Thanksgiving lessons jettison Pilgrim hats, welcome truth
By Collin Binkley on November 23, 2020
BOSTON (AP) — A friendly feast shared by the plucky Pilgrims and their native neighbors? That’s yesterday’s Thanksgiving story.
Students in many U.S. schools are now learning a more complex lesson that includes conflict, injustice and a new focus on the people who lived on the land for hundreds of years before European settlers arrived and named it New England.
Inspired by the nation’s reckoning with systemic racism, schools are scrapping and rewriting lessons that treated Native Americans as a footnote in a story about white settlers. Instead of making Pilgrim hats, students are hearing what scholars call “hard history” — the more shameful aspects of the past.
Students still learn about the 1621 feast, but many are also learning that peace between the Pilgrims and Native Americans was always uneasy and later splintered into years of conflict.
On Cape Cod, language arts teacher Susannah Remillard long found that her sixth grade students had been taught far more about the Pilgrims than the Wampanoag people, the Native Americans who attended the feast. Now she’s trying to balance the narrative.
She asks students to rewrite the Thanksgiving story using historical records, and then she asks them to write a poem from the perspective of a person from that time, half settlers and half Wampanoag.
“We carry this Colonial view of how we teach, and now we have a moment to step outside that and think about whether that is harmful for kids, and if there isn’t a better way,” said Remillard, who teaches at Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in East Harwich, Massachusetts. “I think we are at a point where people are now ready to listen.”
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