The time around the Thanksgiving is my favorite time of year. I love fall colors, the smell of the fire, and fall foods. I also love the idea of gratitude and that this is a time of thankfulness and reflection. However, there are so many myths surrounding Thanksgiving, some of which are downright lies, that we have to help our students unlearn, so this time of year also offers us the opportunity to teach historically accurate material and empathy in a way that ties into something that our students either experience through their own celebrations or by seeing Thanksgiving in popular culture.

Don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly love the Thanksgiving holiday. What I don’t love is the story of the friendly meal between “Pilgrims and Indians” that gets taught to children or the feather headbands people wear at community Thanksgiving feasts. Thanksgiving is about gratitude, sharing, and community, and the teaching of the “first Thanksgiving” myth takes away from that in a way that both erases wrongdoing in history and allows an untrue story to hurt some of our communities in the process. National myths are very powerful stories.

I spent this year’s Thanksgiving lesson debunking the “first Thanksgiving” myth.  The whole idea behind it is to help students rethink the holiday in a way that emphasizes gratitude, sharing, and community and remake the story of “Thanksgiving,” all the while learning the true history behind that mythical meal between Pilgrims and Indians and why it is an inappropriate way to celebrate thankfulness.

A resource I’ve used in the past is BrainPop’s Thanksgiving video.  This video is great if you’re going to focus on telling a truthful Thanksgiving story about the relationship between Puritans (not Pilgrims!) and the Wampanoag, the tribe that bailed out the settler-colonists from England when the Puritans nearly starved.  The relationship between the two was precarious and the reason the Wampanoag were even around the day of the Puritans’ gratitude feast was because they heard the Puritans shooting guns and wanted to make sure they weren’t getting ready to attack the tribe.  Basically, the Wampanoag went with a war party to check on the Puritans, and then ended up staying for dinner.  BrainPop explains all of this in enough detail for my middle school students to understand that the images of little Puritans in buckled hats and shoes with smiles at a table with unidentified Indigenous people who are dressed incorrectly are deceiving.  BrainPop also addresses the fact that Thanksgiving is not a happy holiday for some Indigenous people: it is one that reminds them of death and destruction; therefore they don’t celebrate.

This year, my colleagues and I used James Lowen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me to help us decenter the first meal story. In the book, Lowen goes into great detail about how Thanksgiving came to be, but the part I used with students was about how the story of “Pilgrims” didn’t come into the picture until 1890. If Pilgrims weren’t part of the story until the 1890s, then there must be many layers we have to peel away to get to the root of Thanksgiving in the U.S. Yes, Lincoln made Thanksgiving an official federal holiday in 1864 as an attempt atunification during the Civil War. Yes, Sara Josepha Hale was responsible for a federal Thanksgiving campaign by writing letters to politicians and using her position as editor of The Ladies’ Magazine to influence Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward. Yes, Thanksgivings were celebrated by different states on different days prior to 1864. And, yes, Indigneous people gave thanks in many ways in their communities for centuries. Why not focus on any of these instead of the fake story that ignores the violent history between Europeans and Indigenous people?

To decenter the myth and center a more accurate story, especially those of Indigenous peoples, students worked in pods to read these posters from the National Museum of the American Indian and this information about Washington and Thanksgiving from Mount Vernon.  Next time I do this lesson, I might also include one of Sarah Josepha Hale’s letters and Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation so that I can provide more evidence that Thanksgiving is not based on that famous dinner and also add women’s history into the fray.  Student groups read three sources each- some they chose and others I provided for the group- and they had to answer the following questions while reading each one:

1. What is the meaning of Thanksgiving according to the perspective you’re reading?  (This question required inference!)
2. What is one connection you can make between Thanksgiving and gratitude based on what you read?
3. What do you still wonder?
4. How can this source help tell the Thanksgiving story in a different, more truthful way?

    As students read, I walked around the room listening in.  I can’t stress how important this is given that the conversation could go awry since you’re un-teaching a lot of them something that they thought they knew.  Additionally, stereotypes about Indigenous peoples work their way into conversations, and sometimes students know what they’re saying, but other times they just don’t know what they don’t know. You have to be there to support Indigenous students and also help other students learn to do better.

    To culminate, students wrote a journal entry using the following prompt:

After hearing common Thanksgiving myths then reading about Indigenous perspectives and reading about thanksgiving in the 18th century, do you think that the way we explain and talk about Thanksgiving in popular culture should change? Why or why not? What would you like the narrative to be?

I reiterated to students that the purpose of this lesson was not to “ruin Thanksgiving.” I wanted them to understand the erasure of Indigenous cultural traditions and the violence to which they were subjects that is promoted with the Thanksgiving story we often hear in popular culture and that we have the power to make Thanksgiving about something far better. They also need to recognize the harm untrue stories do to people. There’s a way to have Thanksgiving with gratitude, community, and sharing at the center by recognizing the real history around it. We can give thanks with a grateful heart in many ways and for many reasons. The purpose of everything I do with my students is to help them see history from many perspectives. Sometimes my job as a teacher is to let kids know that not all history is celebratory, either. Other times it is to unravel National myth to uncover the truth. My job is always, however, to give them hope. In this case, I tried to accomplish all four.