The true story of Thanksgiving? The Wampanoag people saved the Plymouth Settlement from total starvation. Massasoit, the Sachem of the Wampanoag, brokered peace deals and signed a peace treaty in 1621. In the coming years, more and more English settlers came in, taking what they wanted and turning the indigenous peoples into second-class citizens, killing hundreds of indigenous men, women, and children along the way. When Massasoit's son Metacom (English name King Phillip) became Sachem and began resisting this oppression, it eventually led to King Phillips's War. Metacom was killed and dismembered, and his body parts were sent to different English towns as trophies. Metacom's head was put on a pike and placed in Plymouth while his 9-year-old son was imprisoned and sold into slavery in the West Indies. That is the thanks we gave them.PBS' American Experience produced We Shall Remain, a four-part docuseries on the suffering that American Indians experienced. The first episode, “After the Mayflower,” is linked here. I highly recommend people watch it and think of those whose land we now occupy and think of their descendants—people we, as a supposedly just and benevolent nation, still treat like second-class citizens.