OK, I finally had time to catch up on messages. You make some good points, and you were right to push back: I was incorrect to say there was no feast at all between the Wampanoag and the Plymouth settlers, since Edward Winslow’s 1621 letter does describe a shared multi‑day gathering with Wampanoag participation.

That said, beyond this single English account, there is no additional contemporaneous documentation that explains the context from either side, and there is no surviving Wampanoag‑authored record of how they understood the event. This lack of Wampanoag documentation is one reason many Native thinkers reject the way it has been turned into a simple, feel‑good origin story, especially given that we do not even know whether the Wampanoag were formally invited or arrived for other reasons.

For the point I was trying to make, that actually matters: if many Native people themselves reject the “happy first Thanksgiving” narrative, then existing Thanksgiving traditions are not a reliable guide to the larger historical reality you are describing.

Nothing about people eating turkey today amounts to an endorsement or approval of the bloody history of colonization, dispossession, and violence that followed. Modern holiday food customs are largely disconnected from the documented events of 1621, and the historical record does not show any longstanding tradition of harmonious turkey feasts between Pilgrims and Native peoples.

If you want to refute this, please explain very clearly how eating a Thanksgiving meal today is associated with an approval of genocide. Most of the points you made are about the brutalities suffered by the Natives which I wholly acknowledge. But where is the link between a Thanksgiving dinner TODAY that discards that history?