Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

Bonus Post: How Thanksgiving Will Look in 2020, and Indigenous Lives Matter

November 23, 2020

Thanksgiving will look different this year not just due to the pandemic. It is still a holiday in which we should acknowledge our past and as I said in last year’s Thanksgiving post:

As we gather with family and friends this Thanksgiving, we should remember to not only express what we are thankful for but to also learn more about Native American culture and their perspectives about the holiday.

It is especially important now, even while times are hard, to remember what we are thankful for and find ways to safely connect with others. A number of articles including from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal cover what we could do to have a safe holiday during the pandemic whether we are with our families or by ourselves this year. The Wall Street Journal for instance released articles “The Covid Thanksgiving: Outdoor Heaters, Virtual Meals, Grandma Stays Home” and “Traveling for Thanksgiving During the Pandemic? Here’s How to Stay Safe” that discuss the tough decisions people in the United States have to make and share information on what precautions that should be taken if one invites family over for the holidays.

The New York Times released articles as well to provide information on how to handle preparations for Thanksgiving during a pandemic. Anna Goldfarb’s “Solo on the Holiday? Reach Out” released advice for individuals who find themselves by themselves during the holiday. Goldfarb stated various ways to still enjoy the holidays as well as advice on dealing with being by oneself, and had shared more detailed explanations behind them:

  1. Plan ahead
  2. Accept whatever feelings bubble up
  3.  Identify what’s most important to you and focus on achieving it
  4. Take a social media break if you need it
  5. Be gracious and live in the moment
  6. Give back
  7. Rest up

Tara Parker-Pope wrote an article called “Serve Up Some Extra Precautions at Your Thanksgiving Table This Year” which discussed health concerns of the pandemic while sharing what one should do if they decide to invite family members outside of the household for Thanksgiving. Health officials recommend keeping home gatherings small, but it is better to not invite people who do not already live within the household. Parker-Pope also listed them with more detailed explanations behind them, and the following was what she stated in the article if one plans to invite people in the house:

  1. Assess the risk
  2. Ask your guests to take early precautions
  3. Move the dinner outside
  4. Reduce the time you spend together
  5. Wear masks during downtime
  6. Don’t share serving utensils and other items

The links of the previously mentioned articles I have discussed are posted below. In addition to what Thanksgiving would be like this year, I have also paid attention to more information available about indigenous people today and Thanksgiving since the post I wrote last year. I included a link to that post below for more about the history of Thanksgiving.

This past year, I attended the virtual AASLH Annual Meeting and one of the sessions I attended was called #IndigenousLivesMatter: Centering Voices of Indigenous People. The speakers were Fawn Douglas and Ashley Minner, and Patrick Naranjo was the moderator. Fawn Douglas is a member of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, where she previously served as a Tribal Councilwoman; she is an artist whose works include murals and performance that aims to shine a light on race, class, and gender to ask what it means to be Native in the contemporary. Ashley Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland, and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Minner’s current research focuses on the changing relationship between Baltimore’s Lumbee Indian community and the area where they first settled. Patrick Naranjo is the director of the American Indian Graduate Program at the University of California, Berkley. Naranjo has published several articles and continues to transform higher education experiences for Native and Indigenous people through the intersection of Native heritage, academia, and cultural concepts.

All three of them had a discussion about the history and the disparage of the American Indian identity and issue. They emphasized within the session that having some meaningful conversation builds awareness and revisits a narrative of fore change in the current context.  During the session, the speakers shared a number of resources on indigenous nations and to help us identify indigenous people who occupied the land first to help us acknowledge the people who live on the land we live on before us. This conversation is not only an important one to learn how we become better ancestors for future generations (the theme of the AASLH Annual Meeting was What Kind of Ancestor Will You Be?) but it is one of many important examples of why indigenous lives matter. Thanksgiving this year for me will be reflecting on what I am thankful for especially in the mist of the pandemic, and how to be a better individual by learning about indigenous culture as well as the issues that need to be addressed.

I hope everyone has a safe Thanksgiving!

I included an updated list of resources I shared in last year’s blog post on Thanksgiving and Native American culture. These resources came from research that I did on my own, and some that were shared during the AASLH session #IndigenousLivesMatter: Centering Voices of Indigenous People.

Links:

Thanksgiving: How We Are Changing the Way We Teach Kids Why We Celebrate

Solo on the Holiday? Reach Out

Serve Up Some Extra Precautions at Your Thanksgiving Table This Year

The Covid Thanksgiving: Outdoor Heaters, Virtual Meals, Grandma Stays Home: Is it safe to have Thanksgiving? As coronavirus cases surge, families face difficult decisions.

Traveling for Thanksgiving During the Pandemic? Here’s How to Stay Safe The Covid pandemic has thrown uncertainty into this year’s celebrations. Here are tips for those who are getting on the road—or staying at home

Resources:

Thanksgiving:

Getting Through The Holidays During The Pandemic

How to watch this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — and what to expect

Five Ideas to Change Teaching about Thanksgiving, in Classrooms and at Home

Indigenous People, Land, Et. Cetera:

Native Knowledge 360° Essential Understandings about American Indians

The Yup’ik People and Their Culture (#arcticstudies)

Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgment

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Arctic Studies Center

Check Out Indigenous Cinema With the National Museum of the American Indian

Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Alaska

Native Land

Protesters demonstrate against ICE near downtown Las Vegas

Ashley Minner Community Artist

Fawn Douglas Art

U.S. Department of Arts and Culture

Indigenous Digital Archive

IDA Treaties Explorer

Locations of North American Native Nations and Cultural Institutions

Thanksgiving: How We Are Changing the Way We Teach Kids Why We Celebrate

November 25, 2019

Thanksgiving is a few days away, and we reflect on how we teach the next generation about its history. Children in the past began to dress up as Pilgrims and Native Americans for school pageants, make Turkeys in arts and crafts, create headbands with feathers and clothing out of shopping bags, design hats with buckles on top, and listen to stories about the first Thanksgiving. When I was a child, I was taught these lessons and since I grew up in Massachusetts, I made a number of trips to Plimoth Plantation to interact with the living history interpreters. We were taught at a young age that Native Americans and the Pilgrims had their first Thanksgiving in 1621 when they shared food and learned to get along. This story was reinforced especially in the media, and rarely did the media challenge the story.

In the 1993 film Addams Family Values the camp Wednesday and Pugsley Addams attend put on a play based on the first Thanksgiving. Wednesday and other kids considered outcasts of the camp were assigned to portray Native Americans and the rest of the kids were cast as food and Pilgrims. The play began with the typical depiction of what our society has taught children about the first Thanksgiving including the Pilgrims finding common ground with the Native Americans. As one of the characters invited the Native Americans to their table, Wednesday breaks from the play and delivers this speech:

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. 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…”

Wednesday’s speech painted a different picture from the play attempted to tell, and is closer to the reality Native Americans face since their land was taken over. And now? The more we learned about Native Americans, the more we are moving away from this myth we were taught for generations.

I was introduced to the truth about the first Thanksgiving during one of my college History courses. Before we left for Thanksgiving, our professor assigned readings from the book The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz. The Deetzes pointed out the myth of Thanksgiving which opened my eyes more to how this myth was used as a credible source to teach Early American history and the disservice it does to representing the true nature of the Pilgrim/Native American relationship. In recent years, we have started to move away from teaching children the myth.

Time magazine released an article, which will be in the December 2nd through 9th edition of the magazine, focusing on the change in the way American children are learning about the first Thanksgiving. Their article covered a workshop in Washington D.C. called “Rethinking Thanksgiving in Your Classroom” in which teachers learned a better way to teach the Thanksgiving story to their students and to do so they did a lot of studying to learn about the story. The teachers were part of the movement to change the way Thanksgiving is taught in schools that had been stuck in the 19th century’s nostalgic interpretation of the past. While the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, it was not a national holiday until President Abraham Lincoln declared it to be so to unite a country torn by the Civil War. The late 19th century saw a number of instances of rebranding people and events in the first Thanksgiving to fit the idyllic narrative, and by the 1920s Thanksgiving was the most talked about holiday in classrooms while leaving out details that made the settlers look bad. It was assumed that the Native Americans have disappeared which was why non-Native Americans feel comfortable dressing children in costumes; the reality is there are 573 federally recognized tribes today, and the active Native American culture and communities can be found across the country. The 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement, with the growth of the American Indian Movement, made the difference between reality and the story of Thanksgiving harder to ignore.

 Education Week also released an article that covered the turn to a different way to introduce the history of the first Thanksgiving. In addition to explaining the origins of how the celebration of Thanksgiving began and how the myth began to be taught in schools, they discussed when teachers noticed the need for change. Jacob Tsotigh, a citizen of the Kiowa tribe and the tribal education specialist for the National Indian Education Association, was quoted in the article stating that there is decreasingly less focus on the myth as people are made aware of the history being in actuality a myth as well as the realization that there is a different perspective which needs to be considered. While this myth has been shared for approximately 150 years, the Native American perspective has not been recognized in American schools. According to the article, Tsotigh recommended that to help students appreciate colonial oppression of Natives and the violence ensued from it the holiday should be reframed to honor representatives of Native communities who greeted the small number of European visitors at the time with open arms and believed in sharing with those less fortunate.

As we gather with family and friends this Thanksgiving, we should remember to not only express what we are thankful for but to also learn more about Native American culture and their perspectives about the holiday.

I have included additional resources about teaching Thanksgiving for more information. I am thankful to all of you who have either continued to read the blog since the beginning or have just started to read the blog.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Resources:

https://time.com/5725168/thanksgiving-history-lesson/

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/11/22/as-thanksgiving-approaches-unlearning-history-continues.html

Deetz, James, Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony, New York: Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 2000, pg. 22-24.

Additional Resources:

https://blog.nativehope.org/what-does-thanksgiving-mean-to-native-americans

http://www.seattleschild.com/This-Thanksgiving-educate-your-family-about-Native-history-and-culture/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2016/11/27/do-american-indians-celebrate-thanksgiving/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/25/the-invention-of-thanksgiving?fbclid=IwAR3rQIfmcyD29tetwpltW15916fCVsdIoM3dg7V1IAUMgsOyhUe8vywd_wk