How does thanksgiving start

But windy conditions forced the group to cut their trip short and settle at what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts. As the Puritans prepared for winter, they gathered anything they could find, including Wampanoag supplies. One day, Samoset, a leader of the Abenaki people, and Tisquantum better known as Squanto visited the settlers.

Squanto was a Wampanoag who had experience with other settlers and knew English. Squanto helped the settlers grow corn and use fish to fertilize their fields. After several meetings, a formal agreement was made between the settlers and the native people, and in March , they joined together to protect each other from other tribes.

One day that fall, four settlers were sent to hunt for food for a harvest celebration. The Wampanoag heard gunshots and alerted their leader, Massasoit, who thought the English might be preparing for war.

Massasoit visited the English settlement with 90 of his men to see if the war rumor was true. Soon after their visit, the Native Americans realized that the English were only hunting for the harvest celebration. Massasoit sent some of his own men to hunt deer for the feast and for three days, the English and native men, women, and children ate together.

The meal consisted of deer, corn, shellfish, and roasted meat, different from today's traditional Thanksgiving feast. They played ball games, sang, and danced. The English also had a long tradition of thanksgiving.

They declared days of prayer to thank God when something good happened. For example, the English declared a day of thanksgiving in the summer of when a gentle rain ended a long drought. Likewise, in the fall of , when their labors were rewarded with a bountiful harvest after a year of sickness and scarcity, the Pilgrims gave thanks to God. They also celebrated their bounty with a tradition called the Harvest Home. During the celebration, Massasoit, an important sachem leader of the Wampanoag People, along with 90 of his men, joined the English for three days of entertainment and feasting.

And so, when Europeans come to the Americas and they buy land from the Wampanoags, the Wampanoags initially assume the English are buying into Wampanoag country, not that they're buying Wampanoag country out from under their feet. Imagine a flotilla of Wampanoag canoes crosses the Atlantic and goes to England, and then the Wampanoags buy land from the English there. No, that's ridiculous. But that's precisely what the English were assuming on this side of the Atlantic.

From the very beginning, a sizable number of Wampanoags disagreed with Ousamequin's decision to reach out to [the English] and tried to undermine the alliance. Ousamequin puts down multiple plots to wipe out the colony and unseat him. They've been raiding our coast for decades, enslaving our people, carrying them off to unknown fates and they can't be trusted. When the English arrived, they entered a multilateral Indian political world in which the internal politics of the Wampanoag tribe and the intertribal politics of the Wampanoag tribe were paramount.

To the degree the Wampanoags dealt with the English, it was to adjust the power dynamics of Indian country. Why was that? The politics of Indian country are more important to native people than their differences with colonists.

Native people didn't conceive of themselves as Indians—that's an identity that they have had to learn through their shared struggles with colleagues. And it takes a long time—they have been here for 12, plus years, and there are a lot of differences between them.

Their focus is on their own people, not on the shared interests of Indians and very often, what's in the best interest of their own people is cutting deals with colonial powers with an eye towards combating their native rivals. The main difference has to do with King Philip's War. The question is whether native people, led by Metacomet, or Philip as the English call him, were plotting a multi-tribal uprising against the English. I think they were. Some of my historian colleagues think it's a figment of paranoid English imagination.

But I see a lot of warning signals building during the s and 70s from Englishmen who lived cheek-by-jowl with Wampanoag people and were terrified of what they were seeing on the ground. I see a pattern of political meetings between native leaders who hated each other.

And yet, they were getting together over and over and over again—it all adds up to me. There's this tendency to see the English as the devils in all of this. And regardless of that, I think the evidence shows that native people had reached their limit and recognize that if they didn't rise up immediately, they were going to become landless subordinates to English authority.