are a nation built on an act of unearned, profound compassion, which we repaid with 400 years of broken treaties, stolen land, cultural erasure, and genocide. We are the systemic problem. We are the ones who set the pattern.
We are not the “greatest country in the world.” That is a “salesman’s” slogan, a comfortable lie we tell ourselves to avoid looking at the “dirty mirror” of our own history. We are a nation built on a check that our children are still paying, a debt of integrity we never had the funds, or the character, to cover.
This is the con. This is the “loophole” we all found. We celebrate the myth of our own greatness because we are terrified of acknowledging the truth of our foundation.
So this Thanksgiving, I’m not interested in the myth. I’m interested in the debt. The real work, the difficult, “adult” work, is to have the courage to finally, after all this time, understand our failures. To see them. To own them. To stop blaming the people we’ve crushed for the noise their bones make under our feet.
That’s the only way we find common ground. It doesn’t start by patting ourselves on the back for a meal we didn’t even cook. It starts by having the humility to finally see the world as it is, and to do the hard, necessary work of mending the fences we were the ones who broke.
So, when you say grace this year around your table, when the next time you think about how great this nation has always been, I want you to do us all a favor. Repeat this:
The Wampanoag (Wam-puh-NO-ag) tribe, led by Massasoit (Mass-uh-SOY-it).
Say. Their. Names.