Charlene D’Avanzo: As a kid growing up in Massachusetts, I believed the Thanksgiving story taught in school – friendly Indians welcomed the Pilgrims, showed them how to live in the new land, enjoyed dinner with them, and left the picture.

 I was too young to recognize serious problems with this myth – that peaceful Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcomed Pilgrims to America, taught them how to live in this new place, sat down to dinner with them, and then disappeared.

The core idea of course is that “Indians” handed off America to white people who would then create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity, and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. That’s the story—it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. It is bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.

Some of the most poignant inaccuracies of this story:

History only begins for Native people when Europeans arrive. In truth the Americas had been populated for at least 12,00 years.

The arrival of the Mayflower was a first-contact episode. But when the Pilgrims arrived at least two and maybe more Wampanoags, spoke English, had already been to Europe and back, and knew the very organizers of the Pilgrims’ venture.

The Wampanoags reached out to the English in Plymouth not because they were friendly but rather because they were decimated by epidemic disease and desperate for help.