Reznet

Finding New Ways to Celebrate Thanksgiving

By Kevin Abourezk

On Thanksgiving Day, families across the country will sit down at tables covered with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy. They'll get tired and fall asleep as the Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Cowboys toss the pigskin on the boob tube.

But for the days and weeks leading up to that day, children in classrooms around the United States will learn about the history of this tradition from their teachers.

They'll learn about the Pilgrims and Indians, about starvation and generosity, about a moment caught in time when two societies as foreign to each other as birds to fish embraced one another and shared a feast.

For many children, this lesson will culminate with a mock feast in which half the children will wear black and white Pilgrim clothes and hats, while the other half wear faux buckskin vests and headdresses.

They'll eat turkey and perpetuate stereotypes as old as America itself. All in the spirit of celebration.

How do I know this?

First of all, because I've been the one dressed up as an Indian (and as a Pilgrim one year by a teacher who thought that would be more politically correct).

And secondly, because my wife teaches second grade and knows other teachers who continue this unfortunate tradition.

Recently, my wife showed me a post to a teachers' Web site in which one teacher described how one year she had half her kindergartners wear Pilgrim hats and white collars and had the other half wear grocery bag vests and feathered headbands to reenact the Thanksgiving feast.

The teacher admitted it "wasn't very PC, but the kiddos loved it and the parents did to (sic)."

My wife, always the activist, asked me, always the diplomat, to please help her craft a response to the misguided teacher, who obviously didn't get it.

Sitting down at the computer together, we wrote a response to the teacher's post, suggesting that by portraying Native people in a purely historical manner the teacher was giving her students the impression that Native Americans no longer exist. That they are a thing of the past.

My wife related how a student had just the week before asked her if Native Americans were still alive.

The question forced my wife to consider, how could her student possibly have gotten the idea that Indians are no more?

Then she realized: All her student sees and reads about Native Americans is historical. She doesn't see them living, working or sharing her classroom today.

As with most things she has never seen (Santa, the Tooth Fairy), the girl believed Indians didn't exist.

We let the teacher know that the cliche Thanksgiving portrayal of Native Americans and Pilgrims sharing a table together perpetuates that false idea, as well as another mistaken notion - that Native Americans celebrate the historical feast between Pilgrims and Indians.

They do not, we told the teacher.

For Indians, that feast is a symbol of the betrayal, of the killing and of the forced removal from their homelands that followed.

We told the teacher we understood her desire to skip over this "messy bit of history" in favor of creating a warm, fuzzy experience for her students, but that by neglecting history she was doing her students a great disservice.

We suggested this: that she find a Native American in her community and ask that person to visit her classroom on a day this month to talk to her students about what Thanksgiving means to him or her.

We told her that person would likely be happy to share their thoughts and feelings on this difficult subject and wouldn't preach if asked in a spirit of truth-seeking.

We never heard from that teacher.

But others who saw the post thanked my wife for sharing her thoughts.

One even said she planned to take her suggestion.

Now wouldn't that be a true Thanksgiving?

Kevin Abourezk's "Red Clout" columns are available for syndication. Please contact reznet to purchase republishing rights.

Kevin Abourezk, Rosebud Lakota, is a reporter and editor at the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star. He writes reznet's "Red Clout" political blog and teaches reporting at the Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute. Abourezk was awarded a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism in 2006.

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