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In this solo episode, we’re talking about unlearning Thanksgiving at home. Regular listeners of the podcast will likely know that the story of Thanksgiving taught to young kids in the US is often inaccurate, and yet, many of us struggle with how to talk about it — we’re either uncomfortable with the topic itself or don’t have the knowledge to really engage in it.
Here, we want to equip you to have conversations with your family and children, offering strategies to discuss politicized historical truths with family during Thanksgiving gatherings. The episode introduces resources you can use to guide conversation, aiming for a more inclusive and accurate representation of history. Why? This is an important topic to discuss simply because many of us don’t actually feel comfortable doing so! In a 2024 poll by CBS News, about 71% of Americans said they would try to avoid discussing politics on Thanksgiving, reflecting the discomfort many feel around these topics. However, the truth of history is often politicized, and it's crucial to seek the truth. We want to center Indigenous voices in our country's history, challenging myths or falsehoods taught to us as children. What? There are many ways and access points to begin having conversations about Thanksgiving — the truth of Thanksgiving — with your family. Here are some simple steps you can take to get started: Step 1: Visit native-land.ca with your child to see what land you’re living on and which Indigenous Nation it belongs to. You can engage them in a simple notice-and-wonder activity to explore Indigenous land history. Step 2: After acknowledging the land you’re living on, you can correct the Thanksgiving record. Pulling from the state of Massachusetts’ Investigating History Curriculum, you can use a tool like the Abbey Museum’s myths and truths cards to challenge ideas around Thanksgiving. For example, one card says:
Step 3: Going a bit deeper, start incorporating books by Indigenous authors into family discussions. Some great options for young children include:
For older children, some recommendations include:
Step 4: In addition to stories and books, you can engage in the following resources during Thanksgiving:
Step 5: As you read and engage in these books, you can draw on tips from episode 236 to engage your children in challenging conversations. You can also utilize our family coaching opportunities through EduBoost for support in handling these challenging conversations with your children. Final Tip: As you approach these sometimes-challenging conversations, model humility and a commitment to lifelong learning by admitting when you don't have all the answers and engaging in learning alongside your children. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my IH Curriculum Link with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 238 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 238, unlearning Thanksgiving at Home. We know that regular listeners and readers of Time for Teachership likely know the story of Thanksgiving taught to young kids in the US is likely inaccurate and we may not know how to talk about it with our kids or our families more broadly, or we may know the factual information but may be uncomfortable broaching the subject and want a little bit of support in doing so. That's what this episode is for. So here we go. In a 2024 poll by CBS News, about 71% of Americans said they're going to try to avoid discussing politics on Thanksgiving. That was reported in the Hill and we can link to that in the blog post. But that's like three out of four people just about that's a lot of people who don't want to discuss politics, and we know that the truth of history is often politicized, whether it should be or not, and so our goal in this episode is really to seek truth and center Indigenous voices in Indigenous history and in our country's history and unlearn kind of the myths or falsehoods that we have likely learned as young children living in the United States. If that resonates with you, if that was your experience. So here are some suggestions and again, speaking as a non-Indigenous person, I just I want to name that up front. And again speaking as a non-Indigenous person, I just I want to name that up front. We want to go find the resources written by, authored by, you know, advised by, created by Indigenous folks. And so first I'm going to direct us to native-landca, which is a website you can visit with your child and invite them to share just a simple notice and wonder what do you notice about this map of the land that we're occupying, that we're living on? Whose? Is it? Click into the Indigenous Nation when it names? What's really cool about the website is it names the Indigenous Nations that you're living on, many sometimes. There are many, right, it's not just one and you can click into them. They're usually live links to like the nation's page, like webpage, and so you can see like modern day tribal council and what initiatives are they into and what are some pictures of people living today. Just a whole load of resources to explore, to connect past and present. And if you feel like you need a little bit of support with how to get that conversation started, or you dive into the conversation and then you're like okay, I don't know how to bring this further A few episodes back, episode 236 of the podcast. We talked about some ideas for conversation starters or some prompts for question generation, so check that out if that feels like something you would like. Once you acknowledge the land that you're living on, correct the Thanksgiving record, I have a lot of resources in my brain from the Investigating History Curriculum which is the state's in Massachusetts, the state's Department of Education curriculum that they've co-created with EduCurious and Primary Source at different grade levels. 03:05 This one particularly is a unit from the third grade curriculum which was piloted this past school year, as we record this. So school year 24-25 is a pilot. It should be out for release soon but you can't access the pilot materials. You just have to complete a form and it's free to access. So I'm going to link that later in the blog post at the very end you can grab that. 03:26 But I want to first talk about an activity from the Abbey Museum. That are myths and truths cards. So again, this is located in Unit 2 of the IH curriculum, but it centers prominent myths or truth and your role is to guess whether it's true or false. So you could do this with children. You might do it with slightly older children. You might not do it with a preschool child. Also, just a content warning here. I'm going to read just three of them and in one in particular there is a lot of violence. So just a heads up if you want to kind of skim through the next two to three minutes of the podcast, if that is triggering for you, but also just want to name there. This is part of the third grade curriculum. So this is something that students should know happened and, depending on your background and your lived experiences and knowledge of history, this may be familiar and it may not. So if it's not, I want you to make sure you know that it has happened. Here we go. 04:26 The pilgrims invited the Indians to celebrate the first Thanksgiving. That's what's written on the first card, true or false? The answer card says false. The Wampanoag tribe, upon hearing gunshots from the Plymouth settlement, gathered approximately 90 men in fear that a battle was about to begin. Upon arriving at Plymouth and seeing the quote festivities, they then went out and brought back five deer and several turkeys. Again, native and Europeans alike were very familiar with harvest feasts long before 1621. So that's the card and I'm reading word for word what is on the card. So this might not be the same language that I would use, but it's part of the Abbey Museum's language. I'm just's also part of it, right? It's kind of this, oh right, like we need to be aware of even the language in the initial card or statement that we may hear in popular culture being something we need to actually rethink. 05:37 Okay, second card, and again the content warning for this one, if you want to skim through for a minute. The pilgrims and Indians became great friends. True or false? False Answer false. About a century later, theft of Indian lands by European settlers forced the Wampanoag to go to war to keep their homes. In 1637, english soldiers massacred some 700 Pequot men, women and children at Mystic Fort, burning many alive and shooting. Those that fled the colony of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay Colony observed a day of Thanksgiving commemorating the massacre. A day of Thanksgiving commemorating the massacre, heavy stuff. And so you know, take care of yourself as you listen, take care of yourself as you introduce these ideas to children and again, consider the age of the children. This is from a third grade curriculum. Third one I'll read Thanksgiving has been celebrated every year since the first Thanksgiving in 1621. True or false? This is false. 06:32 Our modern celebrations of the Thanksgiving quote holiday date back only to 1863. President Lincoln named a national holiday during the Civil War in an attempt to promote solidarity and unity between the warring states. So just sit with that a minute. There are layers upon layers to unpack here. So again, especially with older students, students who have learned about the Civil War and enslavement in their curricula, in their social studies classrooms, that is a lot of layers to unpack there, right? So we're not only talking about the traumatic history of how white settlers are treating and massacring right Indigenous people, but we are also unpacking the fact that in a debate about the right to enslave people, we are seeking to lie about a nation's past and have this holiday that celebrates all of that violence, when we're talking about perpetuating violence in, you know, hundreds of years later. Layers upon layers. So of course there's a lot to unpack and that may feel very daunting, particularly if you yourself, as an adult, are just learning some of this history. There is certainly a lot. So, again, I highly recommend a couple things. 08:01 One, to go back to episode 236 for some just general conversation starters and how do you kind of approach conversations like this. I'll also link in that episode, excuse me, is also linked a resource about how to stay and give difficult conversations with children. So there's kind of a one pager that Kara Pranikov and I created actually for preschoolers and, you know, the adults and parents and educators of preschoolers, but can be used at any level. And the big kind of thing just want to name is that sometimes you don't know how to respond in the moment and if that is the case, that's okay. You can pause, say, hey, that's a really interesting question. I don't know the answer, I'm going to look it up and we'll come back to it. Or hey, I actually want to sit with us for a little bit. That's a really interesting point you're making. I want to sit with us. Let's return to this conversation later. 08:46 That is totally okay for your kids to know that you don't have all the answers, but you're honestly and authentically engaging with them and that maybe you're going to find the answers together. I think that's such a big piece to this right. If we're not willing to learn, if we're not willing to admit that we don't know the answer or we made a mistake or we used to say this term and now we've realized that was terrible and hurt someone's feelings. And you know, like all the things we do as parents and you know, like all the things we do as parents, as family members, as adults around young people, we want to model the humility, the desire to grow, to learn and be community members that seek justice and truth and, you know, perpetuate a sense of belonging in folks in our community. So the other piece of that and I'll talk about this at the end as well, but the other piece of that is that we are now offering family coaching. So live support, like fairly live as live as we can get asynchronously, but ask us a question and within 24 hours we'll get back to you with a possible response. So if you are in that moment, you could say we're going to pause the conversation and within 24 hours I will get back to you. Kiddo, I'm going to consult somebody to think about. You know my game plan here for the next few minutes. Okay, let's continue with our resources Now. 09:57 The rest of the episode is very resource heavy, so I highly recommend opening up the blog post or committing the blog post named memory. So, as always, it's lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog. Slash the episode number. So in this case it is 238, lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog slash 238. And then you can go ahead and access all of these great links. 10:18 So the Investigating History Grade 3 Resource List for the unit Unit 2, that we've been talking about, has a list of books by Indigenous authors that are excellent. I'm just selecting my favorites from that list right now, so I wanted to just name those. For kiddos, these are predominantly picture books. Berry song by Michaela Goad keep on them up. We actually won thanksgiving story, which is our family's favorite, by Daniel Greendeer, anthony Perry and Alexis Bunton, if you live during the plummet. Thanksgiving by Chris Newell excellent, excellent in terms of content, learning, less pictures. Pictures there's like a higher text to picture ratio than these other books in the list here. 10:55 But particularly for older kiddos or for your own learning, I mean, it's a quickly digestible. I think I read it in like an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours, but it's like a. It's like 100 pages of, not a ton of text per page. There are some visuals. So you know you're thinking about again that like third grade, fourth grade, that's going to a good one to read together. Remember by Joy Harjo and we Are Water Protectors by Carol Lindstrom. These are all excellent for kiddos and, again, centering Indigenous stories, indigenous authors. 11:24 For older kids I would say middle high school as well as adults, I always like the young people versions of a people's history because I can read them and then hand over the same text to a young person like a teenager. For example, when I taught high school, this was always a really good thing. As a, it's like faster for me to read than the adult version, but it's also something I could say hey, look on this exact page, see my annotations, or let's have a conversation around the same exact text that is accessible to a younger person. So for that reason, I highly recommend An Indigenous People's History of the United States for Young People by originally by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who wrote the adult version, I think, and then it was adapted for young people by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese. Debbie Reese is phenomenal. She's an author and scholar viewer of children's books and she has an amazing website where she has just an unreal amount of commentary and just extensive reviews and it's called American Indians and Children's Literature. So we will link to that webpage as well in this blog post. 12:33 Okay, in addition to all of those stories and resources. We're just going to link a couple more things. There is a page on the National Museum of the American Indian website that are suggested activities for Thanksgiving or discussing Thanksgiving, and so I think the most compelling one to me because this excerpt was actually part of the grade three curriculum for investigating history that I got to see and experience this year and just was so thought-provoking personally is to read and discuss the Haudenosaunee's Thanksgiving Address. So you actually read through it. It's about two pages and it's about giving thanks right, like it's the actual giving of thanks to you know, nature and everything. I really think that that is worth your time to check that one out. But of course there's a lot more activities in there. Feel free to go through all of them. 13:28 And then I also want to share one that's actually on an educator webpage. It's an article that was shared by NEA so National Educators Association from Dr Star Yellowfish, and she has ideas for how to stop harmful kind of quote unquote traditional Thanksgiving activities. So if you are a family member who's like, yeah, I want to do this in my family, I want to talk about the real truth, I want to make sure we're not doing harmful activities, but actually, I also want to bring this to my kiddos school community, so that no kid has to learn like the fake history, the insulting quote, unquote history that is taught historically, taught in elementary schools, for example. You might have some language and even some activities and just even a landing page to go back to and share the link itself with school administration or teachers who you know are just maybe unfamiliar or just don't know exactly what to do, how to switch activities, like do we still talk about Thanksgiving? In what way do we Like all of that? She gives a lot of specific language scenarios and links to activities. For example, she talks about how making a feather headdress is actually offensive and feathers are sacred to indigenous communities. You do not want to do that. However, she gives a substitute activity for making something and kind of links to directions and like how to do that and what materials you would need to do that, and so she's like this is actually a way that is much more culturally accurate and also inoffensive, and so you know, do this instead. So she offers some nice replacement things if you're like oh, we set aside time to do this activity. Okay, well, here, check this out right. So I think that is another great resource. Again, that's ideas from Dr Star Yellowfish posted on the NEA website. 15:13 As a final resource, I've been talking about it a lot. I've been talking about it a lot over the last year, but the Investigating History curriculum has been really good at, I think, teaching a lot of people in Massachusetts, including myself, a lot about Indigenous communities, particularly in the grade three and four communities. Excuse me curricula, and while they're still in pilot mode, you can, as I said earlier in the episode, access them for free. You just have to complete a quick registration page earlier in the episode. Access them for free. You just have to complete a quick registration page. 15:44 And so just to note that today's resources that we named that were links within the IH curriculum, came from the grade three, unit two, cluster two set of lessons, and so we will link to that in a blog post as well. So today's blog post, one more time, can be accessed at lindsaybethlionscom slash blog, slash 238. And I do want to remind you one more time we are opening EduBoost up to families, so please feel free to check out that page for more information on the website as well, that's lindsaybethlionscom slash families, for more on family coaching and how we can help you with any conversation that you are encountering with your kiddo and wanting more support with. Make sure you reach out, ask us a question, share what's going on. We've got you.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
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