No the turkey isn't dry at all.

*disclaimer- i'm using the term "indian" because it's quicker to type, but i do understand the incorrectness of the term.

last year, when the Dictator was still in daycare, they had a little thanksgiving feast at his school. when i asked about the thxgvg meal they were serving and what it was all about, they told me how they all put on little indian headdresses and talked about the "first" thanksgiving. i turned to the Dictator and said, "one feather, huh? so you killed one warrior from another tribe?" the lady looked at me and her jaw dropped.

firstly, thanksgiving is a made up holiday. it is loosely based in a meal that early settlers had with some native americans. but we all know that is wasn't a nationally recognized holiday until we needed a starting point for the mass consumerism that engulfed xmas.

secondly, the feather thing is from PLAINS indians and were given for braveness, usually for killing a member of a rival tribe (but not always, bravery could be shown in a variety of ways). but the indians in question at the "first" thanksgiving were east coast natives, not from the plains.

thirdly, i HATE the fact that we, as americans, try to be all feel-good about the indian-settler thing. we have committed such atrocities to native americans that a holiday where we acknowledge their generosity is hardly going to make up for the genocide.

i know the dictator's teachers are going to hate me because i will tell him the truth about history and not some waterered-down disney version of events. i have sat in my college classes and gotten sick to my stomach from the things i have had to re-learn about our history. i knew it was bad, but it wasn't until i took a native north american art history class that i started to really see the truth. couple that with my american environmental history class and i see that just about EVERY thing that i was taught in elementary school and even high school were LIES. i feel that we are doing a great injustice to our children by letting them believe that white people came here and lived happily ever after with the native americans after sharing a meal.

so anyway, i know someone like DangerMuffin could have probably said this all a lot better, but i always get a little irritated this time of year when the thanksgiving lies start flowing.

all that said, i think a holiday to actively acknowledge all that we have to be thankful for in our lives is a very good thing. i just wish it wasn't based in a handful of lies.

so, uh, happy turkey day everyone.

capt- hahahah!!! yeah, that works too!

For what it's worth, Andromeda, I think you're awesome. As a historian, I tell Smudge the actual history for things as well as they come up (he's only 2, I don't think he's retaining it yet). Thanksgiving should be extra interesting for us to discuss since we (sorry guys) consider the whole turkey thing to be really morally problematic and offensive as well.

flea did an awesome post about how to talk to kids about history last year:
http://buggydoo.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-prithee-sirrah-dost-thou-think.html

(sorry- i don't know how to do the tiny url. if you know how, please enlighten me).

we don't have to deal with this for a while, though we tend to focus on the gratitude side of things. i am so not looking forward to elementary school.

We always have a family day at my school on the day before T-giving break. Parents, grandparents, visitors, etc. We're supposed to hold normal classes, so I always doing a little historically accurate (in as accurate as we think at this point in time) lesson with a reading from the Lies My Teacher Told Me about native relations.

I'm always surprised I'm not fired.

kommish-go to timyurl.com and there is a button that you can drag to your browser bookmark menu thingy. when i want to tinyurl something, i go to the i want to tinyurl and then click the tinyurl button and it makes a smaller web address thing. i'm gonna go check out that post right now!

bap2- i want to read that book!! i must get! also, i wouldn't mind having you for my son's teacher and any other reasonably educated parent shouldn't mind either.

Oh, good, now I've got Squanto mixed up with Peter Lorre, and my Peter Lorre impression sounds like Jon Stewart impersonating George Bush.

Heh, heh, heh.

uh, that meant to read "i go to the SITE i want to tinyurl..."

Also there is a space where you can paste the address you have it made into a tiny url.

I treat Thanksgiving much like Christmas.

I didnt see the need to tell the kids there was no Santa. For Thanksgiving I didnt tell them the whole story when they were in Kindergarten.

There is enough value in the myth, that two peoples from two different cultures could welcome each other and share a meal in celebration that I dont feel the need to deconstruct it so early in their lives.

If wearing a feather helps them get into it, Im not going to rain on their parade. Later, when they were a little older, We explained more of the backstory.

I will celebrate most any holiday, I dont feel the need for complete authenticity.

Andromeda: That just goes to show you how government schools indoctrinate our children with the "yay america and the government" attitude. My sister is way into history, and she's told me some really crazy bad stuff the americans did to the indians. I can't go onto a reservation because I feel ashamed. I feel like such a dick for what my ancestors did, and now the beautiful culture that these people had is all but decimated, and these people that try to stay true to their tribe have to live in a shithole of a place called a reservation and try to eek out a meager existence.

cog, the school wasn't a government school and private schools aren't any better at a young age. also, i go to a "government school", or a state university, and i'm getting this clarified to me.

do you always need to make everything about your political agenda?

and by "getting this clarified to me" i mean that i have learned a lot about history, the REAL history, or as real as we can tell anyway. all this at a state school.

oh, and i know plenty of native americans who stay pretty true to their roots without living on a reservation.

I'm with Capt on this one. The simple lessons are good in kindergarten. I'm not one to shy away from a good argument with the school adminstration, but my son (who attends public school) just finished a unit about Native American tribes, and it wasn't sugar-coated or spun into any kind of pro-American agenda. I give them credit for that. He's 11 now and we talk to him more about deeper issues.

Just tonight, he asked me why anyone would vote for John McCain, and I took a deep breath and tried to explain conservative values without choking on my words ;)

For his 6-year-old brother, its enough right now that he thinks Obama is "cool".

I'd started a native-related rant--my feelings on the subject are complicated. Suffice it to say that, after six years on a Navajo reservation, no one saw fit to share anti-Thanksgiving feelings with me. They did have parties, though.

I don't see a lot of rationale to paint the whole bloody portrait of our history; I think that one can acknowledge the one shining point in history and just say that things went downhill from there.

No surprise about your perspective, Cog, but I'd like to make on small point, only because I've heard others say the same thing: "Americans" didn't do anything to the Indians; they're Americans, too.

I hate teaching about Thanksgiving, because I don't want to teach about how they were all best friends and make Pilgrim hats and Indian bonnets out of construction paper, but people (other teachers, parents, principals...) freak out if you go for any kind of, you know, reality.

So my solution this year was to not teach about it. I had my kids take a virtual tour of the Mayflower and compare Wampanoag and Pilgrim food and houses on the computer (thank you, Scholastic website), wished all the kids a happy Thanksgiving on the way out the door, and that was that. Although we did have an all school activity on Tuesday that included some crazy old movie featuring a mouse aboard the Mayflower who appeared to be instrumental in stopping those crazy Indians from killing the nice Pilgrims, and then they all hung out and thanked the lord. My eyebrows were somewhere up near the rafters on that, but I didn't have anything to do with it, I swear.

I'll try to come up with something real for next year, maybe. It didn't really fit into our social studies themes, but maybe without that whole election thing I'll do something different. I'm missing that elementary school teacher gene that gets excited about seasonal themes. I'd rather just teach reading.

I read an advance copy of Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates a few months ago. There's a lot in there that kids should know about what the early Massachusetts colonies were really like. The mythmaking about what swell people the pilgrims were and how they allegedly got along with the natives is at best amusing and at worst potentially harmful. Vowell does a pretty good job of pointing up how pilgrims have been portrayed ridiculously in sitcoms, etc. Not that she's entirely down on the pilgrims. They're just so much more complicated than the idealized and sanitized ahistorical Toby Keith USA RULEZ version we've been fed in the past several decades. I think the Santa myth is one thing; effacing the cultural strife and, ultimately, bloodshed that occurred as English started colonizing in Massachusetts and Connecticut is quite another.

Now everyone should go watch the video of Sarah Palin that features turkeys being slaughtered behind her as she gives an interview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-kjM1asH-8

No, Virginia, turkeys aren't made in a factory.