The First Thanksgiving

As early as we can remember, we can remember celebrating Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving in itself is not such a bad thing.  We are told to be thankful for the things we have.  However, how it is often portrayed by textbooks and in schools is far from the positive.  As we have been reading, textbooks simply omit or add information to make their story more appealing to the reader, but this leaves us with the question, what really happened?

Textbooks often leave out the earliest settlers, for example, not only are the American Indians left out of the story, but also the Spanish and how they settled much of the west.  As European exploration and settlement increased, American Indians were faced with devastating illnesses.  American Indians practiced healthy living standards, but they were unexposed to any illnesses; therefore, with European contact, they became ill and their population diminished quickly.  We have all heard that story before; the American Indians faced diseases; however, the fact that many settlers attributed the American Indians' deaths to God gracing their settlement.  To leave controversy out of texts, the authors eliminate this type of unappealing religious blessing.  Most Christians, today, would not like to think the death upon people was wished upon by their God.  It is always easier to leave religion out, but should we?  I don't think so; I think it adds an important aspect to understanding the motivations and aspirations of the settlers.

Back to Thanksgiving: so let me get this straight: we are saying thank you for people dying of diseases; we are saying thank you for stealing food; we are saying thank you for robbing graves for our benefit?......thank you, but really I'm sorry.

This notion can be very offensive to the American Indians, whom which, settlers robbed the graves of the deceased, enslaved their ancestors, stole their food, and took away their livelihood.  Lowen's describes a Wampanoag that was asked to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing.  However, his speech was not found acceptable because it revealed the facts.  The speech began, "today is a time of celebrating for you...but it is not a time of celebrating for me.  It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People." The speech contained nothing offensive, simply the truth.

The earliest thanksgiving was not introduced by the Pilgrims.  The Eastern Indians had celebrated autumnal harvest for centuries.  Abraham Lincoln finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday.  However, pilgrims did not have a part in Thanksgiving until the 1890s.  So where do we get this idea that we all celebrated at a table together and that "the Indians had never seen such a feast!"?

We keep the idea of this Thanksgiving by having our children dress as Pilgrims and Indians to reenact the first Thanksgiving in schools, but shouldn't school be the place that misconceptions are cleared up? Instead textbooks and teachers alike are familiar with the long standing story of Thanksgiving; therefore, the story gets perpetuated.  We don't have to present Thanksgiving in an all bad way, after all it is a national holiday that brings us together.  Instead, we can show students that there are two sides to the story.  If students are presented with both sides of the story, they can see the conflict and create relatable moments to the present.  In doing this, Thanksgiving would probably become much more meaningful for our youth, instead of simply telling them to be grateful for what you have.

This was my take on Loewen's Chapter 3, The Truth About the First Thanksgiving.