"Serious, critical history tends to be hard on the living. It challenges us to see distortions embedded in the heroic national origin myths we have been taught since childhood." These words are how scholar of Native American, Colonial American and American racial history David J. Silverman begins This Land Is Their Land. It sets the stage for exactly what his book endeavors to do: confront the foundational American myth of Thanksgiving in time for the 400th anniversary of the "First Thanksgiving."
This text is an eye-opening account of an often ignored history--the real events that led up to what is taught broadly across the United States as the First Thanksgiving. By focusing on the Wampanoag people rather than Plymouth Colony's members and perspectives, Silverman, professor of history at George Washington University, brings forward the rationale for why some modern Native American people do not celebrate Thanksgiving but rather hold a Day of Mourning. Silverman explores the politics involving colonizers and the people who were there first, and gives an in-depth account of Wampanoag and other Indian histories, from contact and uneasy truces to the breaking of treaties and inflammation of further conflicts.
Thus, Silverman calls for contemporary Americans to revise this myth and to reconsider how the nation can better remember this history without continuing to silence people that still struggle with self-determination. This book serves as a much-needed challenge to the national origin myth of Thanksgiving. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer