Q&A

Questions for Nathaniel Philbrick

The Real Thanksgiving

Nantucket author Nathaniel Philbrick, winner of the National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea, has a new book called Mayflower. In it, Philbrick tells the true (and tragic) story of what really happened between the Pilgrims and Indians after they got up from the Thanksgiving table.

Tell us about your own Thanksgiving lessons in school.

Answer: It was sometime around third grade. We learned the traditional stories about the Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth Rock, being greeted by the Native Americans who taught them how to plant corn, and the story culminates with the first Thanksgiving. It was a great, inspirational story and, in many ways, it was truthful.

Do we need to change the way we teach Thanksgiving?

Answer: I think it’s actually being taught quite well. If I have a complaint, I think it’s that we stop in third grade—and we don’t pursue it in high school. That’s when they’re ready to learn the complexities and the disturbing aspects of this story.

Is it true that the Pilgrims and Indians lived peacefully and cooperatively for 50-plus years before their relationship disintegrated?

Answer: Part of the point of my book is that there was this remarkable period of coexistence in the Plymouth Rock Colony….Given that we’re a nation that sees our diversity as our greatest strength, that lesson of the first Thanksgiving is perfectly appropriate.

But the fact of the matter is there was King Philip’s War [a bloody conflict between settlers and Indians 55 years after that first Thanksgiving]—and that undercuts that lesson. For whatever reason, Americans have seized upon the story of the Pilgrims and Native Americans as our myth of national origin. We owe it to ourselves to fully explore what the reality was.

In school, it’s often “Pilgrims then, dot, dot, dot, here’s Lexington and Concord.” The Indians don’t reappear until the Trail of Tears. I know as a teenager, I had begun to think of the Pilgrims as caricatures, cardboard characters that get trotted out for the Macy’s Day parade. And I wondered—what do they really have to do with the tortured soul of America? My hope is that, when you see it in the context of King Philip’s War, it becomes a story that you can connect to American history. It’s a heartbreaking story of what might have been.

How can teachers best teach these lessons?

Answer: I know I can’t relate to history unless it’s through the people and the story of how it happened. I don’t think anybody can relate to anything, past or present, unless there’s an emotional engagement.