Thanksgiving Rewritten: Hate America
Everything that is remotely Christian is now under attack. First Christmas came under attack—the nativity scene ‘Christ’mas, Seasons’ Greetings, and what not. Now Thanksgiving itself is under the ever watchful eye of the revisionists. It is just not pc to like America anymore.
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.
More realistic?! By taking the children’s play things and saying he was acting like the Pilgrims is shortchanging history. Indeed, the teacher is making a mockery of history. The idea that the Europeans came over to the new world and just took the land from the Indians is just plain wrong. Never happened. What did happen was as inevitable as the Civil War.
The conflict between Indians and the Europeans was a matter of a conflict of cultures. The disagreement arose over the issue of land ownership. To the Europeans land ownership was signified by improvements—a house, fence, garden, and maybe even some cows. Using improvements, the owner made sure others knew this one simple fact: this land is mine. Land ownership was viewed as a source of pride.
The Indians view of land was totally different. To them, no one owned the land. The Indians would live with the land communally. The tribe would not stay in one area very long, moving with the seasons and the herds. jAccording to them, no one single person could ever own the land.
It was only a matter of time before these two competing ideas clashed. When the Indians moved off the territory for greener pastures, the Europeans considered the land unoccupied, which they exploited. So the pilgrims did not take the Indians land, per se, but believed they were merely taking claim of unoccupied land. A bitter conflict was bound to arise due to the difference in the two cultures.
For a teacher like Bill Morgan to boil down the conflict to—the Europeans took the Indians land—is wrong. Morgan either does not know the history of the conflict or he is intentionally misleading his students. Either way he is teaching his students to hate their country. Teachers like Bill Morgan gives my former profession a bad name.
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