(AJ+) Thanksgiving is actually a National Day of Mourning: Native Americans in New England have been hosting an annual protest in Plymouth, Massachusetts since 1970. When was the "first Thanksgiving"? According to demonstrators, it was in 1637, when Gov. John Winthrop hosted a dinner to celebrate the return of soldiers who had massacred 700 Native Americans. These demonstrations are intended to highlight the myth that natives and pilgrims lived together peacefully and that "Indians" gave up their God-given land willingly for some trivial consumer goods the way European invaders claim.
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“I was teaching a lot of misconceptions.” We used to indoctrinate American kids about the “First Thanksgiving”
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| Lies My Teacher Told Me |
On a recent Saturday morning in Washington, D.C., about two dozen secondary-and-elementary-school teachers experienced a role reversal.
This time, it was their turn to take a quiz: answer “true” or “false” for 14 statements about the famous meal known as the “First Thanksgiving.”
Did the people many of us know as pilgrims call themselves Separatists? Did the famous meal last three days? True and true, they shouted loudly in unison. Were the pilgrims originally heading for New Jersey? False.
But some of the other statements drew long pauses, or the soft murmurs of people nervous about saying the wrong thing in front of a group. Renée Gokey, Teacher Services Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, waited patiently for them to respond.
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| Uprooted near Wrigley Field (apmreports.org) |
When Gokey explained that early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a [Native American] Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son, attendees gasped audibly.
“I look back now and realize I was teaching a lot of misconceptions,” Tonia Parker, a second-grade teacher at Island Creek Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, told TIME.
It can sometimes seem that the way kids are taught about Thanksgiving, a staple of American education for about 150 years, is stuck in the past; an elementary school in Mississippi, for example, drew backlash for a Nov. 15 tweet that included photos of kids dressed up as “Native Americans,” with feather headbands and vests made of shopping bags.
But the approximately 25 teachers at that Washington workshop were part of a larger movement to change the way the story is taught. More
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