Thanksgiving (Has Always Been) in a Foreign Land -

This year will be my second Thanksgiving in Austria. I’ve never been the type of American who gets sentimental about the holiday; if anything, I usually have more criticism than affection for it. I find hosting a little party a fun way to bring my friends (decidedly not American) into a little piece of my home.

Last year, nineteen people from thirteen countries squeezed into my tiny Vienna apartment. Obviously, this represents quite the untraditional Thanksgiving, however, in my mission to make my friends “American for the night” (as warned in the invite), I did require everyone to make a hand-turkey upon entrance. For those who were spared elementary school in America, this requires tracing your hand on some colorful paper, cutting it out, and drawing a face on the thumb.

I also made it my goal to make the most American dish I could think of that would without a doubt disgust the Europeans: enter the sweet potato casserole. This classic thanksgiving dish features mashed sweet potatoes mixed with plenty of brown sugar, sour cream, and cream cheese, in a casserole all topped by a healthy layer of marshmallows, which melt down to form a gooey veneer on top of the potatoes. As I anticipated, this led to many critiques and grossed out faces, though I believe the consensus was that it wasn’t as bad as expected.

But underneath the fun, Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday for a lot of Americans. We were raised on a carefully sanitized story about pilgrims and Indians sharing a wholesome meal to mark a great partnership.

As a descendant of settlers in a colonized land, you grow up disconnected from real history.

You inherit a country that insists on forgetting—because remembering would mean acknowledging that the United States has a past older and deeper than us, and that its first chapters were written by peoples who survived genocide, not by pilgrims seeking religious freedom.

It feels more and more crucial in this moment of American history to call out this propaganda; to not allow Christian-nationalist narratives take over our fundamental collective understanding of our nation, where we came from, and where we need to go.

The Founding Myth

As a child, every year I would watch the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. The show tells the story of the Mayflower and the landing at Plymouth. The pilgrims are depicted as godly sojourners peacefully searching for religious freedom and the Indians, friendly people eager to welcome and aid the white man. Thus, in celebration of the bountiful harvest and partnership between English and Indian, they hold the first Thanksgiving.

This story outlines the common understanding most Americans have been taught about the foundation of our country. From the time of the Plymouth landing, a narrative of divine providence has been intimately tied to the birth of the United States. Hidden beneath layers of national story telling, the true history of the carnage and devastation wrought by white settlement is largely ignored. However, this national amnesia did not occur by mistake, but was the result of a carefully-crafted narrative that has ruled American consciousness for centuries.

Divine providence and religious-like fervor surrounding the nation, its democracy and its founding has long overshadowed any wide-spread acknowledgement of the death that followed European discovery of the New World. From the beginning, the settlers at Plymouth saw their settling of the land as part of God’s plan; their deity had cleared the way for them by diminishing Wampanoag populations through disease and bringing the Indians to them as allies.

Throughout a letter to a friend back in Europe, a member of the Mayflower voyage, Edward Winslow, included multiple references to this providence. He praised God for the bountiful crops, grown in “the manner of Indians” and for the “fear” that the Indians hold of the settlers. This narrative was convenient for multiple reasons: not only did it justify the fact that upon landing, the settlers had ravaged Indian burial grounds, food storage and homes, stole their land, and killed their people, but it put forth a story of peace and prosperity that would help to attract more settlers.

The first Thanksgiving was in fact not a gleeful celebration of a bountiful harvest, but a tool used to placate those back home and to maintain a delicate political alliance with the Wampanoag.

Lincoln’s Thanksgiving

It’s worth remembering that Thanksgiving wasn’t even a national holiday until Abraham Lincoln declared it one in 1863—right in the middle of the Civil War, when the country was literally tearing itself apart. Lincoln’s proclamation framed the holiday as a moment of healing, a chance to imagine a nation that could someday reunite.

But even this gesture carried a kind of convenient amnesia: he invited Americans to give thanks for national abundance while avoiding any mention of whose land that abundance was built on, or who was being excluded from this imagined unity. Thanksgiving was formalized not as a celebration of our origins, but as a political tool—an attempt to create a shared story at a moment when the country no longer had one.

The 20th-Century Myth Machine

By 1920, the myth was fully institutionalized. At the 300th anniversary of the Plymouth landing, then Vice-President elect, Calvin Coolidge, gave a speech entitled “The Pilgrim,” espousing much of the same falsehoods outlined in Winslow’s letter. He stated that it was on the backs of the “pilgrims,” not Indians, that an “empire” was formed, asserting that the history of the United States started at the Plymouth landing. Coolidge went on to reinforce the religious ideology tied to the story of Plymouth, calling “their landing-place a shrine.”

The national religion of the United States, with Plymouth as its holy land and the pilgrims as its redeemers, smoothly glides over the violence born in the founding of our country. In fact, Coolidge did not once mention the word Indian in his speech. Under the weight of three hundred years of history, Coolidge needed to legitimize all the violence that was undertaken in the name of freedom for a select few.

It wasn’t until the Civil Rights era that this narrative began to unravel. As the country awakened to the centuries of mistreatment of minority populations, American Indian activists began proclaiming their presence and political potence. When invited to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Plymouth landing in 1970, Wamsutta Frank B. James drafted a speech denouncing the Thanksgiving myth. In it, he outlined the landing at Plymouth through the eyes of the Wampanoag. In his telling, Plymouth did not mark the beginning of the nation, but a downfall of a people. In fact, James stated that the welcoming of the English settlers by the Wampanoag people represented their “biggest mistake.”

In the Thanksgiving myth, the Indians befriended the settlers because they were friendly and harmless. For James and other Indians, this was a strategic choice by a leader facing many challenges that eventually led to the destruction of his peoples’ way of life.

Throughout his speech, James spoke not in the language of providence and religion, but in the language of war. For Indians, the founding story involves the brutal dismantling of their peoples’ land and way of life by invading forces.

And Now

It is difficult to reconcile the American history taught in textbooks and speeches as a history of settlement and war; to understand the gravity of the nations, people, languages, and cultures lost in the landing of white settlers in America. Americans are taught that the “pilgrims” are their forebearers and that the country they established began at the landing at Plymouth.

However, it is impossible to understand American identity if there is a lack of knowledge of Native Americans. Americans today call cities, landmarks, sports teams by Indian names yet there is an utter misunderstanding of who they were and are. Each year Thanksgiving is celebrated without a thought to the pain that underlines each joy in the memory of the Plymouth Plantation.

I’d like to believe we’ve moved beyond these myths, but recent years have shown how deeply they remain embedded in the national imagination. The rise of Trumpism has only intensified a return to a purified origin story — one that centers pilgrims, pioneers, and divine purpose while leaving out the people whose land was taken and whose histories were erased.

This nostalgia for an uncomplicated American past actively sidelines Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and the realities of ongoing violence. In many ways, we are watching the same old narrative reassert itself, simply updated for a new political moment.

Celebrating Abroad

Living abroad through all of this has made the holiday feel even stranger. On October 18, more than seven million Americans marched against Trump in the No Kings protests. I marched in Vienna to try to feel like I can do my small part even from abroad. There’s a surreal split-screen feeling to watching your country unravel from somewhere that feels stable — not to say things are perfect in Austria, however, healthcare is still affordable, education isn’t a luxury, and people aren’t waking up terrified about their basic rights.

The experience of an American in this moment is one of bouncing between dread and determination. And life still moves forward — classes, work, grocery shopping, and figuring out how to seat sixteen people in my apartment for this year’s Thanksgiving.

So why celebrate at all? Honestly, because the day gives me a moment to hold all of this together: the violence of the history I inherited, the opportunities my country has given me, the fear I feel watching it spiral, and the stubborn hope I have that it can still become something better.