Perhaps the most striking part of this class for me was reading on the imagery of the “Indian Head”. As someone who is Black and Native Hawaiian I grew up vaguely aware of the ways in which minorities in the U.S. (and Western society in general) can be viewed as strangely exotic through violence, cultural appropriation, and erasure. It took a couple lessons in high school U.S. Government to be enlightened to ignorance from gaps in our education on indigenous history, both on my own part and my classmates’. So few knew about the overthrow of Hawaii, but at least they knew Hawaiians existed: many, including myself knew nothing of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe despite the shift in the holiday of Thanksgiving towards a narrative of “generosity” between pilgrims and the tribe. Thus, for my project, I wanted to read common online facts taught to children about Thanksgiving and the Mashpee Wampanoag specifically in comparison to how the tribe teaches about itself and the violent history described in There, There.
The first website that appears when searching for “wampanoag tribe kid facts” is “Facts for Kids: Wampanoag Indians”, a fairly simple website created “for young people learning about the Wampanoag tribe for school or home-schooling reports” and lists “answers to the questions we are most often asked by children”. Check it out here: http://www.bigorrin.org/wampanoag_kids.htm I was actually fairly surprised by the level of detail in this website. It acknowledges that the British pilgrims at Plymouth attacked the Wampanoag, causing much death, that different tribes grouped culturally as Wampanoag exist, attempts at language revival, attempts conversation on gender roles, homes, and other cultural characteristics. While it doesn’t go into the legal history the Mashpee Wampanoag website does, it seems to do a moderately good job of reminding children that these people and their culture are more than generic “indians”. While there were a few other educational sites high on the search results that gave some insights to the
Unfortunately, switching the search to “Thanksgiving facts for kids” without any specific mention of any Wampanoag tribe leads to websites with little acknowledgement of indigenous people or the acts of violence committed against them. On Ducksters Educational Site (https://www.ducksters.com/holidays/thanksgiving_day.php), Thanksgiving day “was originally a holiday to give thanks to God for the harvest. Today it is an opportunity to give thanks for all the good things God has given us. It is also a day to celebrate family.” In the History section, they describe a story where pilgrims shared their harvest with the Wampanoag Indians and didn’t use the term Thanksgiving until rain broke a drought two years later. While the site mentions Thanksgiving not being made into a federal holiday until Lincoln declared it in 1863, there is no mention that the Pilgrims were unrelated to its revival and more talk of parades than genocide. Kim Grundy’s parenting blog is also one of the first search results (http://allparenting.com/my-life/articles/969379/20-thanksgiving-fun-facts-to-teach-kids), and her “20 Thanksgiving fun facts that will totally impress the kids” primarily highlights the lack of forks at the first event, parades, and football. Not a word on Wampanoag people and interactions with settlers beyond the shift from a traditional fast of thanksgiving to a feast.
Perhaps online fact websites of a small sample size aren’t indicative of the ways children in the U.S. are in fact being taught about Thanksgiving, however, it’s clear by searchability of these misconceptions that misinformation, or at ignorance, pervade one of the worlds largest sources of information. In the future, as someone interested in communication, I’m wondering what my role could be in reducing the reinforcement of inaccurate narratives around indigenous people, re-adding our stories to mainstream narratives.
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