?The gooey overlay of sweetness over genocide?: the myth of the ?first Thanksgiving?

In 1970, Massachusetts was preparing to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower.

The 53 surviving men, women and children who had left England in search of "religious freedom" are credited with starting America's first successful colony, in Plymouth, in 1620. Their voyage to the so-called New World is celebrated by many Americans still as a powerful symbol of the birth of the United States.

But at the last minute, event organisers reportedly realized something was missing.

So they invited a member of the Wampanoag Nation, or People of the First Light - the loose confederation of south-eastern New England tribes whose ancestors were immortalised as the "friendly Indians" who welcomed the Pilgrims and feasted with them at the "first Thanksgiving" in 1621.

Unfortunately for the planners, the person who returned their call was schoolteacher Wamsutta Frank James of the federally recognised Aquinnah Wampanoag, of Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, who drove a red Corvette with a bumper sticker that read: "Custer had it coming".

James said he would attend, on the condition he told the truth.

That included the fact that the Pilgrims robbed ancestral graves before establishing "America's home town" in the abandoned Native village of Patuxet, where an estimated 90% had perished from a European-originating pandemic they called the Great Dying.