Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November (which this year will be the 23rd) and in Canada on the second Monday of October (which this time was the 9th of last month). The holiday has gone down in history very adulterated and sweetened. The first Thanksgiving of 1621, the illustration above, reflects it perfectly, adding to the treasures of the US Library of Congress.
There is consensus that in 1621, the second year since their arrival, the ultra-religious pilgrims of the Mayflower celebrated this very symbolic banquet for the first time. Except for the title of the painting, the work of Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863-1930), everything is very nuanced. This painter attempted with his canvases about the history of the United States what Benito Pérez Galdós did a while later with the National Episodes.
The artist opted for a sweetened and idealized vision of the events he reflects, as this second painting also reveals, which shows those same pilgrims of 1621, during their ocean crossing, while they signed the Mayflower Pact. Although the original document was lost, the surviving transcripts justify the fact that dollar bills still say today: “In God we trust.”
The first sentences of the pilgrims' pact explain that they embarked and went to the other side of the world "for the glory of God, and the advancement of the Christian faith and the honor of our king and our country." This messianic vision would not be far from the one that inspired Christopher Columbus to search for the “West Indies” 128 years earlier (which is why the Native Americans ended up calling themselves Indians: the consecration of an error).
Although events from more than 500 years ago cannot or should not be judged with today's criteria, the black legend about the colonization of America has haunted Spain and the United States in very different ways. Every October 12, and the last one was no exception, the celebration of Hispanic Heritage raises a recurring controversy in which the words genocide and extermination are used profusely.
However, and although there are also protests, Thanksgiving does not provoke such a categorical reaction. Was the US's treatment of the Native Americans better than Spain's? The feasts on the fourth Thursday in November, which in theory celebrate the harvest and praise good neighborliness, are a good occasion to remember that Indians did not obtain American nationality until 1924!
Let's go back to the initial image. A group of natives, in a submissive attitude, while the whites entertain them with trays of food. Most likely, it happened exactly the other way around. If it weren't for the Indians, the Mayflower travelers would have died of starvation. And the same would have happened to those of the Susan Constant, who arrived a few years earlier on the coasts of what are now the states of Virginia and Massachusetts.
Those were the lands of Wahunsonakoak, whose name will mean nothing to today's reader, although that of his daughter surely will; Pocahontas, of which we have received a very distorted version thanks to the cinema and the errors that brought together Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, directors of the Disney cartoon of the same name, with a filmmaker as radically different as Terrence Malick.
Pocahontas (the 1995 animated version) and The New World (2005, co-starring Colin Farrell and Q'Orianka Kilcher) chronicle the founding of Jamestown, the seed of the first English colony in the U.S. If the Algonquin town of Wahunsonakoak and Pocahontas had not taught them to fertilize the fields with seaweed and plant corn, the future of the inhabitants of that settlement would have been very uncertain.
Both Disney and Terrence Malick made an adult and sexy Pocahontas fall in love with Captain John Smith, an adventurer who also existed, but with a dark, mercenary and buccaneer past. In reality, Pocahontas was a girl when she met John Smith and did not marry until years later, and not with him, but with Thomas Rolfe, a colonist who prospered with tobacco, which was already all the rage at that time in the metropolis and the british court
Pocahontas had a sad ending, as sad is the background of Thanksgiving Day. The most traditional dishes are stuffed turkey (how many times have we seen it in the cinema!), as well as cooked ham, pumpkin compote and mashed potatoes with meat sauce, among other garnishes. And for dessert, the true American pie: an apple pie (although neither the recipe nor the apples are native to the continent).
“They were happy and ate partridges” is the final point of many stories. For years, movies and school books transformed that phrase into something similar to “settlers and Indians were happy and ate turkey.” The truth is that the newcomers were able to endure their first year in the new world thanks to the help of their unwitting hosts, who could never imagine that they were digging their own grave.
It is not clear if the pilgrims invited the Indians or if they showed up by chance at that banquet in 1621. What is clear is that everything served at the meal came from the native lands. Lands that were increasingly reduced by the voracious hunger of the settlers. The Indians of America, those of the north and those of the south, discovered too late that the more the whites ate, the more they wanted.
Perhaps the most real thing about the Disney cartoon film is a dialogue between John Smith and Pocahontas. He tells him that the white people have come in search of a very valuable yellow thing that comes out of the ground. It's gold, of course. She repeats: “Yellow, coming out of the earth and with a lot of courage?” And she shows him the only thing she knows with these characteristics and for which it is worth digging in the ground. An ear of corn.
