by ALIA CHUGHTAI
It’s a day to give thanks. But for millions of Indigenous Americans, it also serves as a reminder of loss.
Across the United States, November is synonymous with preparations for Thanksgiving. Classrooms and public areas are decorated with warm-, earthy-toned cutouts of turkeys; English settlers – the Pilgrims, as they are known – who made a new home in a country new to them; and “Indians” with colourful feather headdresses and vests made of construction paper.
Families come together from all over the country for a feast. And some arguments.
America’s pop culture dominance has meant that songs and movies have introduced these cultural staples to the rest of the world, even among those who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving or fully understand it.
But to millions of Indigenous Americans, the story of Thanksgiving is also closely intertwined with their history of invasion, occupation, displacement, death and devastation that their communities faced as waves of settlers arrived and took over what is today the US.
Here’s a look at what the historical journey of the US has meant to its Native American communities through maps showing where they once lived, how they had to move and the reservations they are now largely ghettoised in.
When did Thanksgiving become a national holiday?
In 1863, a proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln turned the last Thursday of every November into a national holiday for giving thanks.
This occurred in the middle of the Civil War in the United States between the Union, or northern part of the country, against the Confederacy, the southern states that wanted to preserve a system of slavery. The Civil War spanned from 1861 to 1865, and nearly 700,000 soldiers were killed.
The proclamation for the national holiday came about after a campaign led by Sarah Hale, a poet, editor and activist, that began in 1846. She’s most commonly known as the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb.
But long before Lincoln’s proclamation or even Hale’s campaign, the tradition that was formalised as Thanksgiving was common in the original settler communities of New England.
When and where was the first Thanksgiving?
In 1606, England’s King James I divided the east coast of what is now the US into the London Company, which later became the Virginia Company of London, and the Plymouth Company. Both were joint-stock trading companies, much like the British East India Company, which was set up in India in 1608.
This was still more than a century and a half before the US was born.
The goals of these British trading companies were to find gold, search for trade routes and compete with other European powers.
The first settlement by the English in the New World was in 1607 when the Jamestown colony was established on the banks of the James River in present day Virginia. This was the ancestral home of the Powhatan Indigenous people.
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