Of thanksgiving. As we come to the National Holiday of thanksgiving, we know that there is a lot of mythology we grew up with about what happened on that first thanksgiving. Today, we have for you a scholar that is tried to look at what really happened at that time and put the history of against the mythology to talk to us about what is the real story during that time . David silverman is a professor of history at jude George Washington university. You got your masters from william and mary. That is sams alma mater so he wants to make sure we get that out there. Although, you did earn your princeton phd. So you get a little bit of props for both places. Your most recent book, that we will share with you in the followup notes, is called this land is their land the one pinoy indian wampanoag indians Plymouth Colony and the troubled history of thanksgiving. The book was published in 2020 and David Silverman has become one of the go to scholars as thanksgiving comes around so we are excited that he has decided to devote his time and talent to us for the next hour. We are delighted to move forward. Professor silverman, tell us the real story of thanksgiving. I will do my best. Thank you for that introduction. I am honored to be with all of you so we can think together about these issues. I will put up a slide presentation now to accompany my comments. Bear with me for just a moment here. All right. Just one second. There we go. Before i launch into the content of todays talk let me include some preliminary remarks that address the terminology that i will be using today. You will see in the title of my book and here in my comments today that occasionally i use the term indians. I realize, of course, that this term is a misnomer. After all, the United States is not india. I realize that this is a word that has become increasingly jarring to said rents the public. Who have been taught that the word is not only inaccurate but racially insensitive. The reason i use this term in my book and my talk is that over the course of my 20 plus year career researching native american history, most, certainly not all, but most of the Indigenous People with whom i have come into contact have told me that that is the term they prefer when referring to them in the aggregate. Now let me also be clear. Almost to a person they prefer tribal names when it is possible to use them. But the point is that over the centuries, native people have appropriated this term and turned it into a source of pride. Who would like to tell them to do otherwise . It is out of deference, not indifference to them, that i use this word. For generations, americans have been telling themselves a patriotic story of the suppose it for thanksgiving that treats colin the suppose it first thanksgiving that treats this nation as above this affair. In this tale, and that treats colonization as a bloodless affair. The pilgrims, religious dissenters from england cram the mayflower to brave the stormy atlantic in search of freedom of conscience in america. The adventurers land off cape cod with a fresh copy of the protoconstitution the mayflower compact. After fruitless exploring and brief confrontation with the natives they found their settlement up the coast at a place they complement. It is yet, the future of the colony is in doubt during the first couple months. Because, the indians, rarely identified by tribe, upon whom the inquiry list the english know they must depend for food and guidance appear at best wary and shy and at worst hostile. However, eventually the natives reach out to the newcomers through the interpreters sam a set and squanto. The story sidesteps the obvious question of how these figures managed to learn english and it does not explain why the indians were suddenly so friendly. The native chief who the english know by his title even agrees to a treaty of alliance with plymouth. Over the spring and summer the indians feed the pilgrims and teach them how to plant corn and where to fish, whereupon, the colony begins to thrive. That fall the two parties sealed her friendship with the famous first thanksgiving. The piece that follows prevents colonial new england and, by extension, modern america to plant its seeds of democracy, christianity, and plenty. As for what happens to the indians next, this story has nothing to say. The ended indians legacy is to present america as a gift to white people, or in other words, to concede to colonialism. Like pocahontas, sacagawea, the other famous indians of early american history. They helped the colonizers and then they move offstage. The wampanoags in now what is southeastern massachusetts are the indians in this drama. They have long contended that this tale is not history, but a myth that sugarcoat the viciousness of colonialism for Indigenous People. My book reckons with this uncomfortable assertion and its applications. You will have plenty of material after this talk today to ruin your families thanksgiving. I realize many of you are perfectly capable of ruining your families thanksgiving with no assistance from me, but all the same. In traditional accounts of thanksgiving, the pilgrims step onto Plymouth Rock and into a new world where wilderness a wilderness. In fact humans into civilization in the americas was every bit as rich and ancient as in europe. History did not begin for the wampanoag with the mayflower. They had a dynamic past countless generations old that shape to they are, what they did,. In other words, they inhabited an old world. The socalled wilderness in which the english arrived was full of villages, roads, cornfields, historic monuments, cemeteries, and forests cleared of underbrush through controlled burns. All by native design. You can get a sense of what i am talking about here in this drawing of the Wampanoag Community of the talk sit located on the very side plymouth would be built drawn by the french explorer Samuel Champlain 15 years before the pilgrims arrival. The wampanoag recent history mattered two. Though the thanksgiving myth suggested that the pilgrim wampanoag encounter was first contact, in fact, it was one in a long string of bloody meetings between the wampanoags and europeans since 1524. In other words, a century before the arrival of the mayflower. Those bloody contacts took place with increasing frequency from 1602 onward. As yet another drawing by samuel day champlain captures. The thanksgiving myth portrays wampanoags the wampanoags portrays the wampanoags as timid but they were easily the Stronger Party during plymouth early years. The english did not dictate to the wampanoags. Instead, the wampanoags initially used Plymouth Colony as a pawn in domestic and intertribal conflict. It will come as a surprise to most of you that this elevated first thanksgiving feast actually played a minor role in this relationship. Far more influential were a series of other less palatable episodes filled with violence and power politics. I also submit that our emphasis on the nearly 50 years of peace following the first thanksgiving and its treaty of 1621 allows a more important point belies a more important point that the wampanoags came to present the colonist expansion. The english and wampanoags almost came to blows repeatedly during that supposed long piece culminating in king philips war. Most histories that bother to include the wampanoags and with this war. My book contends that accounting with the thanksgiving myth as a white lie requires tracing wampanoags struggles with colonialism through the centuries right up to the present day. Longterm historical perspectives like these are especially urgent as modern america grapples with new manifestations of white nationalism, while at the very same time, indigenous americans in new england and indeed all across the country are reasserting their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty. Histories like this will help us better understand these trials. To explore these themes today i will focus this talk around it two cases spread across the centuries in which wampanoags post counter narratives to White American triumphalist history. Our first revisionist history and is none other than the wampanoag sachem or chief known to history as king philip. In the late spring of 1675, some 60 years after his father ousamequin or massasoit greeted the pilgrims he sat down to talk with english magistrates from the category colony of rhode island. This is the location the conversation took place. Rhode islanders were there to encourage the chief to agree to a peaceful arbitration of the wampanoagsmounting differences with limits colony. He had already agreed to fight and explain why. Lets take a moment to consider what he said that day. The account of this conversation is one of these rare gems in the documentary record in which we it seems we can really hear a native american voice without excess editorial sanitizing. So, metacom said he viewed the history of wampanoag english relations as little more than the colonists failure to live up to the promise of the 1621 alliance. The sachem recalled that when the pilgrims settled ousamequin was as a great man and the english as a little child. He contended that his father could have wiped out the infant colony if he had wished. Instead, he held back its native enemies, said starving colonists, and granted them land. Now, wampanoags metacom conveniently left out that his father made this choice out of out furs is him altruism than any need for allies. The wampanoags had been hobbled by plague between 1616 and 1619 whereupon their narragansett rivals to the west began subjugating them. Generally, metacom was correct here. Plymouth would become yet another in a series of english lost colonies if it had not been for wampanoag largess. How did plymouth show its gratitude decades later now that it had become the great man and deep wampanoags the little child the wampanoags the little child . Metacom denounced that in english courts 20 honest indians testified an englishman had done them wrong it was as if nothing. If one of the worst indians testified against any indian suspected by the english, that was sufficient. Furthermore the english had begun to interfere in criminal matters between wampanoags within wampanoag territory, including recently executing three of metacoms leading men for the suppose it assassination of a Christian Wampanoag that had been leaking wampanoag intelligence to the english. Metacom fumed that whatever it was only between indians and not in english townships, they would not have us prosecute. About 50 of the wampanoags, mostly on cape cod, marthas vineyard, and nantucket, had adopted christianity and sworn off metacoms leadership and the to pay him tribute. They feared no reprisal from the sachem because they enjoyed english protection by virtue of their christianity. If all this was not enough, there were other issues. The english used land deeds. Some fair, some foul, to claim wampanoag territory for their exclusive use under their exclusive jurisdiction. This ran contrary to native expectation that there land sales merely conveyed permission for the english to settle among them. Under their customs, wampanoag customs. In other words, they expected english were buying into wampanoag society rather than buying the land out from wampanoag society. When indians resisted, colonists flooded the contest attracts tracts with lawsuits and slap any indians that entered the animals with trumped up fines and lawsuits to force hold out natives to reduce release their claims and resigned themselves to the english interpretation of the land sales. Such machinations give the colonists as metacom put it 100 times more land than now the came now the king, meaning himself, had for his people. To the wampanoags expanding english law was nothing more than a shakedown. By people with short memories and sin loyalty. The new islanders cautioned it would be suicidal for the wampanoags to result to arms because they said it would the english were too strong for them. Metacom retorted that the english should do to them, the wampanoags as they did to them. He called on the english to assume the role of the great man by acting with generosity, restraint, and justice toward the wampanoag little child. That is where the conversation ended because everybody knew it was futile. Days later metacom led a wampanoag force against nearby english towns prompting a war that would engulf the region and break the back of indigenous power in southern new england. This terrible conflict is the most basic feature of wampanoa s english relations that the thanksgiving myth studiously ignored. Initially, wampanoag got the best of it by repeatedly sacking english settlements and ambushing troops on the march. Furthermore, soon they had the support of a neighboring tribe in central massachusetts, the narragansett the narragansetts from what is now rhode island and tribes from the Connecticut River valley. The colonists turned them into enemies. The warring enemies indians took advantage of colonial missteps to take the lives of upwards of 3000 englishman, destroy 16 colonial towns, and slaughter 800 head of cattle. Eventually, however, the resistance collapsed. Largely, not entirely, but largely, because, other native people through in their lot with the english. Here, i want you to focus on this part of the map around the modernday border of massachusetts and new york. In february of 1676, the mohawks , the easternmost nation of the five nations iroquois people, as a gesture of alliance to the colony of new york drove metacoms winter cap away from dutch and french gun runners away from the hudson river and eastward into the teeth of colonial new england forces. So, they drive the winter camp this direction here. Also lying in wait among the english where the mohicans and the pequots of water now connecticut what are now connecticut and Christian Wampanoags from cape cod who under duress had sided with the colonies from the beginning and were just as adept in warfare as the resistance fighters. Meanwhile, the warring indians and their families were stocked by hunger and disease as they lived on the run away from their cornfields and fishing stations. Consequently, by the late spring of 1676, about one year into this war, growing numbers of them began to accept an english offer of quarter in exchange for switching sides. Others avoided this terrible choice by escaping to the upper Hudson River Valley or canada. Where they build new lives. But, most of them never made it that far. By june, 1676, indian prisoners were telling their english captors that metacom was ready to die, for you have now killed or taken all his relations, and almost broke his heart. There relations included his wife and their son. Colonists captured them and sold them into the horrors of caribbean saber slavery. They are but two of the estimated 2000 native people, men, women, and children alike with the english sentenced to slavery and sold through the atlantic world. Some of these poor souls have surrendered by starting with promises of mercy. Only to discover that the terms were harsher than colonial officials had pledged. Worse still, some surrounding their surrendering natives learned too late that colonial authorities would not spare any native person suspected of having taken in english life. Massachusetts, rhode island, and plymouth all held public executions throughout the summer of 1676, including 50 hangings on boston commons alone. That is something that this public space still has yet to acknowledge. The english even exacted retribution on the dead. On august 6, colonial forces discovered the drowned body of a female samoset a female sachem, war leader, and the sister of metacoms wife. Authorities ordered her head severed and piked next to a holding pen of wampanoag prisoners. The captives made a horrible and diabolical lamentation crying out that it was their queens head. If you days after this incident, metacom was dead too shut shot down by a Christian Indian that the english called alderman. Captain Benjamin Church had the sachem dismembered and his head sent to plymouth. There, on the very site where the samoset sachems father had allied and feasted with the pilgrims they mounted the head at the town gate and allowed it to rot. It is likely one of the very last things that metacoms wife saw when plymouth shipped her from her homeland into slavery. Later that week plymouth held a day of thanksgiving in praise of god for saving the colony from its enemies. Though history rarely plays attention to the wampanoags after king philips war, my book emphasizes that this conflict was just the first stage in a centuries long battle to defend their land and sovereignty. It to come as no surprise that the english seized nearly all of the wampanoags territory in the decades after the war leaving only a handful of townsized reservations for mostly Christian Indians. Less wellknown is that the english also seized the wampanoags as bound laborers. From the late 1600s through the early 1800s merchant creditors, courts, and government appointed guardians colluded to force the wampanoags and their children into indentured servitude to white farmers, householders, and whaling merchants. With the terms often lasting for several years and often decades. So many wampanoag children wound up as servants of the english that few could speak their ancestral language by the mid19th century. For such reasons and more, in 1836 william make this, a pequot , who served as a preacher to the Mashpee Wampanoags on cape cod road what he called a utility a eulogy to king philip where he proposed that massasoits welcome of the mayflower passengers was a grave mistake. Therefore, william avis contended that indians should treat every december 22, the anniversary of the pilgrims landing in plymouth, and every fourth of july as what he called, days of morning and not joint. Y. Let them rather fast and pray to the great spirit, the indian god, that deals out mercy to his red children and not destruction. Despite unyielding assaults on their communities, the wampanoags stubbornly persisted. Massachusetts addressed this in the late 1860s and early 1870s by dissolving the reservations of mashpee, herring pawn, gay head, chappaquiddick, christian town, and others. The state divided the common lands of these places into private poverty property tracts subject to confiscation for debt and unpaid taxes. It then declare the inhabitants to be fullfledged citizens, no longer indians. As if the two were antithetical. White officials refused to listen to the wampanoags that protested that this suppose it give citizenship was actually a trojan horse to rob them of their remaining land and force them to scatter. That was indeed the point. White proponents of the measure at their more honest moments admitted they considered the wampanoags to be too racially intermixed to be classified as indians any longer and it was the fate, the manifest destiny, of indians to vanish. Over the next century, White Americans did everything they could to make this a supposedly natural process occur. Including, reducing indians into romantic bit parts in the countrys history as exemplified by the thanksgiving myth. Let me emphasize here, and this will come as a surprise to most of you. Throughout the 17th, 18th and even 19th century, thanksgiving had no association whatsoever with pilgrims and indians. The link between the holiday and that history appears to date to 1841. When the reverend Alexander Young published a primary source account of the 1621 harvest feast hosted by Plymouth County with colony and attended by neighboring wampanoags. Here is the document and footnotes. As a historian, there are a few famous footnotes but this is one of them. It read this was the first thanksgiving, the Harvest Festival of new england. This primary source was widely read and over the next several years various authors artists and lecturers disseminated the ideas until americans especially in the northeast, took it for granted. Predictably, new englanders were the first to tout the pilgrims as National Founders and their dinner with indians as a template for thanksgiving. For the rest of the country to go along the nation first had to subjugate the tribes of the great plains and far west. Only then could white people stop vilifying indians as bloodthirsty savages and give them the nonthreatening role in the National Founding myth. The pilgrim saga also took hold because it had used in the National Culture wars. It is no coincidence that pilgrims emerged as Founding Fathers at a time of popular anxiety that the u. S. Was being overrun by immigrants. Especially catholics from ireland and germany. That were supposedly unappreciated of the countries democratic origins and values. Treating the pilgrims as the a bit of me of colonial america served to minimize the countrys legacy of racial oppression past and present. Better to highlight the pilgrims religious and democratic principles instead of the indian wars and slavery were difficult of colonies including plymouth. What i am saying here is that no americans today widely assumed that thanksgiving has been associated with pilgrims and indians six since 1621 area that was americans in the 19th century asserting control over indians, americans of color, and other american regions. This invention became tradition by the early 20th century and has remained so in no small part through american Schools Holding annual thanksgiving pageants in which the students dress up as pilgrims and indians to reenact the first thanksgiving. I myself remember participating in one such performance. I was cast as a tree. But in it we saying my country tis of thee, saying my country tis of the praising america as a sweet land of liberty and the pilgrims as my fathers. The point of this exercise was to have a Diverse Group of schoolchildren learn about who we as americans are. Or, at least two we are supposed to be. Even students from ethnic backgrounds would be instilled with the principles of representative government, liberty, and christianity, while learning to identify with english colonists as fellow white people. Leaving indians outside the category of my fathers also. Important lessons. It was another reminder also carried important lessons. It was another reminder about which race ran the country and whose values matters. By 1970, frank james, our second native revisionist historian, had reached the limits of his patients with this nonsense. James was born and raised in the community of oquendo gay head on marthas vineyard, long ranking among the poorest communities in massachusetts. Nevertheless, james grew up determined to succeed and represent his people. His inner drive carry him all the way to the new england conservatory where he studied trumpet. Then, to the regional schools on cape cod where he became director of music. Yet, his passion was political activism. And, the study of wampanoag history. He understood that knowing the past was critical to reforming the present. What he read in the primary sources made his blood boil. It bore little relation to the thanksgiving myth that weighed around his peoples neck like a millstone. So when james was invited to speak at a state banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of plymouths founding, he saw it as a rare opportunity to set the record straight. Yet, when he submitted a draft of his speech for review, white officials rejected it as too inflammatory. James, for his part, found an alternative script brought up by authorities to be so childish and untrue that he pulled out of the event altogether and instead arranged for a commemoration of his own in which there would be no sensors. Censorship. Inspired by the Red Power Movement for indigenous rights and Justice James organized a national day of mourning to be held on thanksgiving day 1970 at the site of the massasoit statue overlooking Plymouth Rock. In choosing which this name, james hearkened back to National Days of mourning hosted after the assassinations of john kennedy and Martin Luther king and reached back to the william avis eulogy on king philip. Like davis, when james moment came he grows up for protesters from all across indian country, media and onlookers, and deliver that inflammatory speech. It began with the poignant assertion that he has the right to the dignity of his humanity, despite societies effort to diminish him and his people. Ice i speak to you as a man, he stressed a wampanoa s man. Despite his family and community suffering, poverty, and this termination, two social and economic diseases, he acknowledged to his white listeners that thanksgiving is a time of celebration for you, celebrating the beginnings of the white man in america. For james and the wampanoags the day had dull full implications. It is with a heavy heart that i look back on what happened to my people. James proceeded to tell a history of english wampanoag relations that turned the traditional bedtime story of thanksgiving into a nightmare. His conclusion was that ousamequins welcome to the pilgrims was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the wampanoags welcomes you, the white man, with open arms little knowing that it was the beginning of the end and before 50 years would pass, the wampanoags would no longer be a free people. To james, like metacom, the moral of the first thanksgiving was that the english and their white successors betrayed the wampanoags that befriended them in their time of need. This message has echoed through subsequent National Days of morning that have taken place each thanksgiving and the very same place right up to this very day. As to the question of how to move forward, james answer is to confront the history, including the fact, as he put it that the wampanoags still walk the lands of massachusetts. James urged americans to consider native americans of worthy as the same respect as everyone else. Let us remember that the indian is and was as human as the white man. The indian feels pain, gets hurt, becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. If americans follow this counsel to extend their native country men and women basic compassion and acknowledgment, it would make thanksgiving day 1970 a new beginning towards what james called a more humane america. A more indian america. In which native people could regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours. There are so many reasons for americans to try to tell the history of plymouth and thanksgiving with threedimensional wampanoag people at the center. Thanksgiving is a focal point for considering the native american role in the nations past. It is bad enough to have gotten the story so wrong for so long. It is downright inexcusable. To continue the annual tradition of having teachers, politicians, and Television Producers traffic in the thanksgiving myth. And, Residential Homes and Shopping Centers export decorations of heavy pilgrims and indians. Happy pilgrims and indians. These practices dismiss native peoples very real historical dramas at white hands in favor of depicting their ancestors as consenting to colonialism. The call the consequences harmless is to ignore the chorus of native americans, our fellow americans, who say that the hurt is profound, particularly, for their children. In april pluralistic country, it is morally unacceptable to allow the celebration of a National Holiday to damage part of the nations people. Never mind the first people. Or, for that matter, all of the people. Whereas, the identity politics of marginalized groups tends to focus on achieving justice and equality, in the native american case, sovereignty, as well, white identity politics has always centered on oppressing others. There has been too little public reflection about how the thanksgiving myth teaches white proprietorship of the nation. Why should a schoolaged child with the name of say, silverman, identify more with the pilgrims than the indians . After all, such a student is unlikely to this and from either group. The descendants of both groups are silvermans fellow americans. If this student is taught to think of both the pilgrims and indians like a historian, more dispassionately as they instead of as we, it might be a step towards a more critical understanding of the past in which all of the actors can be seen as more fully human, with all of the virtues and shortcomings that one would expect to find in any population. At the same time, if the student is taught to think of both groups more inclusively, as we, aware of the associated risk of appropriation, that might be a step towards a more compassionate National Culture. If the public continues to associate pilgrim indian relations with thanksgiving, and i dont think we need to, the least we can do is try to get the story straight with wampanoag actors and perspectives that the center. Imagine if instead of trafficking in the mythical thanksgiving, we, as a country, reckoned with the story as told by massasoit metacom and frank james. I am not naive. I know the challenges are significant at many levels. A number of americans are not comfortable with the native american past. It turns to turn patriotic episodes inside out and heroes and villains. At least, into deeply flawed heroes. It loosens white claims on morality and authority. It raises political and cultural questions about justice. It threatens to tear down monuments and rename buildings. But, confronting this darkness also promises to shed light, cultivate national humility, and most importantly, i think, signaled native people that the country values signal to native people that the country values them as us. As one gracias wampanoags wampanoag elder once told me we do ourselves no good by talking hiding from the truth. I think she was talking about all of us. You certainly gave us active then we learned in grade school and one more grounded in the reality of what our history is. Weve got a series of questions from our audience and let me start with, one of our questioners suggested that perhaps james speech was analogous to Frederick Douglas speech on the fourth of july about what is the fourth of july to a slave. Would you like to comment on that . I dont know if frank james was aware of that speech. He very well might have been. Its a famous speech. I can tell you that when douglass delivered that oration it was in a broader, 19 sectary century reformist millionaire that included millieu that included the preacher to the wampanoags. They might have known each other. They certainly had some of the same contacts. I think there is a constellation of influences that were bearing on james speech and he might have hit on one of them. There is an enormous amount of overlap between reformers in the 19th century advocating for Indigenous People and reformers advocating for africanamerican people. Another question is, was this manufactured history, what was told in the residential schools . Where indians were supposed to be transformed into americans . What a terrific question. I think youve just hit on a topic for one of my next seniors who is looking for a thesis. Heres what i can tell you. There has been an increasing amount of research about the curriculum in these boarding schools and yes, suffice it to say, that curriculum was steeped in racial ideology about White Supremacy and degradation of native people. How thanksgiving came into play, i didnt even think to look there. Thats one of the great things about having q as like this is new material. What was the wampanoags concept of Land Ownership . We learned that indians had a different concept and had become more european. You talked about the loss of land. There is an urban legend that native people have no sense of Land Ownership. Thats not true. They are not wolves roaming the forest as the english would have styled it. Groups of people, communities and tribes understood fully where their territory began and ended and if you wanted to enter and use their territory you needed their permission. Within that territory, the people held the land communally. Certain families might grow their horticultural crops, corn beans and squash on the same tract of land every year but if they stopped growing those crops on that land, the land reverted to the community as a whole. As for fishing places, gathering places and hunting places, those along to everyone within the corporate group. The fundamental difference between european ways of Land Ownership and native american ways is that native people held land communally as a group whereas europeans held land privately. Fascinating. One of the questions we have is one of our listeners said that nasa sought massasoit was in the family tree and the question is when did the wampanoag indians and settlers start intermarrying . They almost never intermarried. Thats not to say they didnt have sex. There are plenty examples of that from the beginning. To my knowledge, there was only one case on record during the 17th and 18th centuries of a formal marriage taking place. And what is especially striking about that, and we cant say for certain whether it is just the english or the english and the whomp in august whose value wampanoags whose values are leading to that intermarriage. I suspect it is the english because native americans native people widely engaged in intermarriage with foreign allies for diplomatic relationships. What is striking about the lack of marriages between the groups is that a sizable percentage of lumpen dogs were wampanoags were christian. Religion was fundamental to these colonists identity but as soon as native people become christian, the standard for who is awesome and who is them who is us and who is them again to shift. I am a scholar of race as well as native america and one of the quite clear patterns in colonial history is that as Indigenous People and enslaved africans adopt christianity, the language of race, especially the identity of white begins to supersede the european identity of christian in the american context. Fascinating. With that, a short time so im going to give you sort of lightning rod questions. And one of them is, can you talk about the federal recognition of the wampanoag groups and when did that happen or did it happen . Right. I will try to make a complex Legal Process as concise as i possibly can. When massachusetts and other states of the original 13 states dissolved native American Communities on state authority, that was in violation of federal law. The trade and intercourse acts, there is three of them in the 1790s, gave the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over diplomacy with native people. So fastforward to the mid to late 20th century and native groups throughout the east began to sue the federal government saying these states had no right to dissolve our legal identities as tribes and take our land away. The ruling of the courts by and large was, thats exactly right. During the carter administration, the passive qualities of main got a massive settlement as the first in a string of settlements. The wampanoags followed in this train and they were the First Community to gain recognition. The mass asserts massasoits the court ruled they werent an actual indian tribe which to them was preposterous. That ruling eventually got overturned. They gained federal recognition and some of the lands were taken into trust by the federal government. The trump Departments Department of the interior tried to dissolve the reservation and i would be glad to discuss the politics. Congress overturned that act. You have two federally recognized wampanoag tribes. To what extent is the real history of the Plymouth Colony reflected in the restored story . Is there an attempt to tell the real story . As they try to make i would say this. Wampanoag people i know have a range of opinions on the thanksgiving holiday and on this history. On the one hand, thanksgiving is the one time a year where the Greater Public pays attention to them. They certainly appreciated, if they are also overwhelmed sometimes by that attention. At the same time, they feel the way White Americans have sanitized colonial history and ignored native american history. They feel that very deeply and are resentful about it. So they have very conflicting opinions about this. The history im telling lets be clear im not wampanoag and im not telling the history from a modern wampanoag perspective. I am telling it from a historians perspective. The powerful intertribal politics and sometimes through fullness of that and colonial relationships is sometimes as jarring to them as my depiction of collis colonists as say the mayflower descendants. All of us struggle with seeing our ancestors in threedimensional form because they were complex people who did good things and bad things and behaved in ways that might have been appropriate for the time, but are unfathomable to us. Thats a critical thats what critical history does. As a historian, its not my job to make people feel good about the past. Its not my job to make people feel patriotic or unpatriotic. It is only my job to capture a complex past in all of its complexity. A complex past and all of its complexity tends to upset people of all descriptions. We could continue these questions because we have so many, but we are up against our time and we want to remind people that this has been video recorded and it will be available so that people can go back and someone wanted to see your last slide. All of the slides are available in the recording and we hope you will share it with your friends and neighbors. We do this, we are honored to have nearly 200 people today with us live, but we want to share this with others because we are about telling the history. So heres the final question. And i think this is a really thoughtful question. One of our listeners said, in their family, thanksgiving is not so much a nationalistic holiday but a time to give thanks for the blessings that that family has and to recognize and what youve shared in the real story of thanksgiving. What kind of messages should people be sharing around the thanksgiving table that is respectful of the wampanoags . Heres what i would say. For over 200 years, White Americans celebrated thanksgiving without invoking pilgrims. So if we detach the myth from this wonderful ritual of getting together with family and friends and offering thanks for whats good in our lives, thats far more traditional than trafficking in this myth. Neither i nor for that matter Indigenous People i know are calling for a war on thanksgiving or to cancel thanksgiving. The message is if you are going to attach a story of pilgrims and wampanoags to the holiday, get the story straight but you dont have to attach the story to the holiday. They are two separate things so lets continue our thanksgiving traditions with families and friends, and leave this miss myth to the dustbin of 19th century and 20th century cultural history, where it belongs. Dr. Silverman, thank you for your time. Thank you for your contributions. We look forward to your continuing scholarship. As you said, you are looking at your next thing so we hope that we will be continuing to be in conversation with you