Thanksgiving Holiday in School

Every year teachers and their students celebrate Thanksgiving. Classes have skits, artwork, songs, and history lessons; and many parents look family time involved in the holiday. Every year most teachers and students imagine that everyone will go home to celebrate this event, which in Anglo-American ideology seems to symbolize the amicable transfer of the "good things" of Indian life to "the Pilgrims." Afterwards, the "Indians" quietly fade into the forest and the past.

Many American Indians hold different views of this event. Some Native American acquaintances of mine find the holiday irrelevant, others find it irritating, still others find it offensive -- a few even observe it as a day of mourning.

How can a teacher deal with this diversity in the classroom?

Go to the Center for World Indigenous Studies' page that provides some good ideas/plans for Teaching Thanksgiving; the introduction is necessary reading. The original document was produced by members of the Highline School District in Washington State.

But you should also read Caleb Johnson's corrections of some historical errors in that document. In some ways, the CWIS reproduced document does not capture the full horror of what happened at the time. Johnson's corrections simply reinforce one's sense of dismay and wonder.

And those corrections raise the questions, "What should we teach our children?" "How should we teach our children?" And, "What is history?"