Around this time of year, we are all used to the classic question: What are we grateful for? This is an important question to bring up every year because it is important to be able to look at all of the great opportunities and things we have access to, and obviously the food is something to look forward to; however, the misrepresented history of the holiday portrays a certain set of America values that aren’t so wholesome.

We are told that Thanksgiving was a feast between the Native Americans and Pilgrims in celebration of their new alliance, but in reality, it was the Wampanoag Nation responding to the celebratory gunshots set off by the Pilgrims in excitement over their first harvest. There was much tension between the Native Americans and Pilgrims for the next couple of days that they were together and the feast was in no way an intended event. Even the food they ate was misconstrued. In reality, the food they had the best access to was muscles, lobsters, and eel.

Even though the misrepresented events that occurred on Thanksgiving Day weren’t hiding something terrible, only tension between the Natives and the newcomers, it’s important to wonder why historians and people of America have built this holiday up the way they did. If it is simply an exaggerated celebration of the closest the Native Americans and Europeans would ever come to peace then that just proves how horribly the groups got along, and as we’ve seen throughout other interactions during this time the Europeans tended to start and end all the scuffles for reasons in which their justification is hardly believable.