On a warm, sun­ny Octo­ber day, peo­ple of all ages dance around the open lawn, stomp­ing and call­ing out to the music. Some are in mul­ti­col­ored regalia, with feath­ers and tas­sels twirling as they cir­cle around the out­side of the Tomaquag Muse­um in Charlestown, Rhode Island. Oth­ers are in every­day clothes.

The Nar­ra­gansett Trib­al Nation is cel­e­brat­ing Cran­ber­ry Thanks­giv­ing with tribes from all over the north­east­ern region. The cel­e­bra­tion hap­pens in accor­dance with the Har­vest Moon with­in the 13 moons or thanks­giv­ings. The hol­i­day is part of a year’s worth of giv­ing thanks cel­e­brat­ed by tribes like the Nar­ra­gansett, Wampanoag and Mashan­tuck­et Pequot.

The hol­i­day is meant to cel­e­brate that “all the things that have been grown are get­ting ready to be har­vest­ed and dried and stored for the win­ter to come,” accord­ing to Chrys­tal Mars Bak­er, an edu­ca­tor at the Tomaquaq Muse­um and a Nar­ra­gansett Trib­al cit­i­zen.

Click on an image to view larg­er.

Bak­er, right, teach­es a young girl about the his­to­ry of Cran­ber­ry Thanks­giv­ing while she works on a craft on Oct. 4, 2025.

Bak­er said the com­mu­ni­ty event is meant to be “an edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty,” as well as a time for “shar­ing, edu­cat­ing and expos­ing our­selves and our trib­al cit­i­zens.” By mak­ing the event pub­lic, the Nar­ra­gansett Tribe hopes to con­nect with peo­ple out­side the Native com­mu­ni­ty so they can bet­ter under­stand their pres­ence and why their cul­tur­al tra­di­tions are impor­tant.

The orig­i­nal idea of the cel­e­bra­tion was to gath­er togeth­er and be thank­ful for the year’s har­vest, Bak­er explained.

“There would be a cer­e­mo­ny, there would be danc­ing, there would be gath­er­ings of peo­ple from vil­lage to vil­lage, com­ing togeth­er just like what you see today,” she said.

The idea of Thanks­giv­ing for Indige­nous peo­ple is very dif­fer­ent from what most peo­ple think of as the hol­i­day of thanks­giv­ing, explained UConn Pro­fes­sor Sandy Grande.

Dance is an impor­tant part of Indige­nous cel­e­bra­tion as move­ment, music and regalia allows “dancers to express both com­mu­ni­ty iden­ti­ty and their own indi­vid­ual jour­neys,” accord­ing to the Run­ning Strong for Amer­i­can Indi­an Youth.

Bak­er stressed that although Native peo­ple have become more mod­ern, cel­e­brat­ing the tra­di­tions allows Native com­mu­ni­ties to reclaim their cul­ture by active­ly keep­ing it alive.

“We may have evolved. We may have changed. We are wear­ing con­tem­po­rary clothes, we have 9‑to‑5 jobs, we live in homes, but we are edu­cat­ing about the loss or the dis­place­ment,” Bak­er said. “We are break­ing the myth that there was only one Thanks­giv­ing. It’s break­ing the myth that it hap­pened in Novem­ber. It’s break­ing the myth that it was the Pil­grims who met the Indi­ans and became great friends and shared a meal and all of that, because none of that is true.”

Indige­nous artist Josephine Smith sews a piece of Indige­nous regalia at the Cran­ber­ry Thanks­giv­ing on Oct. 4, 2025 in Charlestown, Rhode Island.

Smith, who is part of the the Shin­necock Indi­an Nation in Long Island, NY, is an edu­ca­tor for the Shin­necock Nation Muse­um and for­mer direc­tor of the Cul­tur­al Resources Depart­ment for the tribe. She is also an artists and makes regalia and jew­el­ry by doing her own bead­work. She uses many nat­ur­al mate­ri­als, includ­ing wampum and bird feath­ers in her work. Her busi­ness, which she runs with her cousin, is called Hands of Tra­di­tion.

Crafts are essen­tial to “keep­ing tra­di­tions going” and are a “con­tin­u­a­tion of who we are,” Smith said.

The Cran­ber­ry Thanks­giv­ing event also fea­tured Indige­nous food ven­dors sell­ing cran­ber­ry-based meals. Accord­ing to Bak­er, Cran­ber­ry Thanks­giv­ing is meant to acknowl­edge the gifts that “sus­tain the peo­ple, and cran­ber­ry is one of those gifts.”

Much of the food sold is very mod­ern but cran­ber­ry influ­enced and still “gives thanks to the cran­ber­ry,” Bak­er said.

Although the Octo­ber 2025 Cran­ber­ry Thanks­giv­ing event was orga­nized by the Nar­ra­gansett tribe, mem­bers of dif­fer­ent tribes across the region attend­ed the event includ­ing those from the Mashan­tuck­et Pequot and the Mohe­gan tribes.

Region­al tribes com­ing togeth­er is a recent devel­op­ment, Pro­fes­sor Sandy Grande explained, and it is sig­nif­i­cant for Indige­nous uni­ty. “It’s rel­a­tive­ly new, actu­al­ly, because the his­to­ry is pret­ty intense. You know, many of these tribes used to be pit­ted against each oth­er, “ explained UConn Pro­fes­sor Sandy Grande. “It’s real­ly only been in the past maybe five years that they’re doing a lot with each oth­er.”

---