Halloween’s pumpkin-carving tradition: How commercialisation, colonial legacies, and cultural appropriation distort Indigenous harvest rituals into a global spectacle
Original framing: “‘Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers’ brings artistry to a Halloween tradition - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The Wampanoag people’s *Kornetuk’s* festival, held annually before European contact, involved carving gourds and pumpkins as part of a harvest celebration tied to gratitude for the land and communal feasting. This practice predates Halloween by centuries and was rooted in a worldview where agriculture was sacred, not commodified. The modern pumpkin-carving tradition, as commercialised in the U.S., bears little resemblance to these original rituals, which were deeply tied to Indigenous agricultural knowledge and land stewardship. The erasure of these roots in mainstream narratives reflects broader patterns of cultural appropriation where Indigenous practices are stripped of their context and repurposed for profit.
The pumpkin-carving tradition, as it exists today, is a fractured remnant of Indigenous harvest festivals like the Wampanoag *Kornetuk’s*, reshaped by colonial violence, commercialisation, and cultural appropriation.
The mainstream narrative’s focus on individual 'artistry' obscures the systemic forces that transformed these traditions—rooted in land stewardship, ancestral memory, and communal gratitude—into a disposable, consumer-driven spectacle. Corporate Halloween markets, by prioritising novelty and profit over historical context, perpetuate cycles of extraction, erasing the voices of Indigenous knowledge keepers and the labourers who grow the pumpkins. Cross-cultural perspectives reveal how harvest symbols in other traditions (e.g., *Día de los Muertos*, *Tsukimi*) remain tied to cyclical time and land-based economies, contrasting sharply with the linear, extractive logic of Western Halloween. To restore meaning to this tradition, solutions must centre Indigenous-led education, sustainable agricultural practices, and community alternatives that reclaim harvest celebrations from commercialisation. The trickster’s inversion exposes how the 'Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers' trope is a thinly veiled celebration of cultural theft, and the path forward requires accountability, reciprocity, and the reintegration of Indigenous knowledge into modern harvest practices.