Classroom and historical perspectives on Thanksgiving offer food for thought
As students and teachers closed out the last school day last week before the Thanksgiving break began, the holiday was on the minds of many at Sam Houston Elementary School.
The entire third grade gathered in teacher Jessica Ledesma’s classroom, individually decorated turkey hats atop every head, to read a Thanksgiving story together.
Students and teachers read aloud “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey.” Each student got to take home a copy of the book.
“Before we start reading, I want somebody to tell me, what do you think Thanksgiving’s all about?” Ledesma asked.
Friends and family, one student said. Eating turkey, another said. One student was particularly looking forward to dressing their dog up as a turkey.
After the reading, students put their creative skills to work creating a hand-puppet and turkey for the puppet to eat.
In kindergarten teacher Sally Attwood’s class, students listened to “The Night Before Thanksgiving” and drew foods they’d like to eat.
Down the hall in pre-K, teacher Melissa Guerra’s students practiced speaking in complete sentences while sharing what they are thankful for. The children listed family members, from mom and dad to grandpa and grandma, occasionally chiming in with what letter they believed a word started with.
“We’ve talked all week about being thankful,” Guerra said. “We had them make a placemat and we talked about how their families are thankful for them and how they’re important to their families. Today was about them being thankful for the people in their lives.”
After, the children, who were dressed not only in turkey hats, but also turkey outfits made of large paper bags, gathered for a “friends-giving” meal. The meal was also educational – students practiced their socialization skills.
“They’re talking amongst each other,” Guerra said. “That helps with socialization skills and helping them become more vocal.”
Thanksgiving history
In Texas, the Texas Education Agency’s essential knowledge and skills, or TEKS, for social studies don’t require Thanksgiving specific lessons.
The earliest grade that specifically delves into U.S. history is fifth grade. Discussion of European colonization begins with the founding of St. Augustine in 1565. Puritan governor of Plymouth Colony William Bradford and the Mayflower Compact is also included in the TEKS.
U.S. history comes back again in eighth grade. Included in the TEKS are the arrival of pilgrims and the signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 and exploration and colonization more generally.
But Thanksgiving itself isn’t outlined specifically in the TEKS for either grade level.
In high school, unless students opt for an Advanced Placement, dual credit or International Baccalaureate class, their U.S. history class only covers from 1877 onward.
But Thanksgiving is one of the major holidays in the public school calendar, with many districts offering students a full week away from the classroom. Because of this, it does tend to come up in the form of celebrations focused on the modern holiday and the concept of gratitude.
“We follow a curriculum and our curriculum doesn’t stop for Thanksgiving,” Sam Houston Elementary School instructional coach Valerie Sanchez said.
In Corpus Christi ISD, instructional guides for elementary schools did include some Thanksgiving activities so that teachers could celebrate with students while still working on academic skills, including reading turkey- or gratitude-themed stories.
“They’re more teaching about traditions and what it means to be thankful,” Sanchez said.
Despite the popular image of pilgrims and Native Americans in society, the lack of focus in the classroom on the first Thanksgiving in 1621 isn’t too surprising when the history of the holiday itself is taken into account.
In the fall of 1621, the Wampanoag people and English settlers celebrated a successful harvest in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The English in Plymouth survived that first year thanks to the help of the Wampanoag.
In Del Mar College professor Jim Klein’s U.S. history classes, Thanksgiving does occasionally come up.
“I talk about it actually when we’re talking about the social activism,” Klein said. “AIM, the American Indian Movement, organizes demonstrations on Thanksgiving weekend because Native Americans see it very differently than European Americans.”
Native American activists including AIM occupied Alcatraz Island, then an abandoned federal penitentiary, for 19 months between November 1969 and until June 1971.
“They took back this one small piece of federal land for all the lands that have been improperly, illegally taken from different tribes,” Klein said.
Events have been held on Thanksgiving on Alcatraz since 1975 commemorating the occupation. Since the 1970s, some Native people have observed Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning, with protests in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
For some, Thanksgiving is a reminder of the forced removal and displacement of Native Americans from traditional homelands across North America, Klein said.
Though the Wampanoag initially saw the English settlers as potential allies against other groups in the area, relations between the two deteriorated as the Puritans expanded. Only 50 years later, the English and the Wampanoag were at war in King Philip’s War, named for Wampanoag leader who attempted to stop expansion of the Puritans.
That leader, known as Metacom, Metacomet, Pometacom or King Philip, was the son of the earlier Wampanoag leader who allied with the English and helped the Plymouth Colony survive. The war is sometimes described as the bloodiest conflict in American history based on per capita deaths.
Klein said that the more students study history, the more nuanced their understanding of the stories they’ve heard their whole lives can become. Beyond Thanksgiving, Klein made the comparison to Christopher Columbus – Columbus is an explorer honored in the U.S. with Columbus Day and the namesake of many places and institutions across the country, but he also brutally enslaved and maimed many Indigenous people.
“I ask my students, ‘Have you ever heard that story about Christopher Columbus?’ and most of them say no,” Klein said.
Klein said that his students often say they should have learned about these darker sides of history before college.
“But if you agree that we should hear these negative aspects of history, whether it’s Christopher Columbus or the Puritans in high school, should we hear that in eighth grade, seventh grade? What if you walk back further to the earliest social studies classes in what, fourth grade?” Klein said. “At that point, a good number of students, not all, but the majority say they don’t think kids that young should be hearing those stories.”
Thanksgiving doesn’t really come up in Texas A&M University-Kingsville professor Dean Ferguson’s class. When he first began teaching, he sometimes discussed the holiday when teaching the development of the cult of domesticity in the early 19th century and the sentimentalization of the family.
Thanksgiving was not celebrated nationwide until about 200 years after the Puritans and Wampanoag celebrated together.
Other thanksgiving celebrations were also held in a similar manner throughout this era, based on religious traditions and tied to local times of good fortune. U.S. President George Washington called for a national Thanksgiving in 1789, celebrating the creation of the U.S.
“We think of ‘Thanksgiving’ with a capital ’T’,” Ferguson said. “But thanksgiving is really something the Puritans did often. They joined it with fast. They would hold days of fasting particularly when they were under stress, when there was some threat to the community... then when there was, as they saw it, an answer or a relief to that stress, they would have a day of thanksgiving.”
This Puritan tradition is based on earlier European religious practices. In fact, other “thanksgivings” were held even before 1621 celebrating successful voyages by other explorers and settlers to the Americas – like the Spanish in Florida in 1513 or in Texas in 1541 and 1598.
In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Thanksgiving in the midst of the American Civil War calling for peace, union and harmony. Lincoln’s proclamation, similar to Washington’s, doesn’t mention 1621, Plymouth or the pilgrims.
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday from the last Thursday of November up a week earlier between 1939 and 1941, Congress made the fourth Thursday in November the permanent observation date for Thanksgiving, lengthening the Christmas shopping season.
In the years since, for many, celebrating Thanksgiving has come to include parades and football match-ups. One theme that has remained is the idea of coming together to express gratitude. Today’s Thanksgiving meals often feature turkey, while the feast of 1621 featured deer, waterfowl and fish.
"The early Puritan celebration probably had very little to do with the development of the Thanksgiving holiday or Thanksgiving practices,” Ferguson said.
Centering Native American perspectives
The National Musuem of the American Indian has a resource guide for rethinking Thanksgiving celebrations focused on looking beyond the myth of Thanksgiving.
Romanticized and stereotypical descriptions of Pilgrims and generic “Indians” grew out of a sense of national nostalgia and is tied to the sentiment of manifest destiny that the U.S. used to rationalize westward expansion.
According to the museum’s article, the perspective of the Wampanoag is often left out of this storytelling. Included in the resource guide are culturally sensitive children’s stories focused on Native American traditions for giving thanks and seasonal harvests, as well as links to Thanksgiving curriculums that center the Wampanoag perspective and unpack common myths.
The guide discourages projects, costumes or crafts that attempt to copy Native traditions because they can perpetuate stereotypes.
The museum’s Harvest Ceremony study guide describes how the Wampanoag helped the pilgrims of the Mayflower survive when they arrived in 1620, but also discusses the war between the European settlers and the Wampanoag that had erupted by 1675 after years of tensions, as well as the Wampanoag people in the present day.
November is also Native American Heritage Month. Several events were held throughout the month in the Coastal Bend focused on local Indigenous history and culture. Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi held several panel discussions and cultural events, while the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica de Corpus Christi held a “Thanksgiving Decolonized” meal sharing Indigenous cuisine.
Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend will also hold an intertribal event Dec. 2 at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. The Turtle Bay Powwow will take place from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the University Center rotunda.
Indigenous foods celebrated and shared at "Thanksgiving Decolonized" event
A&M-Corpus Christi event focuses on Karankawas past and present
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This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Looking back at Thanksgiving history and today's classroom lessons
