Here are a few different perspectives on the holiday in question:

The Pilgrims set ground at Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620. Their first winter was devastating. At the beginning of the following fall, they had lost 46 of the original 102 who sailed on the Mayflower. But the harvest of 1621 was a bountiful one. And the remaining colonists decided to celebrate with a feast -- including 91 Indians who had helped the Pilgrims survive their first year. It is believed that the Pilgrims would not have made it through the year without the help of the natives. The feast was more of a traditional English harvest festival than a true 'thanksgiving' observance. It lasted three days.

The Thanksgiving Story

- - -

With Philip and most of their leaders dead, the Wampanoag were nearly exterminated. Only 400 survived the war. The Narragansett and Nipmuc had similar losses, and although small bands continued to live along the Connecticut River until the 1800s, the Pocumtuc disappeared as an organized group. For the English, the war was also costly: 600 killed and more than half of 90 settlements attacked with 13 destroyed. Edward Randolph, an agent of the crown, estimated 3,000 natives were killed, but his estimate appears to have been very conservative. From a pre-war native population in southern New England of 15,000, only 4,000 were left in 1680, and the harsh peace terms imposed by the English placed them in total subjugation. In what has been called the Great Dispersal, the Algonquins in southern New England fled either to the Sokoki and French in Canada, or west to the Delaware and Iroquois.

Wampanoag History

- - -

Wampanoag people have always held many seasonal thanksgiving ceremonies. But there is a big difference between these ancient and ongoing celebrations and the Pilgrims' first harvest festival which led to the establishment of the National holiday now known as Thanksgiving. For Wampanoag people, this holiday evokes painful feelings about the consequences they are forced to endure for European settlement and the establishment of America

Wampanoag people describe their own thanksgivings