Listening to the Land We Were Taught to Forget

This week I read a children’s book “Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story”, written by members of the Wampanoag Tribe, the people whose land the Pilgrims arrived on in 1620. The story is told through the eyes of Weeâchumun—Corn—and through the voices of animals, plants, and ancestors. It’s a retelling of what I learned in school, but from the side I was never given.

It’s a story full of vulnerability.

Winter takes many lives.

Communities break apart under sickness and grief.

The land itself feels quieter, emptier.

And when the newcomers arrive, hungry and desperate after failing to grow crops, the Wampanoag people watch with deep uncertainty. Their resources are limited. Their losses are recent. The threat is real.

What struck me most was the tone:

there is fear here, and caution, and discernment.

And yet, after witnessing the newcomers’ struggle through the winter, the Wampanoag decide to help them survive. They teach them how to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. They teach them how to work with the land rather than against it. They teach them the rhythms of the seasons in this place.

And that part matters.

Because this wasn’t “Pilgrims discovered farming.”

It was:

Indigenous knowledge kept them alive.

Many settlers did starve that winter.

Many lived only because the Wampanoag shared their wisdom, food, and presence.

What the book makes visible—quietly, but powerfully—is the Wampanoag understanding of relationship with land. Not as scenery, not as property, but as something meaningful, reciprocal, and spiritual. The personhood of the land becomes central—not literally, but through the symbolic cosmology that expresses reverence and connection.

This is what was nearly erased through colonization.

The book ends with something I have never once encountered in Thanksgiving lessons growing up:

Many Americans call it a day of thanksgiving.

Many of our people call it a day of mourning.

Both truths exist.

The celebration and the grief are inseparable.

For me, reading this story felt like an invitation to widen the narrative.

To listen where silence used to be.

To let complexity speak where simplicity still tries to dominate.

And to honor Indigenous voices—not as an accessory to history,

but as its authors.

This Thanksgiving, I want to carry that forward—

to practice gratitude that is not detached from grief,

and generosity that is not detached from truth.

I want to remember who taught the newcomers how to survive.

I would like to see the dominant culture listen better than it has in the past.

I also want to acknowledge the authors of Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story—Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry, and Alexis Bunten—who are Wampanoag and Alaska Native. Their storytelling brings forward a perspective that has too often been silenced or simplified. I’m grateful for the care they put into honoring their people’s history, culture, language, and memory.

This story is theirs.

I’m simply sharing what it stirred in me.