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

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In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s 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 Philip’s 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.

David J. Silverman is Professor of History at George Washington University, where he has taught since 2003. He is the author of several books on Native American, colonial American, and American racial history, including This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and Troubled History of Thanksgiving, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2019, and Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, which appeared with the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2016. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and National Geographic. He is currently writing a book about Indigenous people and race in United States history.