Giving Thanks: the Kindness of Strangers 🫱🏽🫲🏾
This week, my family and friends in the US celebrated Thanksgiving, an uncomfortable (but inevitable) annual ritual. Thanksgiving is a national holiday that should be respected for managing to generate discomfort for many people, on multiple levels, at the same time: this is a national phenomenon that poses challenges for people personally, within families and across communities.
What exactly is Thanksgiving? 🦃
You can skip this part if you already know, but here’s a brief rundown: American thanksgiving is a celebration that takes place on the fourth Thursday in November and is a federal holiday, which means that most people get this day off work.
In the US, traditionally, people travel home for Thanksgiving dinner and take Friday off work, so they can stay through the weekend. That makes for a very busy week of travel, but also means that the holiday can have a strong cultural significance for some families, and communities – being a secular holiday that everyone can celebrate at the same time – and a more inclusive alternative to Christmas (which not everybody celebrates) for gathering with family and friends.
The Thanksgiving Story: Disney Version
As a child, I was taught the Thanksgiving story in nursery and primary school, sat listening as I made turkey decorations out of handprints on paper plates, and daydreamed of roast sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and Libby’s pumpkin pie.
We are told that in the 1600s, the Pilgrims (Puritanical Christians fleeing religious persecution) came from England, by way of The Netherlands, and settled in what is now New England. They were ill equipped for the weather, and also had no idea how to farm the soil.
Half of the 105 people who arrived in the autumn, died during the first winter. They were saved by a tribe of Native Americans who had observed them from afar, eventually took pity on them, shared clothing and food, taught them to farm, hunt and safely navigate the landscape.
To thank the Native Americans (who we were told to call “Indians” at the time), the Pilgrims held a feast and invited the tribe to celebrate a successful harvest and the survival of the colony with them. This was such a success, it became an annual tradition – of “thanks giving” to the people who saved their lives, and the colony.
Lovely, heartwarming and simple… but is it true? 🤔
Sort of.
Actually, not really.
The “Real” Turkey: English Identity, Slavery and Counternarrative
Most of us now realise that the “real” Thanksgiving story is a lot darker, but also takes in a bigger slice of history – and is a lot more human, and interesting.
It’s true that the Pilgrims were fleeing persecution in England, because they were religious separatists in the early 1600s, at a time when it was illegal to form any church outside of the Church of England.
They fled to Amsterdam in 1608, and mostly settled near Leiden over the following year. Leiden is apparently known as the City of Refugees, and a fun fact according to the city’s official website is that today, 3 out of 4 “Leidenaars” are descended from refugees. The Pilgrims lived free from persecution in Leiden but apparently (and I do find this difficult to understand) experienced their children growing up speaking Dutch as a loss of English identity 🤔 and somehow felt it would be better to travel to the New World to found a colony there.
Some Pilgrims left Leiden in 1620, famously joining others on a ship called the Mayflower, which later landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Today, in the US the Mayflower Society is an organisation compromised only of direct lineal descendants of those who originally sailed on the Mayflower, which is quite something to own up to, given what I’ve just told you (and am about to tell you) about those people.
It’s true that half of those who landed on the Mayflower, perished through the first winter, and their lives were saved by the kindness of strangers – Native Americans who had observed their arrival but kept a distance for a good few months.
But who were these kind people?
Most modern histories refer to a pivotal figure: Tisquantum (or “Squanto“), a Patuxet from the Wampanoag confederation, raised around the area known as Plymouth, where the Pilgrims landed.
Squanto spoke English because he had, in 1610 or 1611, been kidnapped and forced into slavery by an English captain (either Thomas Hunt, John Smith or George Weymouth – possibly, all of them). The only account all the histories give for this, is greed. Either the English wanted to “show Indians” to their financial backers, or they wanted to sell slaves as as commodities to increase their financial return, or both.
Squanto and a number of other Native American slaves were thrown into a ship’s hold, taken to Europe and sold as slaves in Malaga, Spain. Squanto either escaped or was later sold to Master John Slaney in Cornhill, London, who became Master of the London & Bristol Company (known as the “Newfoundland Company“) and put him on a ship back to the New World, to serve as translator and negotiator in the interests of that company.
According to legend, another Native American sent for Squanto after the tribe made contact with the Pilgrims, because they knew that he was fluent in English and would be able to serve as an intermediary for the two communities.
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📚 If you are now curious about alternative history and counternarratives, I highly recommend checking out this from the National Museum of the American Indian: Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives on Thanksgiving
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Bringing It Home: the kindness of strangers 🫱🏽🫲🏾
Something I like about digging a little deeper into our common histories is that is is messy, but it is also more human.
We see and feel the fear, uncertainty and questionable decisions that people make when they are stressed and under pressure. We also see historians (and others) struggle to ascribe human motivations to the actions of people, after they have acted.
Did Squanto act out of kindness and generosity, exercising near superhuman ability to forgive English people for what they did to him?
Or did Squanto “betray his people,” for greed or out of a sense of self-preservation?
Did he even have a sense of “my people” – after everything he had endured, and all he had seen of the world?
We can’t know, but for me, the messy story is a better place to start from. And it’s the messy story I want to reflect on today, and how I will talk about Thanksgiving to my own children, and maybe to their children, in years to come.
So today, I’m giving thanks for:
🫱🏽🫲🏾the kindness of strangers
🧶messy history
🌎 the human capacity to forge friendships, to endure, to take action to change their circumstances, and to tell and retell their stories, forever
Thanks for reading again this week and would love to hear about your own relationship to messy history, or the kindness of strangers, or maybe just the things you’re grateful for today. (This is also a Thanksgiving tradition, and a good one!)
And finally, here’s a Thanksgiving treat for you, the unstoppable lyricism of Bob Dylan presenting an alternative version of the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower
First published on LinkedIn on 29 November 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/giving-thanks-kindness-strangers-jen-ang-e34ke/
