Climate Corner: Gratitude, truth and a warming world Reclaiming the real story of Thanksgiving – and what it teaches us about living in balance with the Earth

Nov 15, 2025

Jean Ambrose

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

This time of year brings with it one of America’s most enduring stories — one we tell ourselves to feel better. The story of the “First Thanksgiving,” as many of us learned in school, is false in nearly every detail. The myth tells of colonists and Native Americans meeting peacefully to share a meal. The truth is far more complex — and far more painful.

Oral histories place the Wampanoag and other Native nations of the northeastern coast in their homelands for thousands of years. Archaeological evidence confirms that the Wampanoag have lived in the region for at least 12,000 years. Imagine belonging to a place so deeply that the land, the water, and the air are part of who you are. Native peoples have long understood themselves not as conquerors of nature but as part of it, living in balance with the world around them.

Giving thanks has always been a central practice among Indigenous peoples. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) open gatherings with the Thanksgiving Address — Greetings to the Natural World, a message of gratitude that honors all parts of life. It begins, “Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things.”

For thousands of years before the English arrived, the Wampanoag held harvest ceremonies expressing gratitude to the Creator and the land. Their thanksgivings were daily, seasonal, and deeply tied to the rhythms of the earth. Indigenous agricultural practices — such as planting corn, beans, and squash together, known as “the Three Sisters” — reflected a philosophy of interdependence among all living things.

European exploration began as early as 1000 AD but intensified in the 1500s and 1600s with explorers like Verrazzano, Champlain, and John Smith. Traders, fishermen, and slavers soon followed. Native people were kidnapped and taken to Europe — sometimes as curiosities, sometimes as slaves. Some who returned warned their communities of European intentions. In 1607, the Abenaki tribe successfully boycotted the short-lived English colony at Popham, Maine, leading to its collapse.

By 1616, epidemics brought by traders had swept through Native communities along the coast. Nearly three-quarters of the Wampanoag population perished. When English settlers landed on Wampanoag territory in 1620, they established Plymouth Colony on the empty village of Patuxet — a place abandoned after disease had killed nearly everyone. The Wampanoag leader Ousamequin (known to the English as Massasoit), facing enormous loss, sought an alliance with the newcomers. A treaty of mutual protection was signed. The Wampanoag shared their planting, hunting and fishing knowledge.

The following year, the colonists held a three-day first harvest celebration. Part of the festivities included shooting guns into the air. When the Wampanoag heard the gunfire, they thought their allies might be under attack. Ousamequin led ninety men to Plymouth to investigate — not because they had been invited, as the national myth suggests. Once there, the Wampanoag gifted five deer to the colonists and joined in the feasting.

In the years that followed, thousands of settlers arrived. English colonies expanded rapidly, using deeds and legal documents to claim land that Indigenous peoples had inhabited and stewarded for millennia. Settlements destroyed forests, blocked access to hunting and fishing grounds, and disrupted traditional food gathering. Within fifty years, the fragile peace was gone, and the Wampanoag — once the region’s powerful protectors — were no longer a free people.

Without the help of the Native nations they encountered, the Pilgrims would not have survived their first years. Yet the alliance soon gave way to centuries of violence, displacement, and genocide. For many Native Americans today, Thanksgiving is not a celebration — it is a National Day of Mourning.

One Wampanoag descendant reflected: “Even before the Pilgrims landed, explorers captured Indians and sold them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored Cape Cod before they robbed the graves of my ancestors and stole their corn and beans.

Massasoit, our great sachem, knew these facts, yet he and his people welcomed and befriended the settlers. Perhaps he did this because his tribe had been depleted by disease, or perhaps he knew the harsh winter ahead. But that act of friendship was our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you — not knowing it was the beginning of the end.”

The true story of Thanksgiving reminds us how much we have to learn from Indigenous values of reciprocity, gratitude, and care for the Earth. Those teachings are more urgent now than ever.

We are living through another kind of crisis — not of colonization alone, but of domination over the natural world. Climate change, driven by centuries of extraction and exploitation, now threatens the same balance Indigenous peoples have long sought to preserve. Rising seas, droughts, storms, and wildfires are reshaping the Earth. The climate crisis continues the same worldview that saw the Earth as something to own rather than something to belong to.

Indigenous wisdom offers a different path — one rooted in respect, humility, and reciprocity. The lessons that sustained the Wampanoag for millennia — gratitude for what the Earth provides, and the understanding that every gift demands responsibility — are precisely the values we need to heal our relationship with the planet.

As we gather around our tables this Thanksgiving, perhaps we can tell a truer story — one that honors both gratitude and grief, and our shared duty to live, as the Thanksgiving Address reminds us, “in balance and harmony with each other and all living things.”

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Jean Ambrose is grateful to be able to share her voice.