There was generosity.

There was also strategy.

There was a harvest gathering.

There was also a homeland that had lost most of its people before the meal ever took place.

History is strongest when it can hold all of those facts together.

Tisquantum deserves that complexity because his life was complex.

The Wampanoag deserve it because their history does not exist simply to explain the survival of Plymouth.

And modern readers deserve it because national beginnings become more meaningful, not less, when the people inside them are allowed to remain human.

Tisquantum’s story is therefore not an argument against remembering Thanksgiving.

It is an argument for remembering more.