The Story of Thanksgiving and the National Day of Mourning

Ideas have been at least as important as law in the shift of status of indigenous Americans, for even the legal gains seem to be built on a foundation of changed imagination and rewritten history. Columbus Day became an occasion to rethink the past, and rethinking the past opened the way to a different future.

Thanksgiving has thus moved from history into the field of religion, “civil religion,” as Robert Bellah has called it. To Bellah, civil religions hold society together. Plymouth Rock achieved iconographic status around 1880, when some enterprising residents of the town rejoined its two pieces on the waterfront and built a Greek templet around it. T

In 1620 a group of English settlers, known today as the Pilgrims, arrived on the shores of North America. They’d been at sea for more than two months—an arduous voyage that killed two of their number.

Ideas have been at least as important as law in the shift of status of indigenous Americans, for even the legal gains seem to be built on a foundation of changed imagination and rewritten history. Columbus Day became an occasion to rethink the past, and rethinking the past opened the way to a different future.

In some ways the annual rehearsal of the Seminole Wars is analogous to the Confederate reenactments. In both, the population honors their foreparents who fought valiantly and lost but also won. Although the Seminole are an unconquered people, their land was stolen again and again. Their current economic victory hinges upon the sovereignty of Indian