It’s officially Thanksgiving month and I’m honestly thrilled that the fleeting hype about Halloween and the oncoming storm of excitement over Christmas is blocking out the fact that it’s turkey month.
Except that it’s not actually turkey month.
It’s “murder the natives and then lie about it to elementary school kids” month.
Few things make me as furious as seeing my kid brother come home with a paper plate rendition of a war bonnet. Construction paper pilgrim hats and the discussion of how much corn the pilgrims grew needs to end in elementary school classrooms, and we need to start telling children the truth. This is the most prominent example of the fact that history is truly written by the winners, by the conquerors, by the colonizers. The privilege of ignoring factual history to instead pretend that this is a holiday about family and gratitude is given only to the people who were not victims of violent genocide. The argument that this is just a nice excuse for a sit-down dinner and some quality time with the people you love isn’t good enough anymore. Find another excuse, one that’s not built on the backs of a murdered race, an entire group of people who we are STILL oppressing and ignoring.
We immediately start learning about the Holocaust in middle school, and we hear about it for the rest of our educational career. So why is it that a country that’s so focused on its history and tradition doesn’t reveal the truth of its foundation to students until they’re finishing up high school? If our children are strong enough to handle hearing about the horrors of the Holocaust, why don’t we reveal to them the truth of the relationship between the white settlers and the natives that they murdered? If it’s a matter of shame, good — we should be ashamed. Germany is ashamed of its history. The difference is that Germany acknowledges its history and makes amends. We hide it. We lie to children to hide the shame of the crimes this country is built on.
That’s shameful in and of itself; there’s nothing lower than lying to children to advert your own shame. It’s not that elementary school children are too fragile to handle the truth, it’s that America is too fragile to admit it.
