Gobble Gobble

Ok I know it's early in the month, but we're beginning to decorate the library for Thanksgiving and ... well this stuff is on my mind. This year I'd like our display to provide a little more info than the usual banal collection of recipes and pictures of Pilgrims and whatnot. I'm thinking about posting this excellent essay by James Loewen. Here is an excerpt:

Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even called them "Pilgrims" until the 1870s. Plymouth Rock achieved ichnographic status only in the nineteenth century, when some enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so its significance as the "holy soil" the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible. The Rock has become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a sacred text, and our textbooks play the same function as the Anglican BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, teaching us the rudiments of the civil religion of Thanksgiving.

Indians are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian guests. Thanksgiving silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the handouts that school children have carried home for decades, with captions like, "They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!" When his son brought home this "information" from his New Hampshire elementary school, Native American novelist Michael Dorris pointed out "the Pilgrims had literally never seen `such a feast,' since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe."


I would be remiss if I did not also recommend Loewen's book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which is about the sorry state of elementary and high school history textbooks.

I would also be remiss if I wrote a post about Thanksgiving which did not include at least one recipe for oyster dressing.... not as good as my mom's of course.