Myth-Making for the Taking (The Truth about Thanksgiving)

“A day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for our victories against the Pequots.” — John WinthropIn this powerful second episode, we breathe, check in, and then peel back one of America’s most enduring myths: Thanksgiving.Far from the grade-school story of friendship and feasting, the 1621 harvest gathering was a political alliance born out of crisis, a survival strategy for both the English colonizers and the Wampanoag Nation after the Great Dying (1616–1619) had already wiped out up to 90% of Indigenous peoples along the coast. We revisit what the feast actually looked like, who was present, and why no one at the time even called it “Thanksgiving.”From there, we confront the truth:The first day officially called “Thanksgiving” was declared in 1637 to celebrate the massacre of over 500 Pequot women, children, and elders at Mystic. Through excerpts from Edward Winslow, King James I, and modern historians, we explore how colonial violence replaced diplomacy, and how massacres became framed as divine blessings.We then dive into how the myth of Thanksgiving was built two centuries later. Writer Alexander Young’s 1841 footnote invented the idea of the “First Thanksgiving” to give the United States a wholesome origin story during an era of rising division, immigration, and slavery. As New England elites felt their cultural influence fading, they reached back and rebranded a harvest feast as a spiritual, peaceful, moral beginning for the nation.Today, that myth still functions as a form of national amnesia.In this episode, we ask:What myths are being created right now?What stories are being rewritten today to justify tomorrow’s atrocities?And what does it look like to build new social structures grounded in truth?Join us as we replace nostalgia with honesty and trace how Thanksgiving became less about gratitude, and more about making genocide look like destiny.