Sabotaging the 'History' of Thanksgiving

Hey guys, hope you're doing well out there in your corner of the world. It's a holiday week here in the U.S., Thanksgiving. And for many, this is a time to gather the family around a turkey, to pile plates high, and gorge ourselves on family traditions, all while practicing gratitude. But for other Americans, the 4th Thursday in November has a different significance. It's a national day of mourning, a reminder of a dark history, and the false myths used to paper over it. So this week, we're bringing back our story of how this national day of mourning came to be. How native protesters gathered in Plymouth, Massachusetts for the first time in 1970, and launched an annual tradition, one that grew over the years, until it reached a breaking point. It's not the Thanksgiving story most are used to hearing, but this story is part of our Thanksgiving tradition, all the same. So here it is, sabotaging Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving morning in 1997, a familiar scene played out in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Men and women, dressed head to toe in colonial era costumes, paraded through the streets. They wore giant white collars, breeches and bonnets. In their hands, they held bibles, some muskets. And in their hearts, they carried the true spirit and story of Thanksgiving. Tourists lined the streets to watch it all play out. But then, indigenous protesters intercepted the parade. They jumped out of the crowd and yelled at the costumed re-enactors. Chaos ensued. And the police, they were there waiting for them. For all those onlookers lining the streets, hoping to see a re-enactment of the Thanksgiving story, they got one all right. They watched as indigenous protesters were pepper sprayed, beaten, and dragged away. Turns out, this was a Thanksgiving scene. Just not in the way the tourists were expecting. From Gimlet Media, this is Not Past It, a show about the stories we can't quite leave behind. Every episode, we take a moment from that very same week in history and tell you the story of how it shaped our world. I'm Simone Polannon. That violent confrontation between Native American activists and the Plymouth police was the culmination of a decades-long tradition of protest that began 51 years ago this week, on Thanksgiving Day 1970. Indigenous activists dubbed it the National Day of Morning and made it their mission to tell the truth about Thanksgiving and the birthplace of that great American myth. Today on the show, we're telling you the story of how one group of indigenous activists has fought to keep American history honest. How exactly do you go about telling a pilgrim to fuck off? That's after the break. In the early 1970s, a man named Wamsudha Frank James gathered a group of activists together in Plymouth, Massachusetts. His mission? To tell a different story about the history of Thanksgiving. Before this day is over, every Indian brother, every sympathizer will go back to their homes with a different thought about what Thanksgiving Day means to the Native Americans. It is the day of mourning! Wamsudha was part of the Wampanoag tribe, the people that, as the story goes, welcomed the pilgrims with open arms in Plymouth all the way back in 1620. The Thanksgiving myth essentially says that the pilgrims seeking religious freedom landed on Plymouth Rock, they then made friends with the Wampanoag, they were welcomed with open arms by the Wampanoag. This is Kisha James, she's also a member of the Wampanoag tribe. And then they sat down to a meal together and the pilgrims looked happily ever after and the natives faded into the background. When Kisha was growing up, her grandfather Wamsudha, the activist whose speech we just heard, told her a very different version of that Thanksgiving story. Thanksgiving was not declared in 1620 as the myth would have you believe, in 1637 to celebrate the massacre of over 700 Pequot, men, women, and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut. Back in the early 17th century, the story goes that the Pequot had been in conflict with Puritan settlers over fur trading and resources. Tensions had been escalating for a while and it all boiled over one early morning. A Puritan militia surrounded a fort where the Pequot were staying. And just as they were waking up, the Puritans attacked. And the description of the Pequot massacre includes things like celebrating the fact that they burned the corpses afterwards and describing the smell and giving thanks to God for the victory over the Pequot. The Puritans saw their victory as a blessing from God and marked that day as a day of Thanksgiving. Historians disagree on how directly the celebration of the Pequot massacre led to our current Thanksgiving celebrations. But what is clear is that after the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts, they attacked and killed the indigenous communities who were already living there, over and over again. In my family, we talk a lot about sort of actions that have happened in the past. I think that's what's driving my grandfather and saying this is unacceptable, this needs to end. Keisha says that her grandfather turned to activism and protest because he felt the history personally. He was born Frank James in 1923, not too far from Plymouth. He was the first generation of my family to leave our ancestral homelands, which is Noepi or Martha's Vineyard. The family ended up moving to Chatham, Massachusetts, where they were one of the few non-white families in town. They experienced incredible amounts of racism from townsfolk. They have a story of a cross being burned on their lawn, for example, like things like that. Starting in the 1950s, a series of laws and policies forced Native Americans to leave their tribal lands and abandon their cultures and native languages. These policies, collectively, were known as Indian termination. Frank assimilated in the ways he could. He dove into music, becoming a trumpet prodigy, and even graduating from the competitive and prestigious New England Conservatory. But these accomplishments only got him so far. He was told by his trumpet teacher that he would never be hired by a symphony orchestra because of the color of his skin. It was a turning point for Frank, and he started to question everything he had been doing. He had learned an instrument that belonged to Western classical music. He went to conservatory to study Western classical music, sort of everything that European society places an emphasis on, and he still was treated like a second-class citizen. I think somewhere between 1948 and 1957, he decided to just be Wampanoag and no longer play that game. Around this time, he changed his name to Wamsuda and started getting involved in local activism for Indigenous rights through an organization called the Federated Eastern Indian League. Then came the '60s, the era of the civil rights movement, and later that decade, women's liberation and Black power. And to promote native self-determination around the country, Indigenous activists started what they called the Red Power Movement. Red Power activists often took a confrontational approach, and their civil disobedience was covered widely in the national press. And those incidents were likely on Wamsuda's mind when he was approached by the governor of Massachusetts ahead of that fateful Thanksgiving in 1970. It's the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower, and Governor Sargent, who's governor of Massachusetts, gets together with a bunch of other white men, and they decide they want to throw a banquet to commemorate this event because it's the founding of America, and many of them are Mayflower descendants themselves. As part of the arrangements for this banquet, the planning committee reached out to Wamsuda. They asked my grandfather, Wamsuda Frank James, to give a speech at the banquet, and he's going to be the token wampanoag, and they, I'm sure, have these fantasies of him praising the pilgrims, praising the Mayflower landing, thanking them for bringing civilization to these shores. Because, you know, nothing says "party" like Puritans flaying Europe and occupying other people's land. My grandfather goes away, and he writes a very different sort of speech. You sat down to write the speech, and he was asked to submit it in advance to the state, and the state flipped out. That's Matui Munro, co-leader of United American Indians of New England. She worked with Wamsuda over the years to organize protests and other activist endeavors. The state said, "Oh, this is way too inflammatory. You can't say words like this on such a grand occasion. That's not all right." Wamsuda wasn't allowed to read his speech, but it's still out there. You can find it online. So I can tell you exactly what he wanted to say. He wanted to say that his people were taken as slaves by those first European settlers, that they were wiped out by diseases that the settlers brought with them. He wrote, "We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees." Yeah, so, like, not exactly pilgrim talking points. But for some reason, state officials still thought Wamsuda could be convinced to play the role they had cast for him. They asked him if he would read something that they wrote for him, which was very vanilla, very tamed down, and he refused to do that. He felt that he was a man who had tried to do his best for his people, and he was not somebody who would stoop to doing that at all. Instead, Wamsuda and other local Indigenous activists hatched a plan to meet in Plymouth on Thanksgiving and send their own message. They created a three-page flyer and mailed it around to different groups and tribes across the country. Word spread through something called the Moccasin Telegraph. And the Moccasin Telegraph was the idea that through word of mouth and Indigenous people just running across each other and spreading the word from place to place, that word would spread about something like this. And that is, in fact, what happened. Finally, the day arrived. The 350th anniversary. It was cold that Thanksgiving morning. The protesters gathered on Kohl's Hill, overlooking Plymouth Rock. The Mayflower replica bobbed quietly in the harbor below. A contingent of some 50 Indians, many in full native dress, gathered at the statue of Massa Soya, the leader of a tribe which inhabited the Plymouth area at the time of the pilgrim's arrival. They were joined by a number of student supporters. Some of them wore native headdresses and feathers in their hair. Others wore bell bottoms and moccasins. Wamsudha Frank James stood at the center of this group. The leader of the group urged continued protesting of the treatment received by American Indians. He charged the government with breaking 389 treaties in the past 350 years. The leader called upon the white man to take back his disease and poverty. After the speeches, the group continued down the hill, marching to the place where the pilgrims supposedly first landed. The Indians paraded to Plymouth Rock, protected in a concrete pit. More than a dozen of the group jumped onto the rock and covered it with sand. They chanted, "There's a curse on the rock, and the rock is red with our blood." Reportedly, the protesters splashed red paint all over Plymouth Rock. And then they set their sights on another pilgrim favorite. The next target was the Mayflower II, a replica of the original sailing vessel of the pilgrims. Many climbed over fences and railings in a symbolic protest. The Indians and their sympathizers ripped down the cross of St. George, took down flags from the ship's mast, and scaled most of the vessel's rigging. They tossed overboard a mannequin of Christopher Jones, master of the original Mayflower. Wamsuda and the other activists declared that day as the first national day of mourning. And they made a plan to return every Thanksgiving to disrupt the pageantry and the celebration of a false history. They would go back year after year after year to challenge the pilgrim narrative. It became tradition. But, as we know, pilgrims don't stay peaceful for long. That's after the break. Before the break, we learned about Wampanoag tribal leader Wamsuda Frank James and his protest against the false history of the Thanksgiving story. But Wamsuda wasn't just upsetting a historical myth. The annual protest he started, the National Day of Mourning, was upsetting local officials in Plymouth because they were very invested in keeping the whitewashed version of the Thanksgiving story alive. In the 1870s and '80s, the town of Plymouth did a pretty fantastic job of remaking itself into a national heritage site. This is Lisa Blee, an associate professor of history at Wake Forest University, where she studies Native American history. And she says that after Congress made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1870, Plymouth became more and more reliant on its tourism industry, really playing itself up as the site of the very first Thanksgiving. They took down all of their old industrial buildings and put up monuments. The monuments to the forefathers was this enormous monument erected in the 1880s. And it drew a whole bunch of visitors. They started having these annual pageants celebrating the pilgrims and their landing in 1620. And those pageants drew in more people. And these annual celebrations of Puritan heritage gets coupled with the Thanksgiving idea of unity. By 1970, the celebration of the pilgrims and Thanksgiving had become a huge draw in Plymouth. Earlier that year, an estimated 100,000 people had come to the town to observe the anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower. And every year, they held a big Thanksgiving Day Parade, that pilgrim progress we mentioned earlier, with the breaches and the bonnets and the Bibles. In the parade, each of the marchers was meant to represent one of the 51 survivors of that first harsh winter in 1620. A commemoration of the suffering of the pilgrims. And nothing about the Wampanoag, who had suffered too. The indigenous activists had to bring their history to the table themselves. First, keeping their attention on the monuments. But as the years passed, they started challenging the parade in more confrontational ways. And sometimes we would go and disrupt them. We didn't get into fiscal violence with them. We would just jump in front of them or we would call them out for reenacting a lie. This is Matui Munro again, who worked alongside Wamsura. Over the years, she got more active in the day of morning protests. Matui says the goal was to raise awareness. And, you know, and talk about what had really happened in Plymouth, and that people were sold as slaves out of the harbor and things like that. Local officials in Plymouth hated this kind of in-your-face disruption. Police presence ramped up through the years. Protesters would often be followed by armed guards and police dogs. The parade and the protests remained largely peaceful, though. And the protesters would not be dissuaded. We never had a permit or anything, and frankly, it's indigenous land. And so we marched through the streets of Plymouth, and we would often end up down by Plymouth Rock. But it all came to a head on Thanksgiving Day in 1997. Matui and 150 or so other protesters gathered that morning on Coles Hill. And then they began marching through Plymouth. So we started to march up a very narrow street there. And the next thing you know, the cops started, like, just coming at us. Not only the local Plymouth cops, but also the Plymouth County police and the state police decided that they were going to ambush us when we tried to march. And so there were hundreds of cops there. They were indiscriminately just pepper spraying anybody they could find. And they also did things like drag indigenous people through the streets by their hair and otherwise violently attacked marchers during that day. Near Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, a Thanksgiving Day protest by Native Americans turned nasty. The police used mace and arrested 20 people. The police would actually arrest 25 of the protesters, including Matui. They were slammed with charges like disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly. The press started calling them the Plymouth 25. And images ended up in the news of protesters being assaulted by the police, getting dragged around in handcuffs, getting pepper spray to the face, and those pictures had a dramatic impact. Almost a year after the altercation, the group reached a settlement with the town of Plymouth. The charges against the Plymouth 25 were dropped, and Plymouth agreed to allow protesters to gather every year without obtaining a permit first. And perhaps most significantly, Plymouth agreed to better address the history of the Wampanoag and its historical markers. One of the things that we got from the settlement were plaques that are in town. One of them is up on Coles Hill, and it has information that we wrote about National Day of Mourning and its significance. If you go to Coles Hill now, the hill that overlooks Plymouth Harbor, where Wamsuda and others first gathered in 1970, you'll find a wide bronze plaque set on a stone that tells the story of the National Day of Mourning. Plymouth was a town that was just filled with propaganda about the pilgrims, and we wanted there to be something there that would tell some historical truth and would tell it from an indigenous perspective as well. The plaques are there to serve as a correction to the Thanksgiving myth that Plymouth had been parading literally for its thousands of visitors. Anybody who is a tourist who goes there will be able to see those plaques and maybe start rethinking why they're in Plymouth and what Plymouth is selling to them when they go there as tourists. So that was to correct some of the history. Historian Lisa Blee says the National Day of Mourning plaques are especially powerful given their prime positioning. One of them is right next to a statue of Masasoyit, a Wampanoag leader from the time of the pilgrims. It's incredible, I would say, what they've accomplished, the plaque next to the statue of Masasoyit by creating a counter-narrative next to the statue when visitors see it and then they go home with a more complicated understanding. An understanding that what your country sells to you and its traditions and its stories, it's not usually the full picture. But also, a couple of plaques isn't enough. It can't possibly represent the whole truth. Because the truth is Native Americans continue to be erased. Indigenous voices continue to be silenced. There aren't many spaces like the National Day of Mourning specifically dedicated to amplifying the needs, the demands, the voices of Indigenous people where the rest of us are asked to just listen. Wamsuta's granddaughter, Keisha James, wants that to change. My genuine hope is that Indigenous people are heard every day and the Thanksgiving myth has fallen and there is not a need for National Day Mourning and that someday it will not be necessary because it should not have been necessary in the first place. It's no secret that America struggles to reckon honestly with its history. The violence, the dispossession, the indoctrination, and the destruction that stains its past. It doesn't fit into the land of the free home of the brave narrative. The Thanksgiving myth, however, I think it's the perfect example of how America likes to see itself in peaceful community, joining hands with others that aren't like us. But, you know, that's not the story of America. I know it isn't. Keisha and Matui and the thousands of other Indigenous people who've protested on the National Day of Mourning, they don't just know it. They express it. They fight to tell the story of America as it actually is. It's not easy to go up against this great American myth, but it's a matter of preservation. They fight against a false history designed to erase them to say, "We are here. We are undeniably here." ♪ ♪ "Not Past It" is a Spotify original produced by Gimlet and ZSP Media. This episode was produced by Ramoy Phillip. Next week, we're diving into celebrity obsession and getting waxed with Madame Tussaud. Oscar probably makes a good doorstop, but it's just a trophy. But unless it gets 150 degrees, Madame Tussaud, it's gonna stay there forever. The rest of our team is producer Olivia Briley. Our associate producer is Nick Del Rose. Laura Newcomb is our production assistant. The supervising producer is Erika Morrison. Editing by Morrow Waltz. Andrea B. Scott is our executive editor. Fact-checking by Jane Ackerman. Sound design and mixing by Hans Dale Shee. Original music by Sax Kicks Ave, Willie Green, J-Bless and Bobby Lord. The theme song is "Toco Liana" by Coco Co. With music supervision by Liz Fulton. Technical direction by Zach Schmidt. Show art by Elise Harvin and Talia Rockman. The executive producer at ZSP Media is Zach Stewart-Pontier. The executive producer from Gimlet is Matt Schiltz. Special thanks to Talia Landry, Professor Jean O'Brien, and the United American Indians of New England. If you want to learn more, you can go to UAINE.org where they'll be live-streaming this year's National Day of Morning. And to Lydia Pulgrin, Abby Rosika, Dan Behar, Jen Han, Emily Wiedemann, Liz Stiles, Ariel Joseph, and Joshua Bianchi. Follow "Not Passed It Now" to listen for free, exclusively on Spotify. Click the little bell next to the follow button to get notifications for new episodes. And while you're there, hey, why don't you rate us five stars? You can follow me on Twitter @simonepilonin. Thanks for hanging! We'll see you next week.