IJMC Teaching About Thanksgiving

                   IJMC - Teaching About Thanksgiving

Imagine this: The IJMC actually tries to send something educational. I'm 
sure something's going to stop this post, it's just not right with the 
world. I've read the whole thing through and I'll admit, it makes me want 
to know more. I hope it has the same effect on you.                 -dave







Date: 6 Nov 1996 19:16:16 GMT
From: Dennis McClain-Furmanski <dmcclain@runet.edu>
Subject: Thanksgiving History

Here's my annual repost of this piece.


 T E A C H I N G   A B O U T   T H A N K S G I V I N G

                        Dr. Frank B. Brouillet
                 Superintendent of Public Instruction
                         State of Washington

                             Cheryl Chow
                       Assistant Superintendent
           Division of Instructional Programs and Services

                           Warren H. Burton
                               Director
            Office for Multicultural and Equity Education

                         Dr. Willard E. Bill
                    Supervisor of Indian Education

                 Originally written and developed by
     Cathy Ross, Mary Robertson, Chuck Larsen, and Roger Fernandes
              Indian Education, Highline School District

                       With an introduction by:
                             Chuck Larsen
                        Tacoma School District

                       Printed: September, 1986

                         Reprinted: May, 1987


                   AN INTRODUCTION FOR TEACHERS

          This is a particularly difficult introduction to
     write. I have been a public schools teacher for twelve
     years, and I am also a historian and have written several
     books on American and Native American history. I also just
     happen to be Quebeque French, Metis, Ojibwa, and Iroquois.
     Because my Indian ancestors were on both sides of the
     struggle between the Puritans and the New England Indians
     and I am well versed in my cultural heritage and history
     both as an Anishnabeg (Algokin) and Hodenosione (Iroquois),
     it was felt that I could bring a unique insight to the
     project.

          For an Indian, who is also a school teacher,
     Thanksgiving was never an easy holiday for me to deal with
     in class. I sometimes have felt like I learned too much
     about "the Pilgrims and the Indians." Every year I have
     been faced with the professional and moral dilemma of just
     how to be honest and informative with my children at
     Thanksgiving without passing on historical distortions, and
     racial and cultural stereotypes.

          The problem is that part of what you and I learned in
     our own childhood about the "Pilgrims" and "Squanto" and
     the "First Thanksgiving" is a mixture of both history and
     myth. But the THEME of Thanksgiving has truth and integrity
     far above and beyond what we and our forebearers have made
     of it. Thanksgiving is a bigger concept than just the story
     of the founding of the Plymouth Plantation.

          So what do we teach to our children? We usually pass
     on unquestioned what we all received in our own childhood
     classrooms. I have come to know both the truths and the
     myths about our "First Thanksgiving," and I feel we need to
     try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historic
     truth. This text is an attempt to do this.

          At this point you are probably asking, "What is the
     big deal about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims?" "What does
     this guy mean by a mixture of truths and myth?" That is
     just what this introduction is all about. I propose that
     there may be a good deal that many of us do not know about
     our Thanksgiving holiday and also about the "First
     Thanksgiving" story. I also propose that what most of us
     have learned about the Pilgrims and the Indians who were at
     the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation is only part
     of the truth. When you build a lesson on only half of the
     information, then you are not teaching the whole truth.
     That is why I used the word myth. So where do you start to
     find out more about the holiday and our modern stories
     about how it began?

          A good place to start is with a very important book,
     "The Invasion of America," by Francis Jennings. It is a
     very authoritative text on the settlement of New England
     and the evolution of Indian/White relations in the New
     England colonies. I also recommend looking up any good text
     on British history. Check out the British Civil War of
     1621-1642, Oliver Cromwell, and the Puritan uprising of
     1653 which ended parliamentary government in England until
     1660. The history of the Puritan experience in New England
     really should not be separated from the history of the
     Puritan experience in England. You should also realize that
     the "Pilgrims" were a sub sect, or splinter group, of the
     Puritan movement. They came to America to achieve on this
     continent what their Puritan bretheran continued to strive
     for in England; and when the Puritans were forced from
     England, they came to New England and soon absorbed the
     original "Pilgrims."

          As the editor, I have read all the texts listed in our
     bibliography, and many more, in preparing this material for
     you. I want you to read some of these books. So let me use
     my editorial license to deliberately provoke you a little.
     When comparing the events stirred on by the Puritans in
     England with accounts of Puritan/Pilgrim activities in New
     England in the same era, several provocative things suggest
     themselves:

     1. The Puritans were not just simple religious
        conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of
        England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were
        political revolutionaries who not only intended to
        overthrow the government of England, but who actually
        did so in 1649.

     2. The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not
        simply refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's
        hands" in the "empty wilderness" of North America, as a
        generation of Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture
        at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often
        outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not
        fit into the mainstream of their society. This is not to
        imply that people who settle on frontiers have no
        redeeming qualities such as bravery, etc., but that the
        images of nobility that we associate with the Puritans
        are at least in part the good "P.R." efforts of later
        writers who have romanticized them.(1) It is also very
        plausible that this unnaturally noble image of the
        Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology of "Noble
        Civilization" vs. "Savagery."(2) At any rate, mainstream
        Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate
        religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation
        completely independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643
        the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent
        confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before
        the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent
        occurrence of Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to
        establish here in the new world the "Kingdom of God"
        foretold in the book of Revelation. They diverged from
        their Puritan brethren who remained in England only in
        that they held little real hope of ever being able to
        successfully overthrow the King and Parliament and,
        thereby, impose their "Rule of Saints" (strict Puritan
        orthodoxy) on the rest of the British people. So they
        came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but
        in a hundred others as well, with every intention of
        taking the land away from its native people to build
        their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."(3)

     3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from
        religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in
        England, but some of them were themselves religious
        bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the
        Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned
        in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first
        themselves and then everyone else of everything they did
        not accept in their own interpretation of scripture.
        Later New England Puritans used any means, including
        deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to
        achieve that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a
        holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with
        them was the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was
        transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it
        sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we
        have of them. This is best illustrated in the written
        text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in
        1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it, Mather the Elder gave
        special thanks to God for the devastating plague of
        smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag
        Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God
        for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very
        seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way
        for a better growth", i.e., the Pilgrims.(5) In as much
        as these Indians were the Pilgrim's benefactors, and
        Squanto, in particular, was the instrument of their
        salvation that first year, how are we to interpret this
        apparent callousness towards their misfortune?

     4. The Wampanoag Indians were not the "friendly savages"
        some of us were told about when we were in the primary
        grades. Nor were they invited out of the goodness of the
        Pilgrims' hearts to share the fruits of the Pilgrims'
        harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and
        interracial brotherhood. The Wampanoag were members of a
        widespread confederacy of Algonkian-speaking peoples
        known as the League of the Delaware. For six hundred
        years they had been defending themselves from my other
        ancestors, the Iroquois, and for the last hundred years
        they had also had encounters with European fishermen and
        explorers but especially with European slavers, who had
        been raiding their coastal villages.(6) They knew
        something of the power of the white people, and they did
        not fully trust them. But their religion taught that
        they were to give charity to the helpless and
        hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty
        hands.(7) Also, Squanto, the Indian hero of the
        Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British
        explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a second
        father to him several years before the Pilgrims arrived
        at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these Pilgrims as
        Weymouth's people.(8) To the Pilgrims the Indians were
        heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the
        Devil. Squanto, as the only educated and baptized
        Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely an
        instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide for
        the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims. The
        Indians were comparatively powerful and, therefore,
        dangerous; and they were to be courted until the next
        ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and the
        balance of power shifted. The Wampanoag were actually
        invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of
        negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the
        Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be
        noted that the INDIANS, possibly out of a sense of
        charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the
        majority of the food for the feast.(9)

     5. A generation later, after the balance of power had
        indeed shifted, the Indian and White children of that
        Thanksgiving were striving to kill each other in the
        genocidal conflict known as King Philip's War. At the
        end of that conflict most of the New England Indians
        were either exterminated or refugees among the French in
        Canada, or they were sold into slavery in the Carolinas
        by the Puritans. So successful was this early trade in
        Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners in Boston
        began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa
        for black slaves to sell to the proprietary colonies of
        the South, thus founding the American-based slave
        trade.(10)

          Obviously there is a lot more to the story of
     Indian/Puritan relations in New England than in the
     thanksgiving stories we heard as children. Our contemporary
     mix of myth and history about the "First" Thanksgiving at
     Plymouth developed in the 1890s and early 1900s. Our
     country was desperately trying to pull together its many
     diverse peoples into a common national identity. To many
     writers and educators at the end of the last century and
     the beginning of this one, this also meant having a common
     national history. This was the era of the "melting pot"
     theory of social progress, and public education was a major
     tool for social unity. It was with this in mind that the
     federal government declared the last Thursday in November
     as the legal holiday of Thanksgiving in 1898.

          In consequence, what started as an inspirational bit
     of New England folklore, soon grew into the full-fledged
     American Thanksgiving we now know. It emerged complete with
     stereotyped Indians and stereotyped Whites, incomplete
     history, and a mythical significance as our "First
     Thanksgiving." But was it really our FIRST American
     Thanksgiving?

          Now that I have deliberately provoked you with some
     new information and different opinions, please take the
     time to read some of the texts in our bibliography. I want
     to encourage you to read further and form your own
     opinions. There really is a TRUE Thanksgiving story of
     Plymouth Plantation. But I strongly suggest that there
     always has been a Thanksgiving story of some kind or other
     for as long as there have been human beings. There was also
     a "First" Thanksgiving in America, but it was celebrated
     thirty thousand years ago.(11) At some time during the New
     Stone Age (beginning about ten thousand years ago)
     Thanksgiving became associated with giving thanks to God
     for the harvests of the land. Thanksgiving has always been
     a time of people coming together, so thanks has also been
     offered for that gift of fellowship between us all. Every
     last Thursday in November we now partake in one of the
     OLDEST and most UNIVERSAL of human celebrations, and THERE
     ARE MANY THANKSGIVING STORIES TO TELL.

          As for Thanksgiving week at Plymouth Plantation in
     1621, the friendship was guarded and not always sincere,
     and the peace was very soon abused. But for three days in
     New England's history, peace and friendship were there.

          So here is a story for your children. It is as kind
     and gentle a balance of historic truth and positive
     inspiration as its writers and this editor can make it out
     to be. I hope it will adequately serve its purpose both for
     you and your students, and I also hope this work will
     encourage you to look both deeper and farther, for
     Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving all around the world.

     Chuck Larsen
     Tacoma Public Schools
     September, 1986

     FOOTNOTES FOR TEACHER INTRODUCTION

          (1)  See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's
     Indian," references to Puritans, pp. 27, 80-85, 90, 104, &
     130.

          (2)  See Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's
     Indian," references to frontier concepts of savagery in
     index. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of
     America," the myth of savagery, pp. 6-12, 15-16, & 109-110.

          (3) See Blitzer, Charles, "Age of Kings," Great Ages
     of Man series, references to Puritanism, pp. 141, 144 &
     145-46. Also see Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of
     America," references to Puritan human motives, pp. 4-6, 43-
     44 and 53.

          (4) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp.
     6-10. Also see Armstrong, Virginia I., "I Have Spoken,"
     reference to Cannonchet and his village, p. 6. Also see
     Jennings, Francis, "The Invasion of America," Chapter 9
     "Savage War," Chapter 13 "We must Burn Them," and Chapter
     17 "Outrage Bloody and Barbarous."

          (5) See "Chronicles of American Indian Protest," pp.
     6-9. Also see Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., "The White Man's
     Indian," the comments of Cotton Mather, pp. 37 & 82-83.

          (6) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving,"
     pp. 3-4. Also see Graff, Steward and Polly Ann, "Squanto,
     Indian Adventurer." Also see "Handbook of North American
     Indians," Vol. 15, the reference to Squanto on p. 82.

          (7) See Benton-Banai, Edward, "The Mishomis Book," as
     a reference on general "Anishinabe" (the Algonkin speaking
     peoples) religious beliefs and practices. Also see Larsen,
     Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving," reference to religious
     life on p. 1.

          (8) See Graff, Stewart and Polly Ann, "Squanto, Indian
     Adventurer." Also see Larsen, Charles M., "The Real
     Thanksgiving." Also see Bradford, Sir William, "Of Plymouth
     Plantation," and "Mourt's Relation."

          (9) See Larsen, Charles M., "The Real Thanksgiving,"
     the letter of Edward Winslow dated 1622, pp. 5-6.

          (10) See "Handbook of North American Indians," Vol.
     15, pp. 177-78. Also see "Chronicles of American Indian
     Protest," p. 9, the reference to the enslavement of King
     Philip's family. Also see Larsen, Charles, M., "The Real
     Thanksgiving," pp. 8-11, "Destruction of the Massachusetts
     Indians."

          (11) Best current estimate of the first entry of
     people into the Americas confirmed by archaeological
     evidence that is datable.

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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.
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