If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving

I purchased this book for my children as we learned of our Mayflower descent this past year and we find honoring the native population to be a vital component to recognizing “Thanksgiving.” I want to make sure they are given both sides to the story, and found this book to be a great, historical telling of the account, complete with references that point to the writings of William Brewster and Edward Winslow which depict the actual first Thanksgiving, not as a festival between the “Pilgrims and the Native Americans” but as a day of thanksgiving/prayer and a harvest feast. I was pleased to see the Wampanoag honored in this book, and while it may be a bit advanced for my 2 and 5 year old children, it will have a home on their bookshelves and be used as an age-appropriate reference when they are able to grasp the concepts of colonization and pestilence. Kudos to the author for presenting the story in an accurate manner, without vilifying anyone.

This book gives very informative and balanced insights into the Pilgrim and Native ways that led to the extraordinary 54 years of peace and friendship between the Pilgrims and the Pokanokets led by The Massasoit Ousamequin. The story has been out of balance since its first telling as it glorified the Pilgrims and left out the Natives, the pendulum swung to demonizing the Pilgrims to honor the Natives - Christopher Newell brings much-needed balance to the story so that we may go forward, inspired by the example set at the founding of the US of A, and come together in our hearts, and birth something new again.

This book is a mish mash of valuable information, misinformation, distortions and omissions. It was intended to present the story of the first Thanksgiving as a “foundational” story of how America came to be” from the standpoint of the Native American people involved. This is a worthy goal. But if the reader has to research every fact and assertion in a book to distinguish what is actually true, the book is worse than useless. It is hard to believe that this book has won awards from educators of American history and is recommended by the publishers as “perfect for the modern classroom”.The central thesis of the book is that the “holiday we celebrate today does not have any real connection to the Mayflower’s landing” (page 7) - but the book makes clear that Sarah J Hale, who promoted the idea of an American national Thanksgiving Day, saw it as a way of honouring this event in the founding of our country as well as a way to unite Americans after the Civil War. Newell goes so far as to refer to writers who connected the Pilgrims’ feast of thanksgiving in 1621 to the modern celebration as “fiction writers” (p. 84) There are indeed differences between the Pilgrims’ concept of a day of thanksgiving, and the harvest feast held in 1621 and the feast day that we now call Thanksgiving, but it is incorrect to say that there is no relationship.Among the very valuable pieces of information in this book are the references to contacts between the native peoples and European during the century before the Mayflower sailed, and a good discussion of the “Great Dying” among the Wampanoag 1616-1619. One would expect that Newell would relate that to the Pilgrims’ experience, but he only notes “Without proper supplies, nearly half of them died.” and has no further comment on how this experience shaped their emotions, beliefs or actions, let alone provided a common experience with the Wampanoag.The discussion on page 22 of a money economy is so bizarre that it may take even a mature reader a second reading to realize that the economy we have all grown up with is what is being described. It’s hard to believe that Newell will have any readers who need to have the purpose of coins explained to them. He goes on to claim that the Native Americans did not make “improvements” [quotations his] in the land because of their greater harmony with nature. No one can dispute that the native peoples had an encyclopedic knowledge of woodscraft and lived in great harmony with nature. But the girdling of trees and management of the forest with selective burning was essential to their way of life. His description of the hybridization of corn is another example of human manipulation of nature.Two distortions surprised me since they are contrary to what one would expect within a “politically correct” framework. The first was the statement that for the Strangers [the settlers who were not part of the Separatist faith] “freedom to worship as they saw fit [was] not the main reason they were going to America, although they welcomed the freedom”. This implies that the Separatists believed in freedom of religion, which was not true. They would have called it “religious toleration” and found it unacceptable. They were willing to risk their lives to worship in the only way they believed was right, but definitely not to give others the right to do it wrongly.The other was a statement that the Separatists “unhappy with the Church of England, protested by leaving for Holland…” This ignores the important fact that advocating separating from the Church of England was illegal in England at the time. The Separatists could be fined and their ministers could be imprisoned. In 1593 three Separatist leaders had been executed.The item that I found most unforgivable was Newell’s statement on p 29 that “the colonists had dug up a mound of earth …[which] turned out to be a grave, and they took many of the items before covering it back up”. The only possible source for this is Edward Winslow’s “Mourt’s Relation” which states that they dug up a bow and some arrows which had rotted. Then “we deemed them graves, we put back the bow and made it up as it was and left the rest untouched because we thought it would be odious to ransack their sepulchers”. This account is easy to find online and for Newell to misrepresent it in this way can only be a deliberate lie.The two most important omissions that I see are the lack of any references to slavery among the native peoples, and no discussion of the differences in the technology available to the native peoples as opposed to that of the Europeans.In his book 1493, Christopher Mann’s discussion of slavery among the Native American people is so good that I will not advance anything of my own other than to recommend it to the reader. On the second point, many factors, (the agricultural revolution that spread from Asia to Europe, the use of bronze, iron and other metals, the use of domesticated animals for labour and food, and the availability of firearms), combined to make it possible for Europeans to live in a culture where the population density far exceeded that which could be sustained in the American Native culture. Even without the effects of the many new diseases that decimated the Native American populations, America would have looked hugely underutilized to the Europeans. An accurate review of this book would be longer than the book itself. But I should not close without mentioning that the adventurous and well-traveled Captain John Smith was a soldier, a pirate, a slave, a mutineer, an explorer, a cartographer and a remarkably effective leader, but he never was a whaling captain. As much as I applaud the teaching of the Native American perspective, this book is one that I can only recommend as a good example of very bad history.

This 92 page book filled with pictures offers an age appropriate look into the history of Thanksgiving, dispelling myths about the story of one of America’s beloved holidays, offering insights on tribal culture of the Wampanoag before colonization, as well as an Indigenous perspective on this celebration today.It’s a fantastic resource for parents and teachers alike to use as a history lesson to instill a better understanding of the honest history of this land’s past.

This delightful, wonderfully illustrated book cuts through the clutter and myth about the first Thanksgiving. It points out that the event was a three day harvest festival and not a thanksgiving, which for the Pilgrims was a day of fasting and contrition. The author is a Penobscot himself and speaks helpfully and authoritatively about Indian culture.

Excellent book! This is a great book for adults and children to learn about the true history of Thanksgiving through a descendant of the Wampanoag’s lens.

An incredibly comprehensive and engaging read!!!