​For “Thanksgiving Day”, we are treated to Norman Rockwell paintings of Pilgrims sharing their harvest with Native Americans, and grandparents serving turkey at a family dinner. However, the article Thanksgiving Dinner: History Designed It says​

there was no original Thanksgiving.​ “It’s a nice myth that was created in 1841.” Lincoln created the holiday in 1863 to unify the country during the Civil War.​​​

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The Real Story of Thanksgiving tells a much more brutal story that helps explain why some Native people mark “Thanksgiving Day” as a “​​Day of Mourning​​​​​​​​​”.

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​The True Story Of Thanksgiving by Richard Greener explains:

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"​​The idea of the American Thanksgiving is a fairly recent fiction. nice myth that was created in 1841. The idyllic partnership of 17th Century European Pilgrims and New England Indians sharing a celebratory meal appears to be less than 120 years old. And it was only after the First World War that a version of such a Puritan-Indian partnership took hold in elementary schools across the American landscape.

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We can thank the invention of textbooks and their mass purchase by public schools for embedding this "Thanksgiving" image in our modern minds. It was, of course, a complete invention, a cleverly-created slice of cultural propaganda, just another in a long line of inspired nationalistic myths.​​​​​​

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The first Thanksgiving Day did occur in the year 1637, but it was nothing like our Thanksgiving today. On that day, the Massachusetts Colony Governor, John Winthrop, proclaimed such a "Thanksgiving" to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily-armed hunters, all colonial vounteers. They had just returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they massacred 700 Pequot Indians. Seven hundred Indians -- men, women, and children -- all lmurdered.  

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This is still remembered today, 373 years later. No, it's been long forgotten by white people, by European Christians. But it is still fresh in the mind of many Indians. A group calling themselves the United American Indians of New England meet each year at Plymouth Rock on Cole's Hill for what they say is a Day of Mourning. They gather at the feet of a stature of Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag to remember the long gone Pequot.​​​​

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Did the Pilgrims share their Thanksgiving meal with the local Indians, the Wampanoag and Pequot? No. That never happened. That is, until its inclusion in the "Thanksgiving Story" in 1890​​."

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