Giving thanks should be a simple thing, but most Americans make it complicated.

We put on feasts, gather the family and indulge in excesses of food and football.

Yet few understand why this holiday is a solemn time for descendants of its main characters, the people we now call Native Americans.

We model our feast from the so-called first Thanksgiving, a harvest celebration between English Puritans new to American soil and their Wampanoag Indian neighbors in Massachusetts in 1621.

A year before, Squanto, an Indian who had learned to speak English, had helped the Puritans survive, teaching them what to plant, how to hunt and how to build wigwams.

This feast was a repayment and a way to begin contract talks between pilgrim and tribal leaders to secure land for the settlement.

A short friendship

It was a three-day feast. The Indians brought most of the food.

But the friendship and peaceful coexistence lasted only a few years.

More Puritans came from England. The newcomers forgot the Indians' help. Their mistrust and cultural and religious intolerance grew.

Within a few years, the children of those who ate the feast together were fighting each other in what became a genocidal war.

Most of New England's Indians were exterminated. Others died of smallpox or were sold by the pilgrims into slavery.

It was a pattern of violent takeover that swept the countryside, lasting generations and nearly wiping out our country's indigenous peoples.

No wonder many Native Americans have mixed feelings about this holiday. It reminds them of things not to be celebrated but solemnly observed.

America's table

Today, at noon, several dozen Cincinnati-area people of various backgrounds, nationalities and religions have been invited to another feast table convened downtown by the Cincinnati chapter of the American Jewish Committee.

They will read from America's Table: A Thanksgiving Reader, a booklet that briefly retells the story of America's journey, giving thanks for it, but also acknowledging that it wasn't always easy or righteous, especially for Indians or for African slaves.

The free pamphlet (available online at www.ajc.org) also discusses the struggles of immigrants and the ongoing responsibility that all Americans have to uphold freedom, justice and unity within our multifaceted communities.

The American Jewish Committee hopes families will read from the booklet as a new tradition at their Thanksgiving tables.

This acknowledgement of our nation's historic burdens reminds me of a different Native American tradition.

Jeanne Marie Brightfire Stophlet, a 63-year-old descendent of the Shawnee Cherokee and of Irish immigrants, explained it to me.

In tribal council after harvest, Native Americans would sit in a circle around a ceremonial fire. They'd each write little notes, listing the year's problems and ongoing worries.

Each would throw notes into the fire, releasing the burdens "to the four winds,'' she said. Then they'd pray for future generations and for peace.

This Thursday, Mrs. Brightfire Stophlet says, members of her council will visit "elders" in nursing homes and give away food, blankets and gifts.

"It's a matter of remembering the true meaning of thanksgiving,'' she said, "the gathering of people together around a table and of what everybody brings to the table.

"Everybody brings something to the table of giving."

E-mail damos@enquirer.com or phone 768-8395.