These Native Americans focus on family amid Thanksgiving’s dark history

For centuries, Thanksgiving has been billed as an opportunity for friends and family to gather, with peace and gratitude in their hearts. But for Native Americans, celebrating the autumnal holiday isn’t as simple.

The short-and-sweet story told in schools depicting the first Thanksgiving as a harmonious harvest celebration between Native people and Pilgrims “was a very romanticized, whitewashed education about Indigenous peoples,” said Jordan Daniel, who’s a member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe.

In reality, 1621 was not the first celebration of Thanksgiving between the English and the

Wampanoag people, said David Silverman, a George Washington University professor who specializes in Native American history. The Wampanoags tried to ally with the English for trade and to maintain political independence from another Native group after an epidemic dwindled their numbers.

“Tensions built for years as the English population grew and began dispossessing, subjugating and evangelizing Native people,” Silverman said. Finally, war broke out around 1675, and after the English won, they enslaved about 2,000 American Indian prisoners of war, he added.

In 1970, the United American Indians of New England began commemorating Thanksgiving Day as a National Day of Mourning

to honor their ancestors who experienced cultural genocide at the hands of European colonialists.

Native Americans as a whole say they’re still fighting for what’s rightfully theirs. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe still doesn’t have control over its entire ancestral land. The Supreme Court has been weighing the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which Congress passed in 1978 to remedy the practice of removing Native children from their homes and sending them to non-Native boarding schools and families.

Pete Coser Jr. an educator and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation also pointed to the recent news that Harvard University’s Peabody Museum apologized for its collection of hair samples taken from 700 Native American children and pledged to return them to families and tribal communities. “It goes to show many different dynamics about this holiday and this particular year,” he said.

Despite the painful history Thanksgiving rehashes, Indigenous people also see themselves as resilient. The fourth Thursday in November is an opportunity for them to celebrate their roots and crush stereotypes, Coser says.

Coser, who lives in Oklahoma, says Thanksgiving for him feels like being in a real-life Hallmark movie.

As Coser’s family readies their feast for the day, Coser’s aunts, sisters and mom banter over who cooks the best dishes. Coser loves his oldest sister’s pumpkin gooey cake. And when the food is ready, multiple generations gather at the table to enjoy turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole and potato salad. They end the day with games such as Uno, Clue and — when it’s just the adults — Cards Against Humanity.

Although Thanksgiving harks back to a tumultuous history for Indigenous people, Coser doesn’t let tragedy define his Muscogee Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw lineage, or the Mashpee Wampanoag ancestry his three sons and daughter also have from their mother’s side.

His last name hails from the Coosa region, which was one of the biggest chiefdoms in the Southeast, straddling what is now Georgia and Alabama. And while the Spaniards who colonized the area saw the tribal leaders, called mekko, as chiefs, they’re actually kings, Coser said.

“What I tell my kids is that ‘You come from royalty. You come from powerful people,’ ” he said. “They have a place on this Earth that they can point to and say, ‘That’s where I’m originally from.’ ”

Coser’s family takes pride in being Native American, not just on Thanksgiving, but throughout their everyday lives. They embrace being Indigenous while also being lacrosse players, musicians, educators, historians, psychologists and accountants.

“We’re not people of the past,” Coser said.