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The First Thanksgiving?

Food and family take center stage today, as every American is well familiar with the traditional Thanksgiving meal – roast turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and of course pumpkin pie.  At its heart, Thanksgiving is all about comfort, ritual and nostalgia for a simpler time. In a nation of restaurant goers and fast-food woofers, nine out of ten Americans sit down to a home-cooked Holiday feast today, with turkey, side dishes, pies and desserts during this quintessential American holiday. Eating these dishes every year, year after year, we have a sense of continuing a tradition that began with the “Pilgrims and Indians”. But are these really the foods the English colonists and native Wampanoag – the unwitting founders of this American tradition –  ate together during the harvest celebration in 1621, the  event that came to be known as “The First Thanksgiving?”

The Wampanoag Nation are a Native American tribe, people who, in the beginning of the 17th century,  lived in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as what are today the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. At the time of first contact with the English,  three thousand Wampanoag lived on Martha’s Vineyard alone. They thrived due to the richness of the environment and their cultivation of corn, beans, and squash. Wampanoag means “Easterners” or literally “People of the Dawn.”

Images and particulars of this long-ago autumn celebration – black clad pilgrims sitting down to a feast with friendly Wampanoag warriors –  are now so familiar in our culture that many people mistakenly believe that the event and the food were thoroughly documented. Unfortunately, the only written record of the celebration mentions just two food items – deer and wildfowl – and doesn’t give a hint about what else was eaten or how the food was prepared or served. For that information, we need to look to other seventeenth-century sources – European paintings and drawings, period cookbooks, artifacts, Wampanoag oral histories, archaeological evidence, and the journals and writings of the colonists themselves – to make educated guesses about details of the first celebration. There may have actually been turkey; wild turkeys were plentiful in New England, and both the native Wampanoag and the English colonists ate them.

The following words, by Nancy Eldredge, Educator and Nauset Wampanoag, centers on the Wampanoag Traditions of Giving Thanks: The American custom of thanksgiving did not begin with the arrival of the European colonists. Giving thanks for the Creator’s gifts is an integral part of the Wampanoag daily life. From ancient times up to the present, Native People of North America have held ceremonies to give thanks for successful harvests, for the hope of a good growing season in the early spring, and for other good fortune such as the birth of a child. Giving thanks was the primary reason for ceremonies and celebrations.

“During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans came to our homeland. They commented in their writings about all the wonderful foods that were found in nature, and the richness and abundance of berries, wild grapes, fish and shellfish, deer, wild turkey and more. The people indigenous to this area were all well aware of this abundance. For generations and generations, the Wampanoag knew of certain times and certain seasons to collect the berries, and medicines from the plants, when to hunt and fish, and how to ensure that there would be food for the future generations of their people. One of those ways was in the daily giving of thanks for the abundance of of materials that were given from the Creator for everyday life. By keeping gratefulness in mind, the Creator’s gifts were not taken for granted. Thankfulness was woven into into every aspect of Wampanoag life. If an animal was hunted for food, special thanks were given to the Creator and to the spirit of the animal. If a plant was harvested and used for any purpose, if a bird or fish was taken, even if an anthill was disrupted, acknowledgment and gratitude were given for the lives that were taken. To this day, it is the same with most Native People.”

 

With sincere Thanks to the book giving thanks, Thanksgiving Recipes and History, from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie from Plimoth Plantation