Wampanoag community is telling its Thanksgiving story as nationwide push to recognise Indigenous history in US grows.

In popular legend, the Thanksgiving feast can be traced back to a friendly gathering about 400 years ago between English Pilgrims – settlers who travelled on board the Mayflower ship – and Native Americans at Plymouth, in present-day Massachusetts.

“The narrative around Thanksgiving today ignores our history,” said Steven Peters, a member of the Mashpee tribe of the Wampanoag in Massachusetts, who regard Thanksgiving as a national day of mourning.

Now, the Wampanoag are reclaiming the history of Thanksgiving amid a nationwide push across the US to recognise – and grapple with – the legacy of colonialism and its lasting effects on Indigenous people and communities.

Villagers began showing signs of illness, a yellowing of the skin, fever and blisters, Peters said.

A few years before the Mayflower arrived in 1620, a group of English explorers had kidnapped about 20 Wampanoag men, who were then sold as slaves in Spain, said Peters, who today is a keeper of the Wampanoag’s historical narrative.

A group of some 90 Wampanoag men, who Peters said were probably warriors, joined with the Pilgrims in feast and entertainment for three days, Winslow wrote.

For more than two centuries, the legend of Thanksgiving was observed by colonists in the US as a harvest festival until President Abraham Lincoln declared it a national day of prayer and thanksgiving to God in 1863, during the US Civil War.

Some historians think the first official English Thanksgiving feast may have happened in Virginia circa 1619, when a group of colonists were directed to hold an annual ceremony giving thanks for their arrival in the New World.

The Wampanoag people today number about 10,000, Peters said – and the community is growing.

The Wampanoag language had largely died out by the mid-1800s as the number of native speakers dwindled.

The Mashpee tribe also has built a museum, in Mashpee, Massachusetts with exhibits and videos telling the community’s side of the Thanksgiving story.

The history of other groups of Indigenous Americans are also being included in narratives that once only told the European side of the story in the United States.