Inside the pre-Thanksgiving feast at the Shinnecock Indian Nation

It is a celebration as old as Long Island’s longest human inhabitants, yet as young as living memory. Nunnowa, celebrated the third Thursday of every November by the Shinnecock Indian Nation, is a Thanksgiving feast steeped in history and layered in meaning, from the prayers to the food to the music. But it is also a modern revitalization of an ancient custom that had mostly gone underground, even as the American nation adopted it as its own.

"Nunnowa is traditional but also recent," says cultural educator Shane Weeks, 34, who, like his parents and ancestors going back generations, grew up on the 700 acre Shinnecock Territory on Shinnecock Bay in Southampton. "It is a gathering of community, sharing traditional foods. It is also a re-manifestation of what was once held here for millennia."

The Shinnecock, like all the Algonquian-speaking groups that populated what is now Long Island and New England, celebrated each of the four seasons with a feast. "Nunnowa, which means ‘the dry season’ or ‘it is dry’, is when all the harvest is ripe: corn, squash, beans, wild nuts, acorns, ground nuts, Jerusalem artichokes," says Weeks. So, Nunnowa celebrated autumnal abundance with food, singing, dancing, and storytelling.

With the rise of European settlers and the decimation of the native people and their lands, these traditions, even the languages, were driven underground or lost.

But the Nunnowa kept resurfacing, to honor Shinnecock veterans or as dinners in private homes. "My grandmother always convened a dinner with her contemporaries," Shinnecock elder, attorney Marguerite Smith, 75, recalls. "I remember her having other older ladies to dinner. The kids weren’t there; they were in school. I don’t remember seeing any men there, but there was certainly food to take home."

In the 1970s, Nunnowa was revived as a community event by the Shinnecock Native American Cultural Coalition (S.N.A.C.C.) the Nation and the Shinnecock Presbyterian Church. While national Thanksgiving Day was a holiday for most Americans, many Shinnecock people worked in service jobs on Thanksgiving, so the third Thursday of November became the date for Nunnowa and it has been on everyone’s calendar ever since. And the enthusiasm has been growing too.

But Nunnowa is not an opposition to national Thanksgiving. "This is a reclamation of cultural practices. We celebrate American Thanksgiving too; we are modern people," says Rainbow Chavis, cultural resources director for the Shinnecock Nation. "Nunnowa is our way of celebrating the season, but on our time. It is where we all get together — which we like to do often — as opposed to American Thanksgiving, which we celebrate with our immediate families."

So this Nov. 21, as in the distant past, generations of Shinnecock will gather at long tables to pray and eat in the community center. Foods will be prepared communally and folks will also bring potluck dishes for about 200 people. It will feature the foods that the Shinnecock have gathered and hunted and farmed for more than 10,000 years: oyster stew, clam chowder, succotash (sweet corn and cranberry beans harvested from their communal garden), samp (white corn and white beans), turkey, potatoes, yams, beans, string beans, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. If this sounds familiar to non-natives, it is because that first Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621 was all about native foods.

"When Americans are celebrating a ‘typical’ Thanksgiving, they are reminding themselves of our foods," says Marguerite Smith. "It is a coastal Algonquian, Long Island, New England menu: fowl, fish, pumpkin, beans, corn. It is part of our cultural foodways."

Elders or the housebound who can’t make it will get a meal delivered. Singing and dancing will break out, some of it rehearsed and some informal. The Algonquian language — also enjoying a revival — will be used as much as possible. Rainbow Chavis, 46, and her sisters will set up a centerpiece for the room, just as their grandmother did before them. Covered with pumpkins and fall fruits and nuts, turkey feathers and beautiful woven textiles, it will serve as an altar to offer thankful prayers for the harvest.

"The Shinnecock people over more recent times have become more knowledgeable about our traditions which were almost wiped out," says Chavis. "But we have been doing the work, and the research and praying as a way to get our traditions back and restored."