I am also responsible for providing the centerpiece of a very culturally loaded holiday meal. Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest for Indigenous nations on this continent, and for many non-Natives, it’s a faint story of gratitude covered with layers of interpretation and fraught historical context. It turns out that as a turkey farmer, I’m responsible for telling my own Thanksgiving story, through my birds.
The “traditional” Thanksgiving spread, including a bulging turkey, fat clouds of mashed potatoes, and glistening gobs of ruby-red canned cranberry sauce is a far cry from what any alleged first Thanksgiving meal resembled. Our modern Thanksgiving is also often a meal built on pure extraction of land, labor, and culture, a story we must actively redress through our choice of farming practices.
While there are accounts of a cross-cultural feast with Wampanoag tribal members and colonists held at Plymouth in 1621, primary documents do not specifically refer to this event as a celebration of thanks. Although wild turkeys were plentiful, it’s debatable as to whether they were on the table that day. There would have been no butter or wheat flour for pies, and foods like potatoes were not present in New England at that time. A Massachusetts feast would more likely have been composed of shellfish, venison, and humble cornmeal.
“This is the story I try to tell with my birds—that meaningful food production and native landscapes can co-exist through agroforestry.”
Still, across faith and culture, pausing at the end of harvest season to give gratitude is a universal impulse. Our modern Thanksgiving table holds many gifts to be thankful for, primary among them the crops that were selected and cultivated by this continent’s Indigenous people. Squash (including pumpkin) is one of the Three Sisters of Native agriculture, an example of the polyculture planting that is now prevalent in modern regenerative farming, as are other Indigenous concepts related to soil health and careful management of natural resources.
Many of the tree crops we use to prepare our feasts today—like pecans, persimmons, and hazelnuts, to name a few—were originally cared for by Native Americans. We now call that agroforestry, the intentional, integrated cultivation of tree crops.
Agroforestry is increasing in popularity among farmers looking to balance ecological integrity with economic viability (especially as climate change demands more resilient, perennial food systems). This is the story I try to tell with my birds—that meaningful food production and native landscapes can co-exist through agroforestry.
My turkeys don’t quite fit on the modern table, actually. They’re a bit lankier (and admittedly tougher) in the leg from running between pin oak trees to fatten on acorns. They’re certainly not plump like a Norman Rockwell bird, but I’ve been told their flavor is unparalleled. That would be because they prefer acorns, wild plums, persimmons, and insects to grain rations.
