Earth-Centered Traditions
Lesson 8: Wampanoag Thanksgiving
11.16.2014
Objectives: Exploring the Wampanoag and so-called “First Thanksgiving.”
Materials: Thanksgiving painting, reading “A First Nations Perspective on Thanksgiving.”
Time allotments are suggested and meant to be adapted.
1. Nametags and Graffiti Wall (before class begins):
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For anyone needing, make nametags using blank paper, markers, and holders. Youth
can create their own unique but LEGIBLE nametag. Make it a regular practice to wear
nametags.
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“Graffiti Wall” questions: Write the following on whiteboard. Invite youth as they
arrive to grab a marker and weigh in with their responses:
a. What’s your favorite Thanksgiving food?
b. What names of places in MN do you know that have Lakota, Ojibwe, or other
Native American names?
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Teachers complete attendance sheets.
2. Chalice Lighting: Light the chalice, saying these words together:
“We light this chalice as a symbol of our faith. We seek the light of truth and share in the
warmth of love.”
Teacher reads: (A prayer of gratitude from the people of the Onondaga Iroquois nation)
To the Earth, mother of all, greetings and thanks; to all the waters, waterfalls and rain,
rivers and oceans, greetings and thanks.
To all the fish life, greetings and thanks; the grains and greens, beans and berries; as one we
send thanks to food plants, medicine herbs of the world, and their keepers, greetings and
thanks.
The trees for shelter and shade, fruit and beauty, greetings and thanks.
To all birds large and small, joyful, greetings and thanks. And from the four directions, the
four winds, thank you for purifying the air we breathe and giving us strength; greetings.
And now the sun, for the light of a new day and all the fires of life, greetings and thanks.
To our oldest grandmother, the moon, leader of women all over the world; and the stars for
their mystery, beauty and guidance, greetings and thanks.
To our teachers, from all times reminding us of how to live in harmony, greetings and
thanks.
And for all the gifts of creation, for all the love around us, greetings and thanks.
And for that which is forgotten, we remember. We end our words; now our minds are one.
3. Joys and Sorrows (10 minutes): Listening is a precious gift that we offer one another at
church. Using the balance scale and the blue (sorrows) and yellow (joys) stones, invite
youth to share a joy and/or a sorrow from the past week, as a way of meeting one
another with our lives and sharing in community. You will want to set limits (e.g. two
stones max per person) so that no one monopolizes sharing time.
Each Sunday, a copy of the congregation’s Embracing Meditation will be made available
to your class, so that stones can be put in for those whose names are being spoken in the
Sanctuary.
4. What do we think about the first Thanksgiving? (5 minutes)
Invite youth to carefully consider a familiar Thanksgiving scene (copies of attached
painting) while asking:
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What story is this painting trying to tell?
From whose point of view and for what purposes is the scene portrayed?
What do we know about the actual history of the events of 1621?
Whose perspective is left out of the American “Thanksgiving” culture?
5. Teacher summarizes: The Wampanoag and First Thanksgiving (10 minutes)
You may be surprised to learn that what we call “The First Thanksgiving” was not really a
“thanksgiving” at all to the people who were there!
The history of Thanksgiving goes much further back than Plymouth and 1621. In fact,
people across the world from every culture have been celebrating and giving thanks for
thousands of years. In this country, long before English colonists arrived, Native People
celebrated many different days of thanksgiving. “Strawberry Thanksgiving” and “Green
Corn Thanksgiving” are just two of kinds of celebrations for the Wampanoag and other
Native People.
One of the earlier contacts between the Wampanoag and Europeans dates from the 16th
century, when merchant vessels and fishing boats traveled along the coast of presentday New England. Captains of merchant vessels captured Native Americans and sold
them as slaves for profit. For example, Captain Thomas Hunt captured several
Wampanoag after enticing them aboard his vessel in 1614. He later sold them in Spain as
slaves. One of his victims, a Patuxet named Squanto (or Tisquantum), was bought by
Spanish monks, who attempted to convert him. Eventually he was set free, and despite
his prior experiences, he boarded an English ship again in order to accompany an
expedition to Newfoundland as a translator. From Newfoundland he made his way back
to his homeland in 1619, only to discover that the entire Patuxet tribe and his family had
fallen victim to an epidemic.
In 1620, religious separatists and others from England who are known today as
“Pilgrims” arrived in present-day Plymouth, MA, where Squanto, along with other
Wampanoags, taught the starving Pilgrims how to cultivate corn, farm squash and
beans, catch fish, and collect seafood.
In 1621, the English colonists at Plymouth, or “Pilgrims,” had a three-day feast to
celebrate their first harvest. More than 90 native Wampanoag People joined the 50
English colonists in the festivities. Historians do not know for sure why the Wampanoag
joined the gathering or what activities went on for those three days. Form the one short
paragraph that was written about the celebration at the time, we know that they ate,
drank, and played games. Back in England, English people celebrated harvest by feasting
and playing games in much the same way.
The English did not call the 1621 event a “thanksgiving.” Their understanding of a day of
“thanksgiving” would have meant a day of prayer to thank God when something really
good happened. So the “pilgrims” actually had their first thanksgiving in the summer of
1623, when they gave thanks for the rain that ended a long drought.
6. Read aloud: A First Nations Perspective on Thanksgiving (30 minutes)
Invite volunteers to read aloud “popcorn” style so that the class can listen to an
alternative perspective from Jacqueline Keeler (attached).
Questions for Discussion:
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Thanksgiving is a complicated story with many themes: hunger, food, slavery,
friendship, land ownership, religious conflict, and more. But the word “thanksgiving”
points to what is in the heart, as Keeler points out, and that this celebration is about
the story of our heart. What do you think about Thanksgiving as a holy day where we
tell the stories of our hearts?
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Giving, taking, trading, and sharing are some basic ways we relate with one another.
What wisdom can we take from reflecting on that meeting between the Wampanoag
and the English that is as relevant today as it was then?
7. Say goodbye until next time: Extinguish the chalice, saying together:
“May the light of truth and the warmth of love go with us in our hearts.”
8. Help clean up classroom before leaving: Please keep regular practice of readying
classroom for the next class.
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leave lesson plan and all materials organized
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return blue/yellow stones to containers
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wipe the whiteboard clean
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tables and chairs neatly returned
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nametags collected in Ziploc bag
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leave any comments for RE staff on attendance sheets
A First Nations Perspective on Thanksgiving
By Jacqueline Keeler
For a Native American, the story of Thanksgiving is not a very happy one. But a member of
the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux finds occasion for hope.
I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. This may surprise those people who wonder what
Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a
European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.
Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of
the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride” in America
the Beautiful. Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care
of the land. We were to sing “Land of the Indian’s pride” instead. I was proud to sing the
new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference.
At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family,
you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some
“inside” knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses came to our
homes. When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry -- half of
them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag
man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe,
and took pity on them. Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through
the winter and taught them how to grow their food. These were not merely “friendly
Indians.” They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a
hundred years or so, and they were wary -- but it was their way to give freely to those who
had nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is
the way to earn respect.
Among the Dakota, my father’s people, they say, when asked to give, “Are we not Dakota
and alive?” It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all -- the exact opposite
of the system we live in now, which is based on selling, not giving. To the Pilgrims, and most
English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw
Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people,
themselves. Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world.
Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American
peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti
without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the “first Thanksgiving”
the Wampanoags provided most of the food -- and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right
to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving.
What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had
decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had
domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people,
spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases
accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities. By
1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the
heathen savages to make way “for a better growth,” meaning his people. In stories told by
the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate
from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop
the evil.
I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the
real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness?
We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental
devastation, poverty, world wars, racism. Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of
evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this [Thanksgiving] Thursday
and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors
survived the evil it caused. Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give
intact, then the evil and the goodwill that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the
Wampanoag will have come full circle. And the healing can begin.
Jacqueline Keeler is a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux. Her work has
appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal.