American Colonial Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving, as it is celebrated in the United States, is a collective exercise in historical delusion. We are told a warm and fuzzy myth about Pilgrims and Indigenous people sharing a big meal in peace, but the truth is soaked in violence, genocide, and land theft. The “first Thanksgiving” story we are taught in grade school was fabricated in the 19th century to sanctify colonial conquest and national unity at a time when the U.S. was expanding westward, exterminating Native peoples, and tightening the chains of slavery. To sit at the table and pretend it was ever about friendship is to participate in a collective lie that masks centuries of oppression. Thanksgiving, in its current mythologized form, is an insult to truth, to Indigenous survival, and to any honest telling of history.
Yet, like many American institutions, the holiday itself has stranger, messier, more complicated roots than we are taught. Few remember that Thanksgiving was formally established as a national holiday during the Civil War, largely through the tireless advocacy of Sarah Josepha Hale. A holiday we associate with the lie of colonial harmony actually has deeper ties to the work of women reformers, abolitionists, and peace advocates, who imagined national rituals of gratitude as a way to heal a divided society.
If we strip away the colonial propaganda, we might find something worth redeeming. Imagine a Thanksgiving not built on Pilgrim mythology, but on multifaith and multicultural practices of gratitude. A day not to erase history, but to face it with honesty, beginning with recognition of Native sovereignty and reparations. A holiday that lifts up the universal human traditions of harvest festivals, ancestral remembrance, and communal feasting—traditions that belong to Indigenous peoples, to Africans, to Asians, to Europeans, to everyone. We could transform Thanksgiving into a spiritual commons, a day where Unitarian Universalists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Humanists, and Indigenous nations alike bring their rituals of thanks, grief, and renewal.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to honor the inherent worth and dignity of every person—and that means refusing to celebrate falsehoods built on genocide. Our principles demand that we seek justice, equity, and compassion in human relations—and that requires naming the violence hidden in Thanksgiving’s myth. Our covenant with the interdependent web of existence invites us to live in gratitude for Earth and all beings, not in denial of the harm done to them. As UUs, we are called to reimagine traditions, to resist the idolatry of nationalism, and to create new rituals of truth-telling, healing, and shared abundance
In that sense, Thanksgiving could become not a nationalist myth but a revolutionary act of gratitude. Not gratitude for conquest, but gratitude for survival. Not gratitude for empire, but gratitude for resistance, resilience, and solidarity. It could be a time to honor Earth and all beings, to recommit ourselves to dismantling the systems of exploitation that still desecrate the land. It could become what Sarah Hale dreamed of—an annual space of moral reflection—but stripped of its false piety and infused instead with radical honesty and diversity. A Thanksgiving worth keeping would be one where we give thanks not for a fantasy past, but for the courage to build a future rooted in justice, abundance, and shared belonging.
Gregory Stevens, October 2025