Thanksgiving is a holiday that brings together American families and close friends to celebrate an event that happened in 1621 in a colony called Plymouth, now Massachusetts.Traditionally, this day of food and festivities is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. This year, the holiday will happen on the 22nd.American society has misrepresented the facts of the actual first Thanksgiving. Pilgrims in black hats dining with free-loving American Indians is a fabricated idea that is far from the truth. The true history of Thanksgiving has been lost over the years and many Pierce College students do not know the truth behind the day of feasts, according to history teacher Richard McMillan. “Eight of 12 ideas students have of Thanksgiving are wrong,” said McMillan. “Pilgrims didn’t wear black hats, those were the Puritan people,” said McMillan. “Indians lived in a constant state of war, not peace and love like hippies,” he said.What people may not understand is that after the first Thanksgiving, the holiday did not take place again until 1864.”Lincoln created Thanksgiving after winning the Civil War. It’s a holiday that celebrates murder, mayhem and chaos,” said McMillan.”There is a difference between American history and Americana,” he said. “The Pilgrims came here to be religiously exclusive. They didn’t like Quakers and they wanted to be free to worship in their own religion,” explained McMillan.Pilgrims did not celebrate holidays. They stood for the concept of religious freedom, understanding the importance of family and believed in bettering themselves. They came to America to worship how they pleased, and those ideas built the foundation that America is based on. The Pilgrims were not the only people involved in v great meal so long ago. Native Americans also had a huge role in the first Thanksgiving dinner. Squanto was the first Native American to befriend the Englishmen who first came to Plymouth. He had at one time been captured as a slave in London and knew that there were a great number of Englishmen. He told the other natives to trade with the Pilgrims and to not fight them, for they outnumbered the Indians significantly, according to McMillan.”I wish people would understand my culture and the history of where I come from,” said Nantan Crow of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. The reservation which he lives on is located just south of the I-10 freeway in Cabazon, California.”Our ancestors made peace with the Pilgrims so they wouldn’t kill them. The English eventually took over everything,” said his sister, Orenda Crow. Orenda is an Indian word meaning “magic power.” Her brother’s name comes from the Indian word meaning “spokesman.” “The Indians brought deer and corn, not mashed potatoes and turkey,” said McMillan about the first Thanksgiving dinner. “A wild turkey is about the size of a football, not like these ones today stuffed full of growth hormones.”The Thanksgiving genocide was the beginning of the end for the American Indian lifestyle. Before Englishmen settled in Plymouth, the Indians roamed the country without any western civilization. Now, original Indian tribes are restricted to small reservations that cannot compare to having the whole North American continent to roam about freely. Although the Pilgrims did not kill the American Indians, the English people soon came over to the New England colonies. Many American Indians were quickly killed, and the rest were put into reservations. Although this was the start for a new generation of American society, it is also our history. Not all of history is full of things we are proud of. “The symbolism of Thanksgiving is pure Americana,” he said. “You can strive for better and move on if you are not happy somewhere and start over again,” said McMillan.