The Myth of Thanksgiving

Interesting: admirable political sentiments if a rather dubious reading of history. Just for the record ....

- the corporation behind 'the Pilgrims' was not the Virginia Company: the Mass. branch of that company had failed before the Mayflower ever set sail and the Virginia branch failed shortly after they arrived.  The voyage of the Mayflower was actually sponsored by the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, which had no royal mandate (a la Virginia Co, or Hudson's Bay Co.) but was a privately held mercantile group seeking to profit from commerce. (The Mayfower initiative was not a great commercial success.)

- the Mayflower Pilgrims were not part of a colonizing project under the direction of King James. They were actually religious refugees living in exile (in Holland) who wholly rejected royal authority and the Church of England and were thus considered 'separatists';

- there are two written records of the classic 1621 'first Thanksgiving'. Both are written by settlers (caveat lector) but there is no compelling reason to believe that they significantly misrepresent the status / treatment of "local Natives" as the Pilgrims felt no shame for their actions in this regard. As evidenced by the descriptions in the same settler records of how they stole corn stores from Pokanoket villages during their first hungry winter in Plymouth. So I am not sure on what basis Ortiz suggests that the food at the 1621 celebration (a year of good harvests and ample hunting, from all accounts) was stolen, or that any aboriginal people present were servants -  they were at least fellow celebrants if not actual 'guests'. 

- FWIW, I have seen no evidence that the local aboriginal people served as servants of the Pilgrim colonizers. It is worth remembering that the Pilgrims negotiated a strong and long-term alliance with Massasoit, chief of the Pokanoket (the 'local' band of the Wampanoag people) for their mutual benefit. From the perspective of the Pokanoket, it appears that the relatively few, generally pastoral Pilgrims were the least of their immediate worries, when compared to an-going killer epidemic as well as increasing military incursions by adjoining nations. It is perhaps worth noting that the Pilgrim / Pakanoket alliance lasted fifty years. 

- despite what Ortiz says, official Thanksgiving in the US did not start in 1863 under Abraham Lincoln: annual proclamations declaring national days of thanksgiving had been made by a series of Presidents, starting with George Washington in 1789. 

Bottom-line: the somewhat Disney-style story of the "original" Thanksgiving may not be quite as mythical as Ortiz seems to want us to believe. Indeed, most historians seems to agree that it was indeed an inter-racial three day festival of food, celebration and harmony.

Of course, how that story has been used to manufacture a mythical view of American history is another matter entirely. 

In terms of the Massachusetts colony itsef,  everything 'went south' over the 50 years after that first Thanksgiving. The Pilgrim's tolerance for and dependence on aboriginal peoples diminished dramatically over the ensuing decades as less tolerant English Puritans gradually grew to outnumber the original Pilgrim separatists.  (It must have been somewhat similar to the experience of the Mi'kmaq people of Atlantic Canada, first with Acadian settlers and then British colonial authorities).  

For the Pokanoket band and Wampanoag people, this all ended very badly in 1675 with King Philip's War - which resulted in the deaths of most of the remaining Wampanoag people, with the few survivors then sold into slavery. As a nation, the Wampanoag effectively disappeared.

The first American Thanksgiving may not be as much of a myth as Ortiz states, but rather a fleeting moment of harmony before a long, deep - and genocidal - betrayal.  If someone wants to frame a national narrative (and holiday?) around that - perhaps it would be better to start with either the Mystic Maasacre or Wounded Knee.