The Thanksgiving Myth Hides the US’s Inability to Reckon With Its Own History

by Jesse Hagopian

“I’m not against giving thanks. I’m against celebrating a falsehood,” says Choctaw historian A. S. Dillingham

The following article appeared originally in Truthout on November 27, 2025. It is reposted here under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

The assault by the Trump administration on honest history is hitting everyone,” A. S. Dillingham, a tribal member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a historian at Arizona State University, says.

This assault on history is particularly glaring this week, as repression and censorship push teachers and politicians alike to acquiesce to the celebration of a sanitized falsehood instead of using the Thanksgiving holiday as an opportunity to reckon with the dispossession and genocide that white settlers inflicted upon Indigenous peoples after arriving in the Americas.

In the interview that follows, Dillingham — the author of Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico, who often shares his analysis on his website — explains how Thanksgiving functions to whitewash the history of settler colonialism. As a scholar whose work centers Indigenous history, colonialism, and education, Dillingham also has invaluable insights to share on how we can teach honestly about Indigenous history, even amid the current political climate.

The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jesse Hagopian: A couple of years ago you wrote a critique of the traditional Thanksgiving story that was published in The Washington Post. Can you talk about the reaction to it?

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A. S. Dillingham: The reaction was revealing. After that piece ran, I got a wave of angry emails. One person even asked, “What do you have against being thankful?” — as if critiquing a national myth means I don’t appreciate gratitude or sharing a good meal with family and friends.

When people frame my critique as an attack on gratitude, they’re missing the point. I’m not against giving thanks. I’m against celebrating a falsehood instead of reckoning with the history Indigenous peoples have survived.

A single (largely inaccurate) tale of supposed harmony has been turned into a national origin story that hides the real foundations of the United States.

As a historian and a member of the Choctaw Nation, what do you see as the most damaging myths embedded in the Thanksgiving story? And what truths do those myths work to obscure about the real relationship between Indigenous nations and the U.S. settler state?

I think the Thanksgiving myth, like any myth, is based on some historical facts and then some lies and misrepresentations. The Thanksgiving story is based on real events that took place in 1621: a meal was shared between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. But basically, the way that story is told in our public celebrations or in school pageants has very little to do with the historical reality.

There was a shared meal, but it wasn’t a kind of Thanksgiving. The Wampanoag heard Pilgrims shooting off their rifles in celebration, and they came running to assist because there was a mutual defense pact between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. And so it was basically a meal shared after a misunderstanding. What we celebrate today has very little to do with what actually happened. That mythologized version of those events was then taken up at the end of the U.S. Civil War: President Lincoln declared it an official holiday in 1863. And it was part of an effort to unite a brutally divided country.

“For much of the first few centuries of European settlement, Europeans were actually the weaker party, and they were trying to hold on to a continent they did not control.”

In terms of your question about what the myth obscures, I think one of the things it does is assert that there was a peaceful existence between Native people and Pilgrims in New England, and we celebrate that as the foundational story of the United States. That myth obscures some of the other central dynamics of early colonial history, which were that for the first century or two of European settlement in the Americas, Native Americans controlled the vast majority of the North American continent. European settlers, including the Pilgrims, were basically hanging on to the edges of the continent and were forced to stay in colonial outposts in which their security and often their material well-being were based on their ability to make alliances with Native Americans who were more powerful than them.

Native Americans and the Pilgrims were assisting each other and had a kind of working relationship, but for much of the first few centuries of European settlement, Europeans were actually the weaker party, and they were trying to hold on to a continent they did not control.

By centering the story of New England and Plymouth and the Pilgrims, it obscures other English settlements, like Jamestown, where one of the central dynamics was the African slave trade. The fact is, both African people and Indigenous people were enslaved, trafficked, and forced into servitude by the colonists. That’s a key truth the Thanksgiving story erases.

That framework for understanding the origins of our country is so important — especially as next year marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, and there will be so many celebrations of the nation that don’t wrestle with these difficult truths. I also want to connect this to our current political moment. In an era of book bans, curriculum gag orders, and demands for “patriotic education,” how does the Thanksgiving narrative function within this broader struggle over who gets to define American history?

We are living in a period in which honest history is being attacked, particularly by the presidential administration. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, universities across the country, PBS — institutions dedicated to telling truthful histories — are all being targeted. That includes Native American history.

I think on one level, in terms of popular culture, there has been a growing reconsideration of the Thanksgiving myth — in large part, because of Native American activism.

I think that myth was beginning to unravel, especially as you saw activism around water defenders and challenging pipeline construction. In recent years there was a renewed understanding that Native people were here before European conquest, resisted our dispossession, and are still here.

“Both African people and Indigenous people were enslaved, trafficked, and forced into servitude by the colonists. That’s a key truth the Thanksgiving story erases.”

But we have witnessed a political backlash that insists on a narrative of a white Christian nation that has only done good. You can even see this in Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth doubling down on the Medals of Honor awarded to U.S. soldiers involved in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The Pentagon had begun a review to officially consider whether the massacre constituted a war crime — but instead of completing that process, we get an insistence by the secretary of defense of maintaining the myth of heroism. That’s where we are.

Exactly. And speaking of violence, one of the most horrific parts of U.S. history is the legacy of Indian boarding schools. Recent revelations have uncovered unmarked graves and extensive documentation of abuse, cultural destruction, and genocide. How should these revelations reshape how Americans understand Thanksgiving — not as a moment of harmony, but part of a longer continuum of state policies aimed at erasure and assimilation?

I think it’s really important. And when Deb Haaland was head of the Department of the Interior — a Native woman herself who oversaw the Bureau of Indian Affairs — some of that research was made more public. But it’s important to understand that boarding schools weren’t unique to the U.S. — Canada and several Latin American countries have had more robust public conversations about their own boarding school systems. The United States appears uniquely unwilling to reckon with this history.

Sometimes my students ask the question, “Where is it better to be an Indigenous person? Is it in the United States? Is it in Canada? Is it in Mexico, somewhere else?” I always find the question frustrating, because we have to think about how Indigenous people have navigated forms of colonial violence in all these different countries.

Yet there does seem to be something unique about the United States’ inability to reckon with its history of violent dispossession and genocide. Educational institutions in Canada have had a much more robust public conversation about boarding schools. And I think there have been more interesting conversations in Latin American countries around the same things.

“There does seem to be something unique about the United States’ inability to reckon with its history of violent dispossession and genocide.”

For most of U.S. history, Native and Black children were never meant to be full subjects in the public education system. They were segregated, exploited, or forcibly assimilated. Boarding schools inflicted sexual violence, cultural destruction, language loss, and the disappearance of children. The United States has a deep inability to confront the reality that its national project depended on Indigenous elimination and exclusion. The Thanksgiving myth is used to try to smooth all that over.

Yes. And in K-12 education, Native Americans are often discussed only in the past tense. Even when violence is acknowledged, it’s framed as if Indigenous peoples were completely wiped out. That erases the ongoing settler-colonial project — land theft, water theft, the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). The Trump administration even recently removed the federal report on MMIWG, dismissing it as diversity, equity, and inclusion content. What does that tell you about how the government is not only erasing Indigenous history, but disappearing evidence of ongoing violence?

Even sympathetic teachers who try to narrate this history more honestly sometimes fall into the trap of talking about Native dispossession or genocide as if it were complete — as if we’re not here anymore. And I think so many Native people have the experience of being in the classroom and hearing people say that while they’re sitting right there, and thinking, “Who am I if we’ve been entirely erased?”

And yes, the violence is ongoing. I’m speaking to you from what is now Arizona, a place of many Native nations, and there are ongoing fights where mining companies want to take sacred Apache lands for private profit and exploitation. This is not something that ended in the 19th century — it’s ongoing in the 21st.

The assault by the Trump administration on honest history is hitting everyone: people working on women’s history, public health, Black history, and people working on murdered and missing Indigenous women, which has been one of the most important fights in Indian Country over the last couple decades. If you remove the evidence and documentation, it becomes harder for communities to make claims and fight back. And because the federal government played such a large role in Indigenous dispossession, it has a legal responsibility to address violence against Native women today. Erasing these reports is a way to attempt to avoid that responsibility

I often hear people describe the Trump administration as “unprecedented,” but Indigenous people have lived through the very things many Americans fear today — censorship, repression, family separation, land seizures, forced assimilation. In this moment of rising fascism, what can the country learn from the long Indigenous struggle against occupation and erasure?

I’ve been having this conversation with friends and family. We should start by acknowledging the real crisis that everyone is facing today. People are right to feel outraged by the attacks on our immigrant neighbors, the separation of families, people being detained arbitrarily by masked men — all of it.

For Native people, as you point out, this isn’t as surprising as it is for other people in the country, because we have lived through forms of colonial violence — separation of families, erasure of our history, suppression of language and culture, political repression — for centuries, and we have nevertheless persisted. I think that is a lesson Native people can bring to the contemporary moment.

“Black and Native communities offer to all of society lessons in perseverance, in saying that we have to fight and we will not be defined by our oppressors.”

People of African descent, whose families and ancestors survived slavery, survived the dispossession of their own bodies and labor, have a lot to teach us in this moment too. Black and Native communities offer to all of society lessons in perseverance, in saying that we have to fight and we will not be defined by our oppressors, but by our ability to resist that oppression, by our ability to form bonds of community in contexts of extreme violence, in contexts where the powers that be are bent on our annihilation. We are still here. We have survived. We are here after hundreds of years.That resilience is a wellspring of courage for this moment.

One example of our resilience and resistance comes from boarding schools themselves. Despite the violence, Native children formed new bonds with one another across tribal nations. They came to see themselves not only as Choctaw or Diné or Wampanoag, but as Indigenous people with shared experiences. Many of the young people who later became activists in the 1960s and ’70s — especially in the American Indian Movement — first forged those connections in boarding schools.

So even in places designed to destroy Indigenous identity, Native youth created solidarity, political consciousness, and resistance. The Thanksgiving story is often used to obscure this history of Native resistance, but that history is precisely what can help people navigate the current crisis.

Schools have always been a site of oppression and struggle for Native people. From racist mascots to sanitized textbooks to cases like the Choctaw high schooler who was recently banned from wearing regalia in his senior portrait — Indigenous students continue to face erasure and discrimination. How do these practices reflect anti-Indigenous racism, and what changes would you like to see in schools?

During the last decade, Indigenous activists made huge gains in removing racist mascots — in public schools and professional sports. Those were victories earned through generations of organizing. But now we’re seeing a backlash. The administration has even pressured the Washington football team to return to its old name. And when I saw the Cleveland baseball team come play in Arizona, I saw fans wearing the old jerseys with the racist caricature.

“Even in places designed to destroy Indigenous identity, Native youth created solidarity, political consciousness, and resistance.”

At the same time, there’s increasing Native representation in the media — shows like “Reservation Dogs” or Sterlin Harjo’s new one, “The Lowdown.” So there’s a contradiction: more representation, but also a resurgence of old racist symbols. Schools need to stand firmly against mascots and stereotypes and instead invite Native people into classrooms to teach from their own cultures, communities, and histories.

Finally, what should replace the sanitized Thanksgiving narrative? And given the backlash, how can teachers tell the truth about Indigenous history while staying as safe as possible, given the attacks on honest educators?

These are dangerous times for educators telling the truth. Teachers need to assess their own situations and do what keeps them safe. But those who have enough security — citizenship, union protection, tenure — should use that privilege to teach the truth.

There are plenty of resources that fit into November’s themes without relying on myths. Teachers can focus on the actual Indigenous nations of their region — their histories, their achievements, their contemporary issues. There are two federally recognized Wampanoag tribes near Plymouth itself that people rarely learn about.

And there are Indigenous practices of giving thanks and expressing gratitude that people can learn, like the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. I’ve used that address with my own family. One of the beautiful things that Native history and cultural knowledge offer is the notion that we are all in relation with other people and other living beings. That we, as human beings, are in relationship with the earth, the rivers, the oceans, the trees. We have a reciprocal relationship to other living beings around us, including people and the natural world.

That’s something to reflect on and to be grateful for and to cultivate a consciousness around. I think those are the kinds of activities that could replace the Thanksgiving myth with something much more truthful — and practices that would help us nurture a better future, not just a more honest reckoning with the past but a more just and kind future.

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Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, an editor for Rethinking Schools, and the author of the book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. You can follow him at IAmAnEducator.com, Instagram, Bluesky or Substack.