In the movie Our Brand Is Crisis, Sandra Bullock’s character hears upon arriving in Bolivia that it is like “there were two-hundred million Apache back home.” Bolivia’s poverty and racial inequality derive in no small part from the brutally extractive institutions erected by the Spanish to manage and exploit indigenous labor.

In contrast, Thanksgiving in the United States is a fat-saturated offering of gratitude for the immense economic prosperity made possible by indigenous conquest. From Labrador to Araucanía, aboriginal people paid a steep price for this success. Today, Americans celebrate one possible historical outcome of their ancestors’ encounter with the native populations, but other trajectories are worth contemplating.

The economic historian Douglass North — a complex thinker worth grappling with as well as being a self-described “Marxist of the Right” — blamed institutions for underdevelopment. His argument works the other way, too: The United States boasts about having the world’s greatest democracy, with a broad franchise, extensive civil liberties, and never-fail Whig instincts, leading us to conclude that these institutions are the source of American economic strength. So the standard story goes.