The Forum

Drive into the STLCC Florissant Valley campus just off Pershall Road, and you will see buildings filled with classrooms, a soccer field, tennis courts, freshly cultivated green spaces, and of course, parking lots. What you will not see is the original landscape of the 96.8 million acres that changed hands for roughly $166,000 in the early 19th century, or the people who lost it. You will not see the Missouria Tribe women and children who were paid in trade goods to dig the foundations of the first European buildings in this region. You will not see the Osage villages that stood here long before anyone called this place Ferguson.

This Thanksgiving, while most of us argue about election outcomes, turkey brine, parade floats, or football team legitimacy, it is worth asking a question that should make us less comfortable: whose land is this, and what did it cost?

The Myths We Were All Taught

The "first Thanksgiving" story almost every American learned in elementary school, complete with construction paper headdresses and hand-print turkeys, was invented in the 19th century. It does not appear in any primary source from 1621. As historians Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker document in All the Real Indians Died Off (2013), the harmonious Pilgrim-and-Indian feast narrative was constructed decades after the fact, largely through Sarah Josepha Hale, who spent 30 years writing letters to lawmakers pushing for a national harvest holiday. Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “thanksgiving and praise” in 1863 as a tool to help instill national unity during the years of the Civil War (National Park Service, 2023).

What actually happened in 1621 was a three-day Wampanoag harvest celebration. Ousamequin, the Wampanoag leader often called Massasoit, sent 90 of his own men. That was not a friendly potluck gesture. It was a diplomatic calculation, an alliance against the Narragansett, a rival nation. The menu likely included venison, lobster, clams, eel, and wild grains, not pumpkin pie or cranberry sauce (Fejos, 1944).

Within 50 years, the Wampanoag population had collapsed from roughly 15,000 to about 500 through disease, warfare, and enslavement. During King Philip’s War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in American history, pre Civil War, colonists killed the Wampanoag leader Metacom, sold his wife and child into slavery in Bermuda, and displayed his body on Plymouth’s town gallows for 20 years (Morgan, 2021).

Say that out loud at your family dinner table sometime. See what happens.

Since 1970, Indigenous people and allies have gathered every Thanksgiving at Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts for the National Day of Mourning, organized by the United American Indians of New England. It began when a Wampanoag man named Frank "Wamsutta" James was invited to speak at a Plymouth tricentennial reenactment and instead delivered a searing commentary of the holiday’s mythology and propaganda.

His granddaughter, Kisha James, now helps lead the event. "We want to educate people so that they understand the stories we all learned in school about the first Thanksgiving are nothing but lies," James said. A banner at the 2025 gathering read: "We are not vanishing. We are not conquered. We are strong as ever" (United American Indians of New England, 2025).

Closer to Home: Whose Land Is This?

Bring it home. The land under the Florissant Valley campus was not empty wilderness waiting for French Creole settlers to found Fleurissant in 1786. It was Osage territory. The Osage, who call themselves Wazhazhe, "Children of the Middle Waters," dominated the fur trade throughout the region and ruled a homeland that spanned much of present-day Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas. The valley’s fertile land, its bluffs, and its position near the merging of two great rivers made it a crossroads for hunting, farming, and trade (White, 1991).

Also here on this space were the Missouria, the Niutachi, "People of the River Mouth," the nation that gave this state its name. When Pierre Laclède founded St. Louis in 1764, the entire Missouria nation encamped nearby, and their women and children were paid in trade goods such as beads, cloth, and metal tools to dig foundations for the settlers’ buildings (Rees, 2022). Deeper still, was Cahokia, located just across the river, the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico, and the center of urban trade and culture. (Milner, 2004).

Then came the paperwork of expulsion. In November 1808, William Clark negotiated the Treaty of Fort Clark, in which the Osage surrendered roughly 52 million acres in Missouri and Arkansas for about $1,200 in cash and $1,500 in merchandise. Treaties in 1815, 1818, and 1825 took nearly everything else, which was about 96.8 million acres total for about $166,000 (U.S. Department of State, 1889).

The Missouria Tribe, which was devastated by epidemic disease, then merged with the Otoe and were forcibly removed to Indian Territory in 1881. Similarly, members of the Illini Confederation, also known as the Illiniwek, were pushed out through broken treaties and removal (Prucha, 1976). Every building on the STLCC Florissant Valley campus has come to be as a result of those exploitive transactions.

Not a Footnote: People Are Still Here

As of Dec. 18, 2025, there were 575 federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). This total includes 228 tribes located in Alaska and 347 in the mainland United States. The most recent addition to this count was the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, which received federal recognition in December 2025, increasing the total from 574 to 575 (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2025).

In 2020, the Federal Census counted roughly 9.7 million people in the U.S. identifying as Indigenous alone or in combination with another race (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021). The Osage Nation today is among the wealthiest tribes in the country because of mineral rights, a legacy that includes the horrific Osage murders of the 1920s. Since 2021, under Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, the Osage have been buying land back in Missouri (Osage Nation, 2023). The Otoe-Missouria Tribe operates cultural programs from Red Rock, Oklahoma, documenting their ancestors’ presence right here (Otoe-Missouria Tribe, 2024).

Indigenous chefs are rewriting the very meals we eat during this holiday. Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef and James Beard Award winner, runs Owamni in Minneapolis. He uses only pre-colonial ingredients, very intentionally excluding food items that were introduced by European colonizers: no wheat, dairy, cane sugar, beef, pork, or chicken (Sherman, 2020). Valerie Segrest, a Muckleshoot nutritionist, builds Thanksgiving feasts around fire-roasted venison, Chinook salmon, and huckleberry pie. The "Three Sisters" companion-planting system of corn, beans, and squash is not a metaphor for a craft-project; it is from thousands of years of Indigenous agricultural science (Kimmerer, 2013). Cornbread, wild rice, maple syrup, turkey, pumpkin pie, barbeque/smoking/pit-roasting, cranberry sauce, and chili peppers are all Indigenous contributions to the American table, whether our textbooks say so or not.

So, Before You Pass the Gravy

Do not just share this article. Look up whose land your own neighborhood sits on using the Native Land Digital website at: https://native-land.ca/. Ask STLCC Administration how, specifically, does the college honor the Osage Nation, the Otoe-Missouria Tribe, or any tribal community beyond reading a sentence at events.

Show up to a public event hosted by local Indigenous organizations. Start your personal quest for knowledge and buy a book by an Indigenous author; many on the journey have taken their first step by reading David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee or Tanya Talagas’ Seven Fallen Feathers. Instead of encountering Indigenous issues once per year, follow Indian Country Today year-round. Donate to the organizers of the National Day of Mourning or to a food sovereignty nonprofit.

And on Thursday, Nov. 26, when someone at your table repeats that outrageously inaccurate weary-Pilgrims-and-friendly-Indians trope, say something. Even if your voice shakes. Especially if your voice shakes.