Thanksgiving Tales

The #1 most emailed article at the LA Times today concerns a controversy over kindergarteners from one Claremont elementary school dressing up as Native Americans and trekking over to visit kids at another Claremont elementary who would dress as Pilgrims.  Apparently, a mom/Seneca/professor of Native American literature, along with some friends and colleagues who also happened to be parents of children at the school, objected that this cartoonish dressing-up was demeaning.

“I’m sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation’s history.”

So the debate rages on over whether this is an example of radical political correctness or whether it’s just innocent tradition.  If you want to get into that mess, first try the Mother Of All Debunking of Thanksgiving Myths; it’s by an historian of pilgrims.  Sample juicy tidbit: pilgrims didn’t only wear black and white.  In fact, surviving portraits include them in a variety of the same warm, fall tones found in your latest Vogue: scarlet, russet, green, gray, blue, brown.

So here are some facts for you from the History Channel, not known as a hotbed of radical influence (though some of the stuff on that site is also debunked by the above-mentioned Mother of All Thanksgiving Debunking Sites):

1621: What is commonly accepted (except maybe in Texas and Florida) as the first Thanksgiving (i.e. shared harvest feast) happened at Plymouth.

1863: After being petitioned by Sarah Hale, the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb, Lincoln first established a national day of Thanksgiving to heal the divides of the Civil War.

1941: FDR established it as a permanent national holiday, though the date he set was the last Thursday in November.

So it’s not written in stone, and it’s been promoted for different purposes.

Here’s my question:  Why are so many of these ‘American’ traditions centered around New England history?

Why are little California kindergartners always having to dress up as pilgrims and whatnot, read about spring and winter and summer and fall, and make sense of the history of the US as starting in Massachusetts and Virginia and moving gradually our way west?  Our state social studies standards don’t do this, but most literature that is read in classrooms has this exact viewpoint.  Just because Sarah Hale had a bee in her Boston bonnet about her forefathers, the various and complex interactions between Spaniards and Native Americans, Hawaiians and Europeans, Mexicans and Native Americans and white settlers, the French, and of course Africans–all of that–gets whitewashed into happy little construction paper hats?  Or maybe it wasn’t Sarah Hale–I just discovered this link to Sarah’s efforts to include everyone in the American nation in her vision of Thanksgiving.

If Thanksgiving was created again and again as a holiday to heal wounds and recognize hardship–and give thanks for having survived–isn’t there room at the Thanksgiving table for all sorts of stories, not just that of one unusually harmonious year in the life of the Plymouth Bay Colony?

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