GONZALEZ: Hey everybody, I’m Ana

NUNES: And I’m Alex. You’re listening to a very special Thanksgiving episode of Mosaic. 

GONZALEZ: Happy Thanksgiving, Alex!

NUNES: Happy Thanksgiving, Ana. 

GONZALEZ: Thanksgiving is a really complex holiday. It’s more than a meal: it’s a representation of America’s past and present. And it’s deeply connected to our country’s history of immigration.

NUNES: You know an interesting thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s such an American holiday, but immigrants who come here don’t really have any idea what it’s all about.

GONZALEZ: Right, that was really apparent when I talked to one of our favorite refugee families at their new home in North Providence.

You might remember the Mulilikwa family from Episode 11. They’re a family of eight kids and a single mom, Pichuna, who arrived in Providence last May from Burundi, where they had been living as refugees for 18 years. 

Their Armenian godfather and former landlord, Manoog, is standing in the kitchen by a simmering pot. 

MANOOG: These are egg noodles. And I browned them in the oven, and you can brown them with butter. In here is chicken broth and butter. So, I’m gonna add the egg noodles in there. And, I’m gonna add rice. 

GONZALEZ: Is this Armenian, too?

MANOOG: Oh yeah

GONZALEZ: With the egg noodles? 

MANOOG: Mhmm.

GONZALEZ: Would you cook this for Thanksgiving normally?

MANOOG: Oh yeah. We do our Armenian touch to Thanksgiving.

GONZALEZ: There’s a turkey in the oven. And over on the kitchen table, Pichuna and her 2 oldest boys, Clement and Armand, are making Armenian pastries based on Manoog’s recipe. 

GONZALEZ: And what’s it called again? What are they making?

MANOOG: Choreg. It’s an Armenian sweet bread.

GONZALEZ: Pichuna is rolling the dough and spinning it into circles while Armand puts an egg wash on the rolls and sprinkles them with sesame seeds. I ask Clement about how they used to celebrate holidays back when they were living as refugees in Burundi.

CLEMENT: The difference I can say in America and where I’m from: in America when you do the party, you do for the family only. But in Africa when you do the party, it’s for everybody. The neighborhood, the friends, the family, the friends of the church. Everybody. 

GONZALEZ: And did you know about Thanksgiving, like did you understand?

CLEMENT: I never know. 

ANA: You never know?

CLEMENT: Never. Because in Africa, we celebrate Christmas and the Happy New Year’s only.

GONZALEZ: So, last year, your first year.

CLEMENT: My first year, yeah.

GONZALEZ: Do you remember Thanksgiving? Did you celebrate last year at all?

CLEMENT: For last year? No. But I don’t know what it mean, the Thanksgiving. But I celebrate something I don’t know. [Laughs]

GONZALEZ: And I realize, in this moment, that I don’t know that much about Thanksgiving. 

NUNES: You mean beyond the Pilgrims and the Indians? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, what really happened at that first Thanksgiving? Was it really this peaceful, beautiful meal shared by English colonists and indigenous peoples?

NUNES: The short answer is yes. It’s 1621 in Plymouth colony. The English have just made it through their first year living in this new land with help from the Wampanoag people. And they have a huge harvest. So, they celebrate with what would become the first Thanksgiving.

GONZALEZ: And there’s a really famous firsthand account of this in a book called Mourt’s Relation, written in 1622 by Edward Winslow, a Mayflower passenger and Plymouth colonist. 

NUNES: Winslow says, “…our harvest being gotten in, our Governour sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours…”

GONZALEZ: So, the English at Plymouth are celebrating their first good harvest in their new colony. They eat fowl. We don’t know which kind, probably turkey. And corn and honey. They start to exercise their arms before the feast when the Wampanoag sachem, Massasoit, comes with 90 of his men and brings the English a deer for the feast. 

NUNES: Winslow writes, “And although it might not always be so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

LIN FISHER: My real concern with Thanksgiving and sort of the stories we tell ourselves around Thanksgiving as Americans, is that by using this imagery, of the pilgrims and Native Americans in 1621, gathering and celebrating this harvest. And that represents a certain kind of fiction about not only that moment, but also the whole history of native and colonial, whether it's European, or later American, relations.

GONZALEZ: This is Lin Fisher. You might remember him from our Roger Williams episode. He’s an associate professor of history at Brown University, and Thanksgiving is one of his areas of study.

NUNES: Lin says that, even though this feast really did happen, that’s only part of the picture.  

FISHER: To take that as the representative sample or to represent that as all of colonial American, European or English and native relations without understanding the violence and dispossession and complexity, of what followed since, seems to me to set the whole conversation, the whole understanding of what Thanksgiving was, off on a really, not just misleading, but I think really dangerous and pernicious kind of foundation.

GONZALEZ: This account of Thanksgiving is written only from the English perspective. There’s no Wampanoag account of what really happened at this feast. 

RAYMOND “TWO HAWKS” WATSON: If you’re talking Thanksgiving, then remember that this is an indigenous holiday. 

NUNES: This is Raymond “Two Hawks” Watson. He’s Narragansett and runs the Providence Cultural Equity Initiative. 

WATSON: Once again, it’s been co opted by Europeans since being here, which is okay. That's fine, you know, but it's not their holiday. They didn't do anything for the Indians. They didn't show kindness to them. And if people can remember that and celebrate that fact, then I'm all for Thanksgiving.

GONZALEZ: Ray says the indigenous nations of New England have been holding Harvest festivals for thousands of years before any European colonists made their way over the Atlantic. 

WATSON: Thanksgiving should be a reminder to everyone whose people are not from here that your people migrated to here from somewhere. So, you're an immigrant. We always, kind of, find it funny when we hear people, “Well, I've been here for three or four generations.” Oh, is that a long time? So, it's always interesting from our perspective to hear people, especially when the whole conversation around “these illegal immigrants and all that”. I’m just like, “But your people were illegal immigrants!”

NUNES: And, Ray says, the Wampanoag nation welcomes these people, who are religious refugees and explicit colonizers. They teach the English how to survive, and, for a brief moment, there’s peace among them. But it doesn’t last.

GONZALEZ: Just 15 years later, there’s the Pequot War, where the English in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut use their power and alliances with native nations to wipeout the Pequot nation. And after the English declare victory over the Pequot, they celebrate with their native allies. This is the second recorded Thanksgiving in the colonies.

NUNES: 40 years later, the third colonial Thanksgiving celebrates the English victory over the indigenous tribes of New England after King Phillip’s War. To this day, King Phillip’s War is considered the bloodiest war per capita in US history. 

FISHER: And so I think we use these kinds of moments and examples of peaceability, because they make us feel better about what happened in the past, but they really obscure the violence. 

GONZALEZ: So, Thanksgiving transforms from this one-off, historical event into a holiday. 

NUNES: Over the next 300 years, the founders and leaders of the United States of America begin to use Thanksgiving to bring the country together during the most turbulent times in our history 

GONZALEZ: The Revolutionary War, George Washington’s first term as President, the Civil War, and the Great Depression all inspired national proclamations of Thanksgiving. 

NUNES: And now, it’s almost all about the holiday of it all: the food, the drinks, the parade on TV, and football games. So what do we do with the history of it?

GONZALEZ: The party is really picking up now. All 8 Mulilikwa kids are home from school, and two of their Armenian godmothers, Jayne and Shakay, have joined us. Clement and Armand are taking pictures of everyone.

AX:HENRI: Miss Jayne, come, let’s take a picture!

GONZALEZ: Henri and Claudine are teaching me Swahili when Manoog places the turkey on the table.

GONZALEZ: Jayne starts to carve the turkey and make plates for everybody. The kids are scooping mashed potatoes, squash, and Armenian pilaf onto their plates. And, it’s obvious none have ever had most of these traditional American foods. Especially not the goopy red sauce next to the gravy.

GONZALEZ: It’s cranberry sauce. So it’s kinda like a sweet, tart, sauce.

MANOOG: She’s gonna try it.

GONZALEZ: Claudine, the oldest girl, volunteers to try it.

Screams

HENRI: I’ll be the second one to try it!

GONZALEZ: After everyone has tried everything, and the turkey is all carved up, Clement asks me a question.

CLEMENT: That’s a chicken?

GONZALEZ: No.

CLEMENT: What the name for this?

CLAUDINE: Turkey.

CLEMENT: The turkey? Ok. Why do the Thanksgiving, they cook the turkey only?

GONZALEZ: I check if anyone else knows the answer, and I give him this long response, explaining the history of Thanksgiving, trying to channel my best Lin Fisher and Ray Watson. But at the end, I’m not sure any of it stuck.

CLEMENT: Oh, it’s unique because it’s big. Everyone, if you are maybe 10 peoples, 15 peoples, you can feed for everybody, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: So, I realize that the process of learning about the history of this country is long. Longer than a meal. And requires more than one explanation. What’s important now is that we’re all together, making jokes, eating good food, and getting to know each other a little bit better. 

GONZALEZ: What are you most grateful for, or thankful for?

HENRI: Me? The first thing, I’m thanks for my mom for giving me a good life. The second thing, I’m grateful for all the people that is around me.

ARMAND: I like my mommy. I like my brother. My family. Yeah

VICTOR: Uuuuuuhm, chicken!

SHAKAY: I am so grateful to this family. They have filled my heart with love, and they taught me about pure joy.

MANOOG: Having a nice Thanksgiving with my godchildren. And seeing them hopefully get up for seconds without being asked.

CLEMENT: Thanksgiving this year is very big for me. And I’m so happy because it’s dinner for the whole family, for the friend. It make me so happy. 

CLAUDINE: I like my mom to bring to America. I’m thankful for my family for being together.

PICHUNA: [Speaking in Swahili]

HENRI: She said she gives thanks to God for bringing Baba Manoog behind her. She say she don’t have many things to say, just to say thank you to God.

WATSON: I wake up every morning, and I got a beautiful wife, I got wonderful kids. I’m in law school. I’m running my own company. I’m a Narragansett, and I’m still here. They tried to literally genocide us, and we’re still here. There’s just so much to be grateful for.

FISHER: I do think there's there's a lot of just not great things out there that are happening daily. And it can be soul-crushing and overwhelming. And it's true of the past. But to take a specific moment and develop the discipline of gratitude, and the habit of thankfulness, whether it's quote, unquote, Thanksgiving or not, I think is really useful. I think it's soul reviving.

GONZALEZ: Alex, what are you grateful for?

NUNES: My family and mashed potatoes with lots of butter. How about you?

GONZALEZ: I’m grateful for my partner and the home we’ve built. My family and friends who support me all the time. For being able to walk my dog by the ocean. And for this show. It’s a dream for me to be able to get to know so many incredible people from all over the world who call Rhode Island home. 

NUNES: Mosaic is a production of The Public’s radio. Edited by Sally Eisele. WIth production help from James Baumgartner and Aaron Selbig. Our original music is by Bryn Bliska. Torey Malatia is the general manager of The Public’s Radio. I’m Alex Nunes.

GONZALEZ: And I’m Ana González. Thanks for listening, and Happy Thanksgiving.