Most people celebrate Thanksgiving without any reference to Pilgrims and Indians. For most of us, it’s mostly just in the background.
The real offense takes places in schools where the vast majority of history and social studies teachers—especially at the elementary level—teach this myth of friendly Indians welcoming colonists into their country, and then handing off their territory so these newcomers can form the United States while the Native people fade into the mist.
That, of course, is pure nonsense. If you ask most adults whether they think A) that’s an accurate portrayal of what happened in 1620, and B) whether that’s the appropriate symbol for the history of colonial Native American relations, they will say no.
And yet they were taught this nonsense, their parents were taught this nonsense and their children are taught this nonsense. It is a century-plus long tradition in American schools.
Let me be clear: When it comes to how we celebrate the holiday as a nation, I am not declaring war on Thanksgiving, I am not trying to cancel Thanksgiving.
Some Native people—first and foremost, the Wampanoags, who are the Indians in the Thanksgiving story—hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, as is their right. But I am not suggesting we replace Thanksgiving with a day of mourning. You’re not going to rally the national population around that idea. Who wants to dwell on genocide and then sit down and have a feast with their family?
What I am suggesting is that there is no reason on the day when we get together with family and friends to offer thanks for what’s good that we have to invoke a false history—and what I consider a damaging history. It’s damaging to our Native country men and women. And it’s damaging to the overall population because it blinds them to the truth of a very formative violent history.
We should enjoy the holiday. But let’s leave Pilgrims and Indians out of it.
David J. Silverman has taught Native American, colonial American and American racial history at GW since 2003. He is the author of six books, including his latest “The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States”(New York: Bloomsbury, 2026).