As Thanksgiving approaches, many people across the country hope their holiday will resemble Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want. In the 1943 painting, a family gathers around an abundant table in peace and happiness. The gathering reflects the myth we tell about American Thanksgiving, about Pilgrims and Native Americans living in peace and united in abundance. The myth hides the truth that love has always shared the table with fear.
A year after the English arrived in Plymouth in 1620, they shared a meal with the Wampanoag people—a meal that bore little resemblance to the grade-school plays my classmates and I enacted, with our paper hats and buckled shoes. The meal was shared between two traumatized groups of people whose relationship was built on survival. The English had barely made it through the winter, losing half of the passengers who set sail from England. The Wampanoag had endured devastating losses due to European diseases and stood in the shadow of the powerful Narragansett Nation. In a landscape of shifting power, their alliance with the English was strategic.
The so-called first Thanksgiving was a truce meal, a pause in conflict rather than the end of it. The Wampanoag did not break bread with the English because they liked them. They did it because the alternative was worse. The Narragansett were stronger, and survival required uneasy cooperation—not unlike Republicans and Democrats agreeing to end a government shutdown because the cost of not doing so is too high. Peace has always required people to endure tension long enough to imagine something better.
