Native American educators teach their first Thanksgiving story
It’s that time of year when our youngest learners are coloring pilgrims and Indians and learning the story of the first Thanksgiving. That story has been taught to generation after generation, and generally involves British pilgrims landing in America, sowing crops and sharing the first harvest in a meal with local Native Americans to give thanks for the bounty.
That’s not the story author and educator Jacqueline Keeler learned when she five.
“Growing up, my mom made it very clear to me that there was another story,” said Keeler, who is a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux. Her mother told her the pilgrims coming amounted to “theft of our lands.”
Her mother taught her that Native people did indeed show kindness to the pilgrims arriving. She told her “how much the pilgrims were truly struggling and how desperate they were for the help, [and] the fact that they would not have survived without Native American assistance.”
Her mother also warned her she would hear a different story in school. “She did encourage us to challenge [our teachers] if we heard things that were derogatory towards Native people,” Keeler added.
After all, the real-deal history is not pretty, and the pilgrims aren’t presented accurately in the widespread first Thanksgiving story, according to Keeler and many others.
"Often the pictures are of these white pilgrims in these very crisp clean clothes, you know, bringing in Native people into this bounty,” Keeler said. “Actually they were starving to death, half the people had died, and it was the native people who brought most of the food.”
Keeler is a writer and educator and works with American Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland. She has written about what thanks giving means to Native people, and her work is used in middle school’s to plant the seeds of an alternative narrative. Yet Keeler believes the education must start younger – in preschool and kindergarten. That's precisely the time when the standard narrative of Thanksgiving history is taught.
So what would Keeler say to a room of five-year-olds?
“I would explain what Thanksgiving means to my own people, we have our own Thanksgiving traditions. And one of the things that we give thanks for is our continued existence.”
That’s definitely a deep concept for a five-year-old, but Keeler says, honesty with Native American educators teach their first Thanksgiving story | 89.3 KPCC: