Illustration by Gemma Fa-Kaji
With Thanksgiving right around the corner, many students at Berkeley High School are simply thinking about the food related to the holiday, or the days off from school. Thanksgiving is meant to be a day of celebration, but the story behind it is a sugarcoated version of the real history.
We all know the account of the English settlers from the Mayflower and Native Americans — the Wampanoag People — joining together in the fall of 1621 for a meal that became the basis of our own current Thanksgiving dinners. This story is one of kindness on both parts, and while uplifting, it is an inaccurate account of what actually happened in most interactions between the Native Americans and white colonists.
Many accounts describe kindness, if not hospitality, on the side of the natives, met with violence and slavery from the colonists. New diseases and outright murder led to the genocide of nearly ninety percent of the Native American population. The true story of most interactions between the Old World and the New World is not one of kindness but of brutality. The Thanksgiving story shouldn’t be the main account that we are exposed to as it doesn’t acknowledge the cruelty of most interactions.
Luckily, here in Berkeley, it isn’t the only story we’re told. In history classes we’ve learned about Columbus and the carnage he spread, the suffering the native people endured, and the cultures that were destroyed. This has been well represented in our learning, but it still doesn’t tell the entire story.
The history we learn about Native Americans is almost always connected to white invaders. We hear that people were killed, and that societies were destroyed, but we never learn who those people or their cultures were. Native American history did not begin when Europe began colonizing the Americas; there were thousands of years of complex, important history before that. We learn in depth about a number of ancient cultures and civilizations that are long gone. So why is it seen as less important to learn about the civilizations of the Americas, the very place we inhabit today?
There are plenty of small ways Native American history can be brought up in classes. Teachers can use traditional native stories when talking about literature; recently I read an article in class that talked about the astronomy of the Lakota tribe. However, it’s important to remember to teach Native American culture and history respectfully and truthfully. Inaccurate, stereotypical instruction or the conflation of the many different Native American societies leads to much more harm than good.
While it is still not mandatory in every state to teach Native American history, Berkeley does a good job of teaching some parts of the story. We dismantle myths about interactions between the native people and white colonizers that are widespread in our nation, but we can still do more. Native American history is a huge part of American history, and it’s critical we get a comprehensive education.