Wednesday, the spinoff of the Addams Family franchise that focuses on their daughter, has started streaming on Netflix. The gothic horror comedy series has the perfect mixture of scares and laughs, but behind all the entertainment is a deep-rooted connection to American history and the day of Thanksgiving.

The character Wednesday is not someone who will harm others without any reason. She decides to release piranhas into the pool after getting a vision of the school swimming team bullying her brother. She even picks up a fight with a popular girl at school when she finds the latter bullying a little boy.

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So how does the release of Wednesday on November 23 connect with Thanksgiving, which is being celebrated on November 24 this year? Here we explain:

Thanksgiving was unofficially celebrated for the first time by the earliest English settlers (also known as Pilgrims) in America. They were taught how to harvest indigenous crops by Native Americans, and after their first harvest in October 1621, the Pilgrims began celebrating Thanksgiving.

In a very famous scene from the 1993 Addams Family values, we see Wednesday (played by Christina Ricci, who also stars in the spinoff) being cast as a Native American for a Thanksgiving play.

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Wednesday suddenly goes off script and tells an English character, “You have taken the land which is rightfully ours,” further adding, “Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadsides. You will play golf and enjoy hot hors d’oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, ‘Do not trust the pilgrims—especially Sarah Miller.’”

Then Wednesday proceeds to burn down the entire Pilgrim village. The words Wednesday speaks might have been off the script, but they perfectly sums up the systemic oppression that has been levied on native Americans by the European settlers.

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The school attended by Wednesday, Nevermore Academy, is a special school for children with abilities like her. They are thus regarded as ‘outsiders’ and not allowed to go to regular schools.

In one of the scenes of the series, Wednesday is seen serving sweets at an Outreach Day programme with her classmates. On this day, students from Nevermore interact with students from a regular school. Wednesday once again takes the occasion to teach us a lesson in American history.

She offers some sweets to a group of tourists in German, and tells them, “Enjoy your ‘authentic’ pilgrim fudge made with cacao beans procured by the oppressed Indigenous people of the Amazon,” adding, “All proceeds go to uphold this pathetic whitewashing of American history. Also, fudge wasn’t invented for another 258 years. Any takers?”