Thanksgiving is over, but the story we tell about it remains largely untouched. For many Americans, the holiday brings to mind images of Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a peaceful meal during a moment of unity and gratitude. But the real history behind Thanksgiving tells a very different story, one shaped by disease, displacement, broken treaties and state-sanctioned violence.
By the time the English settlers landed in Plymouth, the Wampanoag people had already lost much of their population to European diseases. The land the Pilgrims claimed as their own was Patuxet, a Wampanoag village left empty by plague. The feast that took place in the fall of 1621 was not an act of harmony but a moment of strategic diplomacy during a fragile alliance. The Wampanoag, led by Massasoit, were navigating threats from rival tribes and the increasing presence of foreign settlers. They were not invited guests at a Thanksgiving dinner, but military allies responding to the sound of gunfire who arrived ready to defend their interests.
Within a generation after that famous meal, the alliance had collapsed, as land disputes and colonial expansion led to open conflict. In 1675, Metacom, son of Massasoit and known to the English as King Philip, led a resistance against the settlers. The war ended with his death, the public display of his severed head, and the enslavement or execution of surviving Wampanoag people. It also ended with another colonial “day of thanksgiving,” this one to mark the suppression of Native resistance.
The violence that followed the 1621 feast was not an exception but a pattern. Across North America, early moments of trade or diplomacy between settlers and Native nations gave way to broken treaties, land seizures, and war. As the United States expanded westward under the banner of Manifest Destiny, tribes were displaced from their homelands, pushed onto shrinking reservations, or targeted in massacres from Sand Creek to Wounded Knee. The holiday’s mythology took shape during this same era, offering a comforting story of unity just as Indigenous resistance was being violently suppressed. President Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation of Thanksgiving came in the midst of this contradiction. That year, Lincoln issued a proclamation during the Civil War calling for a day of thanks and national unity. What is often left out of that narrative is that just one year earlier, he authorized the largest mass execution in American history. In December 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, after a military tribunal sentenced more than 300 to death. The trials were conducted without legal counsel, and some lasted less than five minutes.
The Dakota War of 1862 began after years of treaty violations and withheld payments left the Dakota people starving. With food supplies gone and winter approaching, a small group raided settler homesteads. The U.S. government, already consumed by the Civil War, sent volunteer militias to suppress the uprising. Following the executions, nearly 1,600 Dakota women, children and elders were held in a prison camp on Pike Island, near Fort Snelling. Hundreds died from disease and exposure, and in the spring of 1863, Congress voided all treaties with the Dakota and made it illegal for them to remain in Minnesota. A state-sanctioned bounty was established for Dakota scalps.
For Lincoln, the Thanksgiving holiday served to project a message of national unity and healing while ignoring the brutal treatment of Native people. The proclamation was essentially propaganda designed to promote a narrative of shared values and brotherhood, while pushing aside the reality of genocide, land theft and forced removal. Today, many Native Americans observe Thanksgiving not as a holiday but as a day of mourning. Since 1970, Indigenous people have gathered at Plymouth Rock for the National Day of Mourning to honor ancestors and speak truthfully about the consequences of colonialism. Others mark the day with private reflection, community meals or traditional ceremonies.