This is an abridged version of an article first published on the back page of the November 25, 2009 issue of CHALLENGE, updated with current examples.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is sold as a holiday of family, food and gratitude. But the story taught to schoolchildren across the country is a racist, patriotic lie that buries the genocide of millions of Indigenous people.

Colonial Puritans held days of thanksgiving to thank god for the slaughter of Indigenous peoples by sword and disease. There were many such bloody thanksgivings. Indigenous workers have since endured more than 1,500 wars, stolen land, broken treaties, repression, and confinement on racist reservations (Equal Justice Initiative, 09/20/2019). Today surviving indigenous workers face high rates of unemployment, suicide, drug addiction and alcoholism, the wreckage capitalism leaves behind.

In May 1637, colonial militias from Connecticut and Massachusetts, aided by Mohegan and Narragansett allies, surrounded a fortified Pequot village at Mystic and set it ablaze before dawn. John Mason and John Underhill, who took part, wrote their own accounts of the attack. Historians estimate the dead at anywhere from several hundred to 700, mostly women, children and elders. Within weeks, the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a day of thanksgiving for its victory over the Pequot.

That is the truth the bosses want buried, and exposing it helps us expose their other lies. The Progressive Labor Party aims to smash their grip on our minds so we can build a fighting, mass, antiracist communist movement that ends their sexist, racist and genocidal system for good. The roots run deep. The colonization of the Americas helped birth capitalism, which could not have existed without the genocide, enslavement and displacement of workers around the world. Imperialism—capitalism in its most developed, competitive form—still feeds on all three.

In Gaza, Palestinians are being slaughtered by Israeli forces armed and backed by the U.S. An analysis of 60,199 recorded deaths through July 31, 2025 calculated that more than 3.08 million years of human life have been stolen, an average of 51 years from each person killed, including over a million years stolen from children under 15 (The Lancet, 11/15/2025). In Sudan, about 14 million people have been forced to flee since 2023, the world’s largest displacement crisis (UN, 11/6/2026) in a war fueled by imperialist jockeying among the U.S., China and Russia and their junior partners, the UAE, Turkey, Iran and Egypt (Euronews, 01/22/2025). In the Amazon, oil, mining and big agriculture are killing Indigenous peoples and driving them off their land (Genocide Watch, 10/18).

As the crisis of capitalism deepens and the U.S. bosses struggle to keep their sinking empire afloat, they will need to build fascism. They are divided over how. A major fight is how to balance their war plans with their grip on workers’ minds, through nationalism and patriotism, and it starts with what our youth learn in school, which has become a battleground for the U.S. rulers.

The Trump MAGA wing, the domestic-capital wing of U.S. gutter racists, prefers cheap racism. It wants to erase the history of colonialism, genocide and slavery by attacking universities and schools over DEI. Trump’s January 2025 order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” prioritizes “patriotic education (National Archives, Executive office of the President, 01/29/2025),” and his March 2025 order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” directs the Smithsonian to remove exhibits deemed to contain “improper ideology” (NPR 03/27/2025). The liberal finance-capital wing, the Big Fascists, promotes a different history, built on decolonial theory, intersectionality, critical race theory and feminism, that separates antiracist and antisexist history from class struggle and working-class history, and that promotes anti-communism. As both wings distort and whitewash the past, our job as communists is to arm the working class with real history and the truth.

The truth about the “first” Thanksgiving

The “first” Thanksgiving dinner between “pilgrims” and “Indians,” reenacted by the ruling class in schools and TV specials, was a 1621 harvest gathering at Plymouth between about 50 surviving English colonists and the Wampanoag, a confederation of Native groups based mainly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Half the colonists had died of disease and hunger.

The colonists did not share their food with the Wampanoag; they had too little to share. Edward Winslow, who was there, wrote that the Wampanoag leader Massasoit arrived with about 90 men, and that his people brought five deer. Historians note that the colonists never called it a thanksgiving.

Without Squanto and Samoset, the colonists might not have survived. Squanto, a Patuxet man, was kidnapped in 1614 and taken to Europe, where he learned English. When he returned in 1619, he found indigenous peoples devastated by plague. He and Samoset, an Abenaki sachem from Maine, taught the colonists to fish, hunt and grow crops. The Pilgrims, religious separatists who shared the Puritans’ belief that they were god’s “chosen” people, saw Squanto as “god’s instrument” and the Wampanoag as “heathens.”

Diseases spread by colonizers, killed up to 90 percent of some Wampanoag communities in the years before Plymouth. The Puritans, like the Spanish, French and English occupiers, believed that “god” cleared the Indigenous workers out of the Americas for colonial settlement. Christianity, religion that endorsed genocide and slavery, backed them up.

In 1675 the Wampanoag leader Metacom, Massasoit’s son, led a war to stop the colonists’ land grab. In 1676 colonial forces murdered him and then decapitated him. As historian Jill Lepore documents, his head was displayed at Plymouth for two decades, and the minister Increase Mather read it as god’s gift. The colonies proclaimed days of thanksgiving for the victory. The colonists did not wipe out the Wampanoag. They still live in New England, and each Thanksgiving they gather at Plymouth for the National Day of Mourning.

Bosses still lying about “Thanksgiving”

The ruling class has spent centuries whitewashing this story. Amidst the disarray and turmoil of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln had declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, and his proclamation mentioned neither the Pilgrims nor the Wampanoag. Less than a year earlier, on December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were lynched in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass execution in U.S. history, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.

Teaching lies about “generous” Puritans props up today’s racist, patriotic lies about democracy. The bosses want us to believe in the government’s good intentions while they use state power to strip away workers’ few gains. But none of those gains were graciously handed down by the successors of the Puritans. Workers won them with militant strikes, demonstrations and, at times, guns.

And much like the Native Americans cut down by early capitalists, workers across the Middle East, Africa and Asia have been slaughtered in the bosses’ “war on terror.” An estimated 906,000 to 937,000 people have been killed directly in the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. Add deaths from hunger, disease and bombed-out hospitals and water systems, and the toll climbs to at least 4.5 million (Costs of War Project, Brown University, May 2023). Untold millions more have died from war and imperialist sanctions. Then and now, the capitalists’ motive is competition for profit. It is the capitalists, with their genocidal wars, who are the savages, not workers.

As workers in the U.S. gather for Thanksgiving, Progressive Labor Party gives thanks to everyone around the world committed to smashing the bosses’ racist, sexist and genocidal system. We invite the international multiracial working class to join PLP and fight for a world free of racism, genocide and imperialist war: communism, where future generations can one day feast without the capitalists’ exploitation and lies.

Sources: 

“The Hidden History of Massachusetts: A Guide for Black Folks,” http://www.danielnpaul.com/TheRealThanksgiving.html
“Are You Teaching the Real Story of the ‘First Thanksgiving’?” http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr040.shtml
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
Chuck Larsen, “Teaching About Thanksgiving: An Introduction” and “The Plymouth Thanksgiving Story”
Edward Winslow, 1621 letter, in Mourt’s Relation
John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War, and John Underhill, News from America
Jill Lepore, The Name of War
Minnesota Historical Society, U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 materials

Reservations: U.S. concentration camps

Indigenous workers in the U.S. who survived the bosses’ wars and diseases were forced into concentration camps, also known as reservations, on the worst, least irrigable land. Today, racism against indigenous workers remains extreme. In 2024, the median household income for indigenous and Alaskan households was $62,420, nearly 23% below the U.S. median of $80,734 (HHS Office of Minority Health, 2024 American Community Survey). U.S. Indigenous households live in poverty at twice the rate of the general population, 20.9% versus 10% (Economic Policy Institute, 2025).

The racist oppression of indigenous workers is also written into health statistics. In 2023, the alcohol-induced death rate was 61.5 per 100,000, nearly five times the national rate of 12.6, and their drug overdose death rate, 65.0 per 100,000, was the highest of any group (Trust for America’s Health, May 28, 2025). A Lancet study found that midlife deaths among indigenous workers rose about 30% while deaths among white workers rose 9%, and that the gap has only widened since (NPR, February 1, 2023).

A worker on an Arizona reservation reported to CHALLENGE that Homeland Security harasses and attacks workers on reservations, much like police brutalize Black and Latin workers in neighborhoods forced into racist neglect. Not until 2005 did Massachusetts repeal a law, on the books since 1675, banning indigenous workers from entering Boston. It was passed in the year war was raging between the colonists and the Wampanoag (Massachusetts Acts of 2005, ch. 25, May 20, 2005).