What Does Thanksgiving Celebrate?; Exploring Honest History About Thanksgiving with Young Children
by Grace Aldrich and Emma Redden
The dialogue below is a rough transcription of an episode from the podcast Freedom Means by Grace Aldrich and Emma Redden, creators of The Full Story School, a community education project focused on collaborating with teachers and parents on how to effectively talk with young children about race, racism, and colonialism. In each episode, Grace and Emma role play responding to a question a child asks. This episode answers the question: “What does Thanksgiving celebrate?” Other episodes respond to questions like “are all police bad?”, “why is her skin brown?” and “why do Black lives matter?”
The following dialogue is based on a question asked by a child:
“What does Thanksgiving celebrate?”
“Some people spend the day to feel thankful for everything they have and all the people they love. AND we get a lot of messages and stories about Thanksgiving that are really unfair and hurtful to the Wampanoag people.”
“Whose that?”
“The (Wampanoag) are the indigenous people of Plymouth Massachusetts, the place where people who came here on boats who spoke English landed. Have you heard any stories about Thanksgiving?”
“We eat turkey!”
“Yeah, one tradition of Thanksgiving is to eat foods similar to what people could have eaten on Wampanoag land 400 years go. Like turkey, cranberries, squash and beans. The dinner that many people call the first Thanksgiving was a dinner between Pilgrims (people with light tan skin who came on boats and took land from indigenous people) and the Wampanoag people who had lived here for thousands of years. Why do you think people have dinner together?”
“To be friends!”
“Yeah, the Wampanoag people were experiencing something really scary and sad. Many people were killed by germs the Europeans brought with them on boats. The Wampanoag people were worried about being safe from another group of indigenous people, the Narragansett. They had dinner and made a deal with the pilgrims to try to help each other stay safe.”
“Did the deal work?”
“No, the pilgrims continued to treat indigenous people unfairly. And many Wampanoag people were worried about the deal with the pilgrims because the pilgrims had already stolen from them.”
“That’s mean.”
“Yeah it’s really unfair to steal from people, especially people who had been on the land for thousands of years. The deal didn’t work and the pilgrims mostly were extremely unfair and unsafe to the Wampanoag people.”
“How?”
“Taking land and food from them, hurting (and killing) their bodies with guns and germs. Some indigenous people, and some people who aren’t indigenous to this land, don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Instead, we celebrate what’s called a Day of Mourning.”
“Like good morning?”
“That’s a good connection. Actually, this kind of mourning means being really sad that people died. How would you feel if people had a party to celebrate something that was really unfair and dangerous to you?”
“BAD!”
“Yeah, so I want to remember the real parts of the story together…This land was taken care of by indigenous people for thousands of years. MANY indigenous people were killed by germs Europeans brought. The people who survived—who stayed alive—worked VERY hard to protect their land, languages, beliefs, and their bodies. In the past and now, Europeans have treated indigenous people very, very unfairly AND indigenous people find strong and beautiful ways to live and make art and take care of themselves and people around them.”
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Grace Aldrich is a mom, storyteller, facilitator and Black woman living on unceded Penacook territory now called Southern New Hampshire. She is committed to inviting people to find belonging by questioning the outmoded stories they carry that cause harm.
Emma Redden is a White, Jewish preschool teacher and community organizer living on occupied Abenaki land in Northern Vermont. She believes in education as a means to create a more free and tender world, and that young children are the best co-conspirators in this project.