Thanksgiving: A History Of Mourning And Genocide For Native Americans

By Alonso Martínez\EL PAÍS Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons There is a common tale that American students hear about the first Thanksgiving celebration: a group of friendly Native Americans welcomed the Pilgrims to the continent, taught them how to live, and sat down to dinner with them. However, David Silverman, an expert on the history of this population, claims that this Thanksgiving story is a myth. First of all, the tribe involved is almost never identified and, according to the myth, “they give America to whites so they can create a great nation dedicated to freedom, opportunity and Christianity so that the rest of the world can benefit. This is about natives giving in to colonialism,” Silverman argues in his book This Land Is Their Land. The truth is different. The colonists, known as Pilgrims, arrived in 1620 in what is now Plymouth, Massachussetts, a land abandoned by most Patuxet Indians due to a disease outbreak. After a harsh winter that claimed half of the settlers — who couldn’t adjust to the land — the last surviving Patuxet, Tisquantum (also known as Squanto), helped the Pilgrims by teaching them to catch eel and grow corn. He served as an interpreter until...