During this Thanksgiving season, I cannot help but think about how our national feast day only reinforces a limited view of our nation’s origins and the relations between Native Americans and Europeans during the colonial period. As we gather around the table our thoughts turn instinctively -- if only momentarily -- to New England and the short period of comity between Indians and newcomers that has become so central to our national mythology... and when we think more broadly of our nation’s colonial past, we almost always think of another feel-good story: how in 1776 the thirteen English colonies struck as one to lay the foundation for our United States of America. Both stories are rooted in a thin strip of land along our Atlantic Coast, but in their drama and power, they tend to obliterate other valuable narratives about European-Indian relations in colonial America. The English, once they had borrowed all the food and provisions from Native Americans in New England, embarked on a slaughter that wiped most of the Indians from this earth.