Telling Kids the True Story of Thanksgiving (And the True Gospel)
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Every year, we hear the story of the First Thanksgiving, a quaint tale of unlikely friends, pilgrims and Native Americans, enjoying a bountiful feast together. We love this story because it gives us hope we can get along, extend everyone a seat at the table, and overcome differences through the charm of thankfulness and food. And whose heart doesn’t stir in response to that kind of meal and that kind of peace? It’s a beautiful longing, perhaps planted in our minds by God Himself.
But when we take a look at history, the 1621 meal shared between Pilgrims and Native Americans doesn’t offer the redemptive story for which we long. Though the meal was unusual and friendly, that particular Pilgrim-Native American relationship was likely borne out of mutual weakness we often disregard (the Pilgrims, from the perils of the “new world,” and the Native Americans, from the diseases brought from Europeans in the years prior). And certainly, this unusual meal was a mere blip on a historical landscape of a completely different picture. This fact says a lot: the Native American leader associated with Thanksgiving, Massasoit, had a son named Metacomet. Metacomet is the “King Philip” of King Philip’s War, a brutal struggle between colonists and Native Americans.
I grew up building Native American homes for school projects, I loved dressing the part for Thanksgiving programs, and I was really pumped to land the name “Rainbow Princess” for the duration of our Native American unit in second grade. For a woman whose education dabbled in the realm of indigenous nearly every year in elementary school, it was just a few months ago that I learned the phrase “merciless Indian savages” is written into The Declaration of Independence. There’s much to think about, much to wrestle with.
As I consider how I’ve been taught and how to teach my children, history clashes loudly with the familiar narratives. It’s tempting for us to force-feed redemption into the stories we tell rather than tell stories as they actually are. However, when we strong-arm redemption, we can short-circuit the powerful experience of longing for a Redeemer—and I don’t want my kids to miss that. I also think we can let passages like Psalm 78 inform the way we pass down stories—not hiding ugly truths but proclaiming them plainly alongside God’s glorious deeds (v. 4) that the hearers might set their hope in God alone, remember his works, and keep his commandments (v. 6-7).
So when I tell my kids the Thanksgiving story (based on what I now know and humbly recognizing that I’m still learning and don’t know everything), it goes something like this:
Native Americans are men, women, and children who lived in the land we call America long before any Europeans arrived. They considered this place home—and that makes sense. After all, they’d lived here for as long as they could remember. Their parents had always lived here, and even their grandparents and great-grandparents had always lived here!
Several hundred years ago, some people from Europe traveled here, desiring to make it their home, too. There were some who did this for good reasons, like their desire to worship freely, but many did this for selfish reasons. Perhaps these new people could have shared, or asked, “Can I live here, too?” but many didn’t. Instead, some of them made it a project to shove their way in. Of course, the Native Americans were not about to give up their home! Who would want to give up their home? Who would want to let someone take the place where they’d grown up, where their parents had grown up, where their grandparents had grown up, where their great-grandparents had grown up?
These two groups fought a lot, and it was very bloody and brutal. The Europeans brought with them diseases that made the Native Americans very sick, and over time, many died. However, many of the Europeans didn’t fare so well, either. They didn’t understand how to grow food in this new land. They didn’t understand how to make it their home. It was scary! Unbelievably, some of these people may have forced Native Americans to teach them how to take care of the land. Even more unbelievably, some of the Native Americans helped the Europeans learn. They may have done this out of genuine kindness, or it may have made them feel safe to know the Europeans were on their same team. Who knows?
In the midst of all the fighting and sickness, sometimes there would be a moment of peace, a moment to experience “home” rather than fight for it. Once, about fifty pilgrims and about ninety Native Americans shared a meal. Both groups were weakened and grieving. The Pilgrims were a group of Europeans who came here wanting to worship freely, but they also found hunger and sickness that killed many of them. The Pokanoket Wampanoag, a group of Native Americans, was lead by a man named Massasoit, had suffered greatly from European disease brought over years before. Despite their grief and their differences, these two groups shared a 3-day meal together, and the two groups continued to try to be on the same team.
However, when Massasoit and his Pilgrim friends died, both sides began to forget that little glimpse of peace and friendship, and the fighting and horrors continued—and even got worse. The colonists grew stronger, and eventually most Native Americans tribes suffered tremendous loss of lives and then the loss of their homes.
I know what you’re thinking: “Uh oh—this is not the beautiful story we wanted! This is horrible!”
It’s tempting to shove all the icky stuff away, to focus only on that shared table—that one time when it looked like things might be okay. But don’t shift your eyes away because it’s the ickiness that will make you cry out, “Someone, help!” And then you’ll see: There is hope in this sticky place.
The truth is that God sent His Son Jesus as a rescue for a world full of people like the ones in this story: people who were mistreated, oppressed, and victimized, and people who fought, behaved cruelly, and took what wasn’t theirs. People like you and me.
When Jesus died on the cross, He made a way for us to be untangled from all the ugly stuff and to be with Him, together and safe, with a permanent seat at the table and permanent spot in His family. When He brings us into His family and offers us a home with Him and a place at His table, we can be sure nothing can take that away. One day He will come back and make all things new, and at His table, we will worship Him freely and enjoy friendships with people from every tribe, tongue, and nation! (And maybe some turkey, too.)
You know how you long for everything to be okay? How your heart yearns for that shared table with friends and family, for that togetherness and feeling of home? It’s something we occasionally catch a glimpse of on earth (hey, you might catch a glimpse this Thanksgiving with our very own family!), but do you know what? It’s something that is guaranteed when Jesus comes back for His family, and nothing can take it away—no fighting, no hate, no disease.
Now that’s something to be thankful for!
Grown ups, we don’t have to find comfort in convenient stories of cornucopia and cartoon smiles. In Christ, we are able to interact with the Thanksgiving story as it is, seeking to honor the personhood of all image bearers, knowing that his blood speaks a better word (Hebrews 12:24), knowing one day “he will wipe away every tear…and death shall be no more, neither shall their be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). We know through Jesus we are extended invitation to his table, that he invites us to “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isaiah 55:1). We remember with excitement the promise of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb and remember with the solemnness the Lamb slain that it might be so.
Indeed, the gospel offers hope to more ugly stories than just the Thanksgiving story. We are able to truthfully interact with the story we find ourselves in today—our blindspots, our hatred, our longings—and invite God to search us and know us, to see if there is anything in us that grieves him, and to ask him to lead us in the way everlasting (Psalm 139:24).
Sometimes this post from 2019 makes people mad, so I wanted to offer some additional commentary and links that may help. I’m not a trained historian by any means, but I tried to write this story with integrity, and I think you’ll find my overview to be fair to the difficulties of the time period and the personhood on both sides. Some things to consider:
A few primary sources from the colonist perspective that affirm the unusual and friendly nature of the first Thanksgiving
Nearly every respected reference source (like this and this) help us see that there was tremendous difficulty in colonist-Native America relations, not only before the first Thanksgiving but after.
Consider the way Increase Mather (influential leader and Harvard College president) opened his 1676 A History of the War with the Indians: “The heathen people amongst whom we live, and whose land the God of our Fathers has given us for a rightful possession, have a various times been plotting mischievous plans against that part of the English Israel which has settled here, as no man who has lived through this period can be ignorant of.” Then he specifically mentions the Wampanoags, the tribe associated with the first Thanksgiving just fifty years prior.
You may consider this professor’s research on the Wampanoag tribe and the history of Thanksgiving or consider with compassion that many Native people treat Thanksgiving Day as a day or mourning.
Of course, as you look into it yourself, you will notice that many sources beyond our go-to reference sources have an agenda, so it’s difficult to rummage through it all and know who to believe. This why I’ve aimed to offer a retelling that is general and gracious. My agenda is this: to talk about Thanksgiving by looking at history with honesty and at the gospel with hope. Because Jesus covered our sin and shame on the cross, we can look to the true Savior and the true table that awaits us.
