This is certainly the time of year where we focus on gratitude and giving thanks. And if I ask our students about Thanksgiving, chances are good that they will have lots of stories to tell about family traditions, special visits with relatives, eating certain foods, maybe participating in turkey trots, or watching parades and football. I am willing to bet that our youngest learners, our preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders don't know a whole lot about the first Thanksgiving. They might be able to tell me that Pilgrims and Native Americans ate a meal together, but they probably don't know much else. For many of us, we were taught that the first Thanksgiving was about the Pilgrims and the Native Americans sitting down to have a feast together. We learned about how Pilgrims landed and began to settle. We learned about Pilgrims meeting Native Americans and how helpful they were to the Pilgrims. But we didn't learn about how the Native Americans were already settled here and the Pilgrims took their land. We didn't learn that it was a time of suffering and even death. Instead, we were only told one story while we made our stereotypical feather headbands out of construction paper and acted out a peaceful Thanksgiving meal. We didn't know any better. But now we do. And we have the chance to undo years of damage and start encouraging our kids to ask questions about who is missing from the traditional Thanksgiving stories. I love the quote from Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." Now that we know better about the story of Thanksgiving, it's time to do better. The first step is educating ourselves. Have you taken the time to learn the real story? It's ok if you haven't. I am including some links at the end of this post. I encourage you to take some time to read about the first Thanksgiving as told from the Native American perspective. The next important step is to take a look at the books and materials that we have in our classroom and share with our students. I encourage you to consider doing an activity or leading a discussion with your students where you help them start to question whose story is being told. Whose story is missing? Let's get our students to start questioning, to be curious, to wonder and to seek out all sides of the story. Besides being the month of Thanksgiving, did you know that November is Native American Heritage Month? Do your students know that? This is also the month that we all have experience with focusing on gratitude and giving thanks. And that is important to continue to do with our students. I hope you will continue to tie in gratitude to your lessons during this month, but I also hope you will begin to help change the narrative that we grew up with around the story of Thanksgiving. Teaching The History of Thanksgiving with Equity An Authentic Look at Thanksgiving American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving Thanksgving: Practicing Gratitude and Honoring the Real Story Here is just one of many lists of books written by Native American authors that you can share with your class: https://socialjusticebooks.org/booklists/american-indians/ I am including pictures of two beautiful books that I have in my office if anyone wants to borrow them and then the book about the first Thanksgiving told from the Wampanoag perspective, I just won some copies of it and hope that they will arrive in the mail this week.
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