False Portrayals - The Thanksgiving Story

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, Chapter Three (The Truth About the First Thanksgiving)

The story of the First Thanksgiving was one that I didn't realize that even I have a ton of misconceptions about or had never heard pieces of the real story. It's frightening to me that these particular students thought that the first settlers were in 1620, because it shows that we follow a "white history" of sorts.

What I found most interesting in this reading was the disease and plagues that ravaged the area following the Europeans coming to America. I always knew that there were diseases but I never knew to the extent that those diseases wiped out the Native population. It seems crazy to me that the healthiness of the Native Americans was actually part of their undoing because Europeans brought those diseases that they were not resistant to. The plagues "wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of inhabitants of coastal New England" in a matter of three years (70). Even worse was the aftermath where survivors had to simply leave where they had been because the amount of bodies surrounding them was overwhelming. Unfortunately, leaving meant that they ended up carrying these diseases with them to other places where Europeans never went - meaning that Native Americans who had never even met a European were now dying because of the diseases that had been carried over. One quote will really stick with me following this reading: "The Europeans' advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas ... but not to 'settle' the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required" (74). How different would history be if the Native Americans had been able to survive in larger numbers? Of course we are not supposed to ask 'what if' questions, but it makes me wonder what it would look like if disease hadn't made it nearly impossible for the Natives to do anything.

Of course I knew that there was rampant racism at the time, but it was still difficult to read and understand their ways of thinking. The Europeans thought that because they were surviving from Smallpox but Native Americans were dying from it that it meant that God was choosing them (72). They believed that it was a sign from God that they were superior and it was meant to be their land. Somewhat connected to this, the Native Americans had spent time and energy providing assistance to the Native Americans, and yet the Europeans thanked God for the assistance rather than the Natives. I really struggle to follow this line of thinking, but must remind myself to not impose my own values and keep in mind that nobody would have thought the same way that I do.

Along a similar line is another quote that will stay with me. "In this invocation, the Pilgrims supply not only the origin of the United Stats, but also the inspiration for democracy in Europe and perhaps for all goodness in the world today! ... This notion that 'we' advanced peoples provided for the Indians, exactly the converse of the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our history to complicate race relations" (86). The textbooks that some history teachers are instructing from are providing this false idea that the Europeans that came to America provided for the Native Americans, and it is simply untrue. Omitting the truth that Natives were enslaved, that there was a plague brought to the area because of European disease, and that people were grave robbing speaks to the fact that these textbooks aren't concerned with telling the truth - they seem to be more concerned with spreading a false story that makes white people look better than the truth would.

So, what does this mean? A quote from Loewen shows the consequences: "Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentrism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave students less able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures" (87). We have to be more honest in our representation of history so students can learn from it. They're not learning anything if we don't present them with reality.