Every culture needs stories. Here's one we tell: In 1620, a persecuted group of Christians known as the Pilgrims fled England in search of religious freedom. After a brief sojourn in the Netherlands, they sailed to North America. They landed at Plymouth Rock and worked hard to make a new life.
Their first winter in America proved deadly. Some colonists perished, but, fortunately, generous Native Americans brought the Pilgrims food and taught them to adapt to the new land. As a consequence, most of the colonists survived.
The next year, when they finally celebrated their first harvest, the Pilgrims held a feast and invited their Indian friends. The grateful colonists gave thanks to God for their bounty -- and voila! -- the first Thanksgiving.
We all know that this narrative strays a bit from the truth. The Pilgrims were not warm and loving freedom seekers. They were intolerant people. They could not abide religious pluralism -- that's one of the reasons they left England -- and once they arrived in New World they were eager to rid themselves of the very neighbors who helped them.
Yet although a few Americans now insist on celebrating Indigenous People Day instead of Thanksgiving, the historical truth seldom interferes with our modern holiday. Nor should it. The truth is beside the point.
We don't celebrate the Pilgrims; we celebrate the story. The story of the first Thanksgiving is our country's creation myth. We tell this story now to explain how we became the people who value what we supposedly value: freedom, community, generosity and, in the 21st century version of the tale, ethnic diversity.
The value of the traditional Thanksgiving myth becomes particularly apparent when we try to come up with an alternative, more historically accurate creation story.
Imagine, for instance, if we tried to use the story of Jamestown. Not the Jamestown of Pocahontas and John Smith (that's another myth, for another essay), but the Jamestown of the starving time. Jamestown was founded in 1607 and, much like the Pilgrims, the first colonists struggled to adapt to their new environment.
Unlike the Pilgrims, however, the Jamestown colonists came to these shores not for religious reasons but financial ones. They came to make their fortunes, and they hoped that England's America would be like Spain's America. They wanted a lot of gold and silver and a lot of easily exploitable labor. They found none.
