November
has also once again this year been designated as National Native American
Heritage Month.
In light of the latter, many of us USAmericans need to overcome various Thanksgiving
Day myths that have long been abroad in the land.
Kaitlin
Curtice is a Potawatomi woman and a Christian. In her 2020 book Native:
Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God, she writes how she and other
Native Americans are “bombarded with Thanksgiving myths” every November and how
hard that is.
Curtice writes,
“My non-Native friends have to understand that the myths told at Thanksgiving
only continue the toxic stereotypes and hateful language that has always been
spewed at us” (pp. 67, 68)
“The
Thanksgiving Myth” by Native Circle is explained here in a 2019 post. The authors write,
“The big problem with the American Thanksgiving holiday is
its false association with American Indian people; the infamous 'Indians and
pilgrims' myth.”
They continue, “It is good to celebrate
Thanksgiving, to be thankful for your blessings. It is not good to distort
history, to falsely portray the origin of this holiday and lie about the truth
of its actual inception.”
David
Silverman, a professor at George Washington University who
specializes in Native American and Colonial American history, tells the true American Thanksgiving story
in This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony,
and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (2019).
As UCC pastor Jane McBride writes in her helpful Christian Century review, Silverman begins his lengthy book
“by shattering the myth of the first Thanksgiving.” Then in his concluding
paragraph, Silverman asserts,
The truth exposes the traditional tale of the First Thanksgiving as a myth rather than history, and so let us declare it dead except as a subject for the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture (p. 427).
References
to Thanksgiving myths are not just recent incidences, though. Back in 1986, Chuck
Larsen, a high school history teacher in the state of Washington, wrote how the
Thanksgiving stories most children have learned are “a mixture of both history
and myth.”
Larson emphasized
the “need to try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historical truth.”
He also said, “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.”**
Thankfully,
there are many more resources available now for learning the truth of the first
Thanksgiving than were available in 1986, so there is no excuse for us to hang
on to the old myths.
Overcoming
Thanksgiving Day Myths
There is an abundance of ways to celebrate
Thanksgiving Day without reiterating the Thanksgiving myths, which tend to foster
white Christian nationalism and to whitewash the harsh mistreatment of Native
Americans.
We can begin to overcome those myths by
listening to the scholars such as Silverman and/or to Native American voices such
as Larsen’s as found in his article linked to in the second footnote below.
Then, we can overcome Thanksgiving myths by
focusing primarily on the many blessings we have received from Creator God, who
dearly loves each person and all the people groups in God’s good Creation.
_____
*
“This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They
still regret it 400 years later. Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S.
history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first
Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621” (headlines of a Nov. 4 Washington Post article).
**
Larsen, who has Native American ancestry, wrote “Introduction for Teachers” to
help them in teaching the truth about Thanksgiving Day. That instructive piece
has been reproduced in many places, but here is a link to a PDF version. It is
well worth reading.
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