A Thanksgiving History Lesson in a Handful of Corn

These goals are part of an attempt to revive the deep, almost symbiotic relationship between maize and humans.

“For the Indigenous people, it’s not just about growing the corn and bringing it back home,” Ms Greendeer said. “It’s about creating a spiritual connection and relationship with corn. He is alive. So the goal is to swallow it and become one with the corn.”

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The past doesn’t always define us, but the stories we tell about it do. That’s their purpose.

The United States is in the midst of a fierce battle over the stories Americans tell themselves about how the nation was built and what it stands for today. Dramatic and at times violent clashes broke out over monuments to Confederate soldiers, institutions named after slave traders and plantation owners, the history lessons the children were learning, and the books they were reading. Efforts to revise popular narratives of history to include Black, Indigenous, and other neglected viewpoints, and resistance to these efforts, is now a central feature of political life.

One purpose of many of the stories Americans tell about Thanksgiving is nation-building. in 1863 asked for his first observation As a national holiday, President Abraham Lincoln asked my “citizens” to “firmly beg the Great Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and bring it back to its full benefit as soon as it is consistent with Divine purposes.” peace, harmony, tranquility and Unity.”

Another goal is to document the long and shameful history of killing Native Americans, expelling them from their land, and shattering their culture. For many Indigenous people, Thanksgiving is a national day of mourning, a time to remember what they have lost since Europeans first appeared.

Miss Greendeer has just finished her own story about the original 1621 feast, her “children’s book” to be published next year.Keepunumuk: The Thanksgiving Story of WeeâchumWritten with two other Native American authors, the book is told by a Wampanoag woman who tells her grandchildren that corn is the hero of the Pilgrim’s harvest feast.

A plague had killed many Wampanoags before the Pilgrims arrived, and in the winter of 1620-21 the Pilgrims were dying too. Seeing all this, corn asks Natives to show the newcomers “how to take care of me” so they don’t die of starvation, said Mrs. Greendeer.