Teaching Thanksgiving From A Different Perspective

by Staff - November 23rd, 2006 - Associated Press

Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them.

The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.

He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.

Realistic? What duplicity. Morgan claimes he wants a more realistic look at the relationship between whites and "indians". However what he is really doing is evaluating the acts of whites as if they had our current level of knowledge and material wealth while imputing purity and innocence to the "indians" they never had. A realistic look would recognize that the entire world of that time was a far more difficult and dangerous place than his simplistic view of the pilgrims acts can embrace.

Life in European countries at that time was tough, often deadly, with short life spans and little food for many. Indentured servants and the poor lived in close to slave like conditions. An example: Lords had the "right" to take the virginity of of a poor man's bride before he could marry her. How subservient does a man have to be to allow another to sleep with the woman he loves? The force that drove so many Europeans to migrate was not idle interest in stealing from "indians", but a desire to simply live free.

As for the "purity" of these "indians" so beloved of the liberals, they were tribes whose existence was based on a nomadic culture of constant warfare. There was no ownership of land not based on force. They were annoyed when whites moved in but they did not enforce any ownership rights because they did not recognize them. It was all about food and power. The modern "indian" concept they they collectively owned North America is a convenient rationalization of their desire to keep sucking reparations from modern taxpayers, but the very people they claim collectively owned this land never felt kinship with other tribes at all. They capured and enslaved each other. They raped each other's women. They fought them for temporary control of land they wanted. They killed each other. Usually in brutal ways and with torture in the killing a standard practice. And when whites arrived they kept the same practices they had always lived by. They did not kill whites because of some desire to defend their nation, something they were too savage to conceive. They killed them for food and power just as they had always done.

When white men seeking a better life came to these shores they were exactly like an "indian" tribe that moved from one area after they had exhausted its resources and tried to find a new area where they could whip the tribe that currently held it and take it for their own. This happened constantly.

By what irrational logic and hypocrisy does Bill Morgan evaluate the view of these two peoples based on different expectations? Why can whites not seek a better life here while the transgressions of "indians" are ignored?

The hypocrisy is most evident in the ridiculous comment "the tribe suspected the settlers of robbing Indian graves to steal food buried with the dead". Anyone who knows the culture of the pilgrims would recognize that casual theft was not their way. However I doubt that people who are starving and who lived a hand to mouth existence would see taking food for their children as something to be concerned with. They recognized that food left on a grave would simply rot. Cultural sensitivity is easier for well fed liberals of today.

I am sure these liberals probably feel the pilgirms should simply have voted themselves more welfare rather than coming to America. I think it is also correct to assume that liberals are far more in tune with the socialism in which the average Indian tribe lived at that time than in any culture that recognizes property rights.

It is therefore duplicitous to measure the pilgrims through claiming that coming to America to start a new life is equivalent to individually stealing from another individul while claiming purity for the savages who occupied the land before the pilgrims arrived.