The Second Question
On all other holidays , we eat with our families and our communities . Why on this day are we joining together with a larger and more diverse community of Americans ?
We are each on a journey
For some it began here . Others arrived from across the seas , centuries ago and yesterday . Today there are more than 330 million of us .
It has not always been a righteous journey
In 1621 , when the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest with the Wampanoag , at least 40 other Native American tribes inhabited the Northeast of what we now know as the United States . In the following decades and centuries , those tribes , along with hundreds of others throughout the United States , would be displaced and destroyed through both aggression and the spread of disease by the new settlers of the land .
If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian , he can live in peace ….. Treat all men alike . Give them all the same law . Give them all an even chance to live and grow . All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief . They are all brothers . The Earth is the mother of all people , and all people should have equal rights upon it .
CHIEF JOSEPH , NEZ PERCE ( 1840-1904 )
FOR DISCUSSION :
1 . How can we honor the history of Native Americans at our Thanksgiving tables ?
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2 . How can we appropriately acknowledge that our popular narrative of Thanksgiving cooperation between Native Americans and settlers is in fact a tiny part of a much more difficult and painful story ?