As we celebrate Thanksgiving this coming week, it might be a very good year to recognize that the so-called First Thanksgiving in 1621 was nowhere near the first Thanksgiving. A ritual of thanksgiving in the fall has been embedded in native cultures for centuries, and it was the Wampanoag tribe who introduced the deeply American tradition to the Pilgrims, not the other way around.

Historian Patricia Limerick, faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, takes a long view of Thanksgiving.

“This is what people have been doing in North America for years beyond our estimation,” she told me. “People have been gathering in the season when there is a harvest” for millennium “and they celebrate each other’s company and they eat the resources that have come to them, and they are not taking that for granted. They’re really saying how remarkable and extraordinary that we have this, and we’re being kept alive by it.”

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Limerick and Navajo scholar and history professor Farina King took some time last week to talk over fresh perspectives on Thanksgiving in this year of rethinking Indian mascots and Indian team names and American history. How, I wondered, do Native Americans look upon Thanksgiving these days?

Their answers surprised and delighted me. There was certainly no talk of cancelling Thanksgiving. 

“For the Navajo nation, October is considered our new year,” King said. “Fall is a very special time. Before European contact it was a time of corn growing, the harvest, the cycles of life. This season always meant something very important to indigenous people.”

To see Thanksgiving as starting only when the Pilgrims arrive is short-sighted, King believes, and doesn’t do justice to the richness of our American history.

Observed Limerick: “Renowned American writer Henry James wrote one of the stupidest paragraphs ever when he said, ‘Europe has a complicated history, of drama and significance, and here we are on a continent where history has just begun and the country is so empty.’ And you say, ‘Really? Get out of Boston, hon. Quit with that nonsense.’”

King seconds the notion that the famously verbose writer was in a way illiterate. He clearly “didn’t know how to read the history around him. Read the peoples that had always been around those spaces.”

Limerick sees Thanksgiving this year as an opportunity to increase our literacy about our own deep history.

“Most of the time if you have something important to say about history, you don’t have very many people to say it to because people’s attention is scattered and fragmented and they are listening to some podcast or they’re playing some video game,” she said. “Unless it is a hundredth anniversary or 50th anniversary. But on Thanksgiving, we have their attention for a moment. It’s a good moment to pay attention to history.”

“We’re not saying stop enjoying being with your family,” she added. “But we could have a teachable moment.”

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Maybe, King said, we need to add in “a moment of silence, of reflection, of thinking how are we where we are today” during Thanksgiving.

But let’s not use Thanksgiving to celebrate the conquest of American Indians, King urged. “That needs to be reevaluated.”

“The story of Indians and Pilgrims and the Thanksgiving myth, people take that and make it a whimsical fairy tale” about a peaceful cultural exchange and interracial harmony, she said, which ignores the brutal subjugation of Indians that began just a few years later. “It’s a distorted history that is still perpetuated,” King complained.

That distortion feels like “disrespect of who we are and our heritage, our ancestry — and it lasts. Why don’t you see us?” she asked. “All some people see is the Indians and the Pilgrims, that they’re gone now, and all the real Indians are dead. And yet we’re still here. If only we can start to tell our children the truth, and it doesn’t have to be all ugly either. It can be that the Wampanoag are beautiful people who are still alive today. Do we know their names? Do we know how to say it?”

I must admit that, until King told me, I had never heard the name of the tribe that shared Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, nor that the word Wampanoag means “People of the First Light.” Or that they came to the Pilgrims unbidden that Thanksgiving and likely saved them from starvation in their early days by teaching them how to cultivate crops native to the Americas.

This Thanksgiving, King suggests, maybe “people can really pause and take this as a moment to commit to not just Native American Heritage month in November, but commit to how can we continue to tell a true story. Even if it is hard.”

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Limerick adds that the reverent, heavily edited version of history, with the funny hats, large belt buckles, and clunky black shoes, is pretty boring, actually.

“The Puritans actually wore quite colorful clothes,” Limerick said. “They weren’t even as boring as they are now made out to be.

“I think what we actually unintentionally do with the reverent retelling … is a disservice to everyone. People of the past are really interesting, and we at least owe them that.”

People who haven’t taken the time to get to know their history before Plymouth are missing out on a source of pride, King believes. “Not acknowledging the ingenuity and presence of indigenous people since time immemorial, the canal systems that Phoenix drew upon, the spiral mounds and intricate works through generations of people” is like cutting off a powerful, colorful taproot of American culture.

“In the teaching of our children, what I hope changes is that when we come around the dinner table, and gather with our families, sustain family ties,” said King, we tell our children that “the gathering has always been happening for different peoples over time. And people from all kinds of backgrounds.

“And then finally maybe we’ll be able to come together, really come together, from all walks of life and see the indigenous, the diverse, people of color — see them all and not erase their story. And truly celebrate human life together.”