This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving a new look at the Plymouth colonys founding events told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. In March 1621 when Plymouths survival was hanging in the balance the Wampanoag sachem (or chief) Ousamequin (Massasoit) and Plymouths governor John Carver declared their peoples friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the First Thanksgiving. The treaty remained operative until King Philips War in 1675 when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. 400 years after that famous meal historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation and bloody dissolution of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we as a pluralistic nation tell the history of Thanksgiving.