Indigenous Generosity: The True Story Behind the First Thanksgiving

Every November, millions of Americans gather around tables laden with turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie to celebrate Thanksgiving. Children in classrooms craft paper pilgrim hats and feather headdresses, and the dominant narrative remains one of hardy English settlers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest earned through their own labor and faith.

That story is not entirely wrong — but it is profoundly incomplete. The survival of the Plymouth Colony, and the harvest celebration of autumn 1621 that we now call the “First Thanksgiving,” rested almost entirely on the knowledge, resources, and deliberate generosity of the Wampanoag people and one remarkable man in particular: Tisquantum, better known as Squanto.

A Brutal First Winter

When the Mayflower anchored off Cape Cod in November 1620, its 102 passengers and crew were already months behind schedule. They had no time to plant crops before winter. Their provisions — hardtack, salt pork, dried peas, and beer — were rapidly depleted. Exposure, scurvy, pneumonia, and malnutrition claimed approximately half the company. By March 1621, only 52 of the original pilgrims remained alive.

They were, in the words of Governor William Bradford, “in great sickness and distress,” with scarcely any food left and no realistic prospect of growing their own before starvation set in.

The Cached Corn That Saved Them

In February and March 1621, exploratory parties discovered abandoned Wampanoag storage pits containing seed corn. The village of Patuxet — the very site where the pilgrims had built their settlement — had been wiped out a few years earlier by a leptospirosis epidemic inadvertently introduced by European fishermen. The cached baskets of maize the pilgrims removed were not wild grain; they were the next season’s planting seed, carefully stored by people who were no longer alive to use it.

The pilgrims took this corn. They later acknowledged the act with unease, promising future payment to its rightful owners if any survived. That seed corn became their primary food source in the desperate weeks before spring.

“A Special Instrument Sent of God”

In March 1621, an English-speaking Native man walked into Plymouth and greeted the astonished settlers in their own language. Tisquantum (Squanto) was a Patuxet who had been kidnapped by English sailors in 1614, sold into slavery in Spain, escaped to London, and finally returned to his homeland — only to find his entire community dead.

Squanto chose to stay with the pilgrims. He taught them how to plant maize using fish as fertilizer, where to catch eels and shellfish, how to grow squash and beans in symbiotic “Three Sisters” mounds, and which native plants were edible. William Bradford later called him “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”

The Wampanoag Alliance

Squanto was not acting alone. In March 1621, the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit concluded a formal peace treaty with the pilgrims that lasted over fifty years. The Wampanoag provided additional corn through trade and diplomacy, and their warriors protected the tiny colony from potential threats by neighboring tribes.

This was not naïve charity. Massasoit had lost as much as 90 percent of his people to the recent epidemic and faced pressure from the powerful Narragansett to his west. A small, weak English outpost that posed no immediate threat — and which could potentially serve as an ally against rivals — represented a strategic opportunity.

The 1621 Harvest Celebration

In the fall of 1621, after a decent harvest made possible by indigenous agricultural knowledge, Governor Bradford invited Massasoit to a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit arrived with ninety men and brought five deer. The celebration lasted three days and included approximately ninety Wampanoag and fifty-two surviving English colonists — nearly twice as many Native people as pilgrims.

Edward Winslow’s contemporary account mentions venison, wildfowl, and “a great store of wild turkeys,” but makes no mention of cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, or pumpkin pie. Those now-iconic dishes emerged much later.

A More Honest Telling

The pilgrims were religious refugees seeking freedom of worship, and many were courageous. But their survival was not a triumph of European superiority or self-reliance. It was made possible by indigenous people who chose — for a complex mix of humanitarian, diplomatic, and strategic reasons — to help strangers who had arrived uninvited on their shore.

Thanksgiving, at its core, is a story of indigenous generosity in the face of extraordinary loss. The Wampanoag saved the pilgrims from starvation not once but repeatedly, sharing knowledge and food that European agriculture and technology could not provide in that place and season.

As we sit down to our own tables this November, perhaps the most authentic way to honor the day is to remember the people without whom there would have been no harvest feast at all — and to acknowledge that the true thanksgiving in 1621 was owed, first and foremost, to the original inhabitants of this land.