GLIMMERS AND INTIMATIONS: What are children being told today...

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2022

...as one tale replaces another? We'll bite! What are schoolkids told today—or perhaps, permitted to learn on their own—about the so-called First Thanksgiving?

Let's take it one step further! What do school kids know today about the state of "the Americas" in 1621? About the state of the Americas in 1491, one year before the event which has long been taken as the first contact between Europe and this "new world?"

What do kids know about the civilizations of the Americas as of 1491? About the state of play in what is now called New England at the time of that first Thanksgiving Day feast?

About the events which came after that? What are today's children told? What do they learn on their own?

You're asking interesting questions there; you can color us curious blue! We'd love to know what today's textbooks say, and what kids learn on their own, but we're unlikely see such reports.

Instead, we'll continue to see the swapping of standard stories.

"For centuries," a standard story was told to children and adults alike about that first Thanksgiving—a very limited story. Today, it's been replaced by what may perhaps be seen as a new and substantially different standard / limited tale:

CHERY (11/19/22): For centuries, Thanksgiving has been billed as an opportunity for friends and family to gather, with peace and gratitude in their hearts. But for Native Americans, celebrating the autumnal holiday isn’t as simple.

The short-and-sweet story told in schools depicting the first Thanksgiving as a harmonious harvest celebration between Native people and Pilgrims “was a very romanticized, Whitewashed education about Indigenous peoples,” said Jordan Daniel, who’s a member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe.

In reality, 1621 was not the first celebration of Thanksgiving between the English and the Wampanoag people, said David Silverman, a George Washington University professor who specializes in Native American history. The Wampanoags tried to ally with the English for trade and to maintain political independence from another Native group after an epidemic dwindled their numbers.

“Tensions built for years as the English population grew and began dispossessing, subjugating and evangelizing Native people,” Silverman said. Finally, war broke out around 1675, and after the English won, they enslaved about 2,000 American Indian prisoners of war, he added.

In 1970, the United American Indians of New England began commemorating Thanksgiving Day as a National Day of Mourning to honor their ancestors who experienced cultural genocide at the hands of European colonialists.

That newer version of the story is now published each year. Arguably, it might be perceived as a bit of a "bluewashed" story, especially when it continues in ways such as this:

CHERY (continuing directly): Native Americans as a whole say they’re still fighting for what’s rightfully theirs. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe still doesn’t have control over its entire ancestral land. The Supreme Court has been weighing the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which Congress passed in 1978 to remedy the practice of removing Native children from their homes and sending them to non-Native boarding schools and families.

The people of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe still don’t have control over the tribe's entire ancestral land?  In reality, the 2,800 people of that tribe aren't ever going to "have control" over some such undefined expanse of ancestral land. 

As everyone knows, that isn't going to happen! History has moved on in a brutal but definitive way, as history has frequently done. It's hard to know whose interests are served by seeming to pretend different.

What are children told today about that First Thanksgiving? What are children told today about what happened next?

We'd love to know such things! We'd also like to know what adults are told about the problems of needs of Native American peoples today. But that's a topic which is almost never discussed within our blue tribe press.

In fact, no one cares a whole lot about that—about the interests and the needs of the Native American kids who are being born today. Instead, we retell the story, once a year, about this "national day of mourning"—a day of mourning which has now been observed, at least by some people, for over fifty years.

"These are the days of miracle and wonder," Paul Simon once declared. These are also days of great suffering around the world—and of advice columns prominently placed in the Washington Post, such as these recent insulting groaners

Miss Manners: I can’t deal with my colleagues pooping next to me

Miss Manners: The proper etiquette for disposing bathroom trash

Miss Manners: Guest pointed out a burned-out bulb in the middle of dinner

Miss Manners: I used my friend’s baby changing station. Is that weird?

The Washington Post should be embarrassed to publish such manifest drivel. That said, this seems to be a major way to attract our blue tribe's inquiring eyeballs, with the focus on bodily waste seeming to be on the rise:

DEAR PRUDENCE
Help! My Dad’s Visiting Friend Used Our Bathtub as a Toilet.

Pathetically, "Slate Staff" recently republished that monumental, world-class groaner from January 2020. Adding intellectual insult to cultural injury, we take it as obvious that the problem posed in the original letter to Slate was a fairly obvious hoax.

For our money, Margaret Renkl has been a superb addition to the New York Times' roster of opinion columnists. Today, she writes a column which appears beneath this title:

How to Give Thanks in a Screwed-Up World

For the record, the world is substantially worse than than "screwed-up." In our view, Renkl offers superb advice as she remembers her father:

RENKL (11/23/22): I think about my father every day, but I’ve been thinking about him more than usual lately. Not only because Thanksgiving is coming on, that time when the ache of my missing elders is especially acute, but because I am trying to remind myself how to see the world as my father saw it.

“Brew positivity,” the tag on my tea bag tells me, but I am thinking of nothing as simplistic as that. My father was no Panglossian determined to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Dad grew up during the Great Depression in what was effectively an orphanage. He knew very well that this was not the best of all possible worlds. Nevertheless, he loved his life and was grateful for every minute of it. Somehow he was able to hold the love and the beauty and the joy alongside the grief and the fear and the pain. 

That was her father! For the record, we human beings can't survive if we see nothing but the pain. Rather plainly, our species is built with the ability to ignore, forget, disregard.

That said, what are we ignoring as one of our biggest newspapers gives prominent placement to those insulting advice columns? Later, Renkl thinks about an important topic—happiness—and the (many) things she'll never be able to change:

RENKL: What voters want is transparently irrelevant to many of the officials charged to represent us, as the attorney general of Kentucky made clear last week. Voters in that state defeated a proposed anti-abortion amendment to its Constitution, but the attorney general insists the vote “has no bearing” on its near-total abortion ban. Down here, Mr. Trump’s movement is Glenn Close in the bathtub with a knife.

But it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m determined not to think about that this week. I will think instead about my father and his insistence on happiness. I will let my whole heart fill up with gratitude for what is still breathtakingly beautiful about this weary, ragged world; for the many people who are fighting for our democracy; and for all the people I love.

I can’t force polluting nations to work together to hold climate change to planet-surviving levels. I can’t force Congress to work together for solutions to the economic inequities and information silos that separate us. But I can pull out my mother’s recipe box and make a Thanksgiving feast. I can remember the loved ones who once shared this table and fill their seats with people whose loved ones are distant or otherwise missing. And I can be grateful for every single fantastic moment we have together.

None of us will ever be able to change the "economic inequities" of this nation—and those which afflict the world. That said, we blue tribals could at least make an effort to stop creating the "information silos" we help construct on a daily basis, including the silos in which brutal conduct from centuries past is never put away in service to the possibilities of the future. 

The good, decent people of that (very small) Massachusetts tribe aren't ever going to get their entire ancestral land back! The Post's young writer framed the issue that way, and some editor let it go.

(Or who knows? Maybe some editor inserted that point into the young writer's report!)

That said, something else is true. Our own blue tribe is full of standard stories designed to tell ourselves that We Are The Very Good People and The Others Are Very Bad. As we tell ourselves these stories, we pretend to care about X, Y and Z, then let those matters go.

Variants of this tribal self-flattery can be seen on a daily basis. They offer glimmers and intimations of the way we manage to lose elections, even as 6-year-old children lose their mothers as they try to cross the Darien Gap on their way to this land.

We repeat the talk of cosseted professors. We're quick to call Others names, preferably by the tens of millions. 

On this Thanksgiving Eve, that doesn't make us bad people. It simply makes us people people, but it also lets us know why we keep running in place.

Around the world, we humans are strongly inclined to cling to the nightmares of the past. That isn't an evil thing to do, but at what point might it possibly leave us poorly served?

Friday: Who took part in that cultural genocide? Also, what are children being told about that slightly earlier year?

Also, what sacred Nietzsche said! So much to look forward to!


40 comments:

  1. "We'd love to know what today's textbooks say, and what kids learn on their own, but we're unlikely see such reports."

    This is not a state secret. Somerby can visit his local school district offices and see the books that are being used in his local schools. Or he can call the principal of the nearest school and ask about it. All it takes is initiative on his part. If he knows any kids in his neighborhood, he can ask them what they learned about Thanksgiving this year. Those who work in schools may be puzzled by his interest. He may encounter a bit of protectiveness, being an elderly man with no kids -- school employees may worry about his inquiries in this age of school shootings. And it isn't as if this is a routine inquiry, given that families celebrate Thanksgiving in their own homes according to their own traditions and thus are not very concerned about what kids learn about it at school. Except on the right, where this has become the newest culture war issue, the new War on Christmas, another holiday that was never threatened by anyone but caused people to object to those who want to wish others "Happy Holidays."

    What are kids told indeed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "you can color us curious blue"

    Another porn movie reference. Does Somerby imagine that this is cute, as he discusses family holidays and school kids?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Somerby may have always been a right winger, but was he always a sociopath?

      Today he berates those who do not always look on the bright side of things: to the Jew in the concentration camp, to the slave in the field, to colonized indigenous people, to the oppressed he sings, "Always look on the bright side of life", and with no irony!

      This coming from our Village Eeyore of all people.

      Delete
  3. Was waiting to hear about Mrs. E who replaced Mrs. K. Wholeft due to her husbands illness. This fifth grade class was combined with sixth graders which made for a strange vibe. Did Mrs. E return to Wyoming?

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Today, it's been replaced..." Actually, that traditional story has been supplemented, not replaced.

    The great replacement -- yes, let's stoke those fears on the right. Why not? It has only been a few days since the last mass shooting. And Somerby hasn't even acknowledged, much less talked about thoughts and prayers after an adult drag show was shot up, 5 killed and 18 wounded, because the right is so damned protective of children.

    It is everyone's duty and responsibility to prevent mass shootings, but Somerby goes on blithely talking about the replacement of our traditional family holiday, with concern for Native Americans -- thus pointing the crazies at yet another marginalized minority group who have simply existed with their own history. Happy Turkey Day!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Not surprising Bob’s theme is our
    collective importance the day after
    the Judicial Branch takes a firm
    stance against his boy Trump and
    the bizarre Judge who was running
    crazy interference for him.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "The Supreme Court has been weighing the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which Congress passed in 1978 to remedy the practice of removing Native children from their homes and sending them to non-Native boarding schools and families."

    And yet Somerby just knows that there will not be decisions in the Indians' favor:

    "The people of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe still don’t have control over the tribe's entire ancestral land? In reality, the 2,800 people of that tribe aren't ever going to "have control" over some such undefined expanse of ancestral land. "

    Somerby says everyone knows this, but how? Have there been more Supreme Court leaks? Or does he just assume that the government will go on ignoring previous treaty agreements? How can Somerby have such certainty about this? Or is he just expressing the manifest destiny assumptions about white entitlement that have existed since the colonists first set foot on this continent?

    And what would be the reaction if Somerby said: "Black people are never going to be considered equal to white people in America. Everyone know that this just isn't going to happen."?

    "History has moved on in a brutal but definitive way, as history has frequently done. It's hard to know whose interests are served by seeming to pretend different."

    Or perhaps the various tribes who have won court victories nationwide and who have had rights restored to tribal lands in other states, are just a figment of the imagination, not a major contradiction to Somerby assumptions about white ownership of land. For example:

    "The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that about half of the land in Oklahoma is within a Native American reservation, a decision that will have major consequences for both past and future criminal and civil cases.

    The court's decision hinged on the question of whether the Creek reservation continued to exist after Oklahoma became a state.

    "Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of fed­eral criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion."

    We can add bigotry against Native Americans to the list of Somerby's other bigotries. He is a grown man who apparently reads the newspapers, so he should have known about the success of efforts to reclaim tribal lands under treaty, but instead he just assumes that white men like him are entitled to keep all the land, because...there were brutal wars lost by Indians but settled by treaties, which Somerby blithely assumes do not matter any more because they are in the past?

    And anyone who sides with the Indians, such as Gorsuch I assume, must be automatically blue, leftist, against the rights of white men like himself.

    Why does Somerby write stuff like this on the day before Thanksgiving? Does he get off on insulting Native Americans and anyone else who cares about them? Those who care are not only liberals, by the way. Kevin McCarthy's wife is 1/8 Cherokee and his in-laws received over $7 million in no-bid contracts for being an Indian-owned business, members of the North American Cherokee tribe (which the Cherokee nation says is bogus and doesn't exist). Kevin McCarthy is a Republican, so obviously it is not just the left that cares about Indian rights. /sarcasm off

    Kudos to Somerby who has once again found yet another way of leaving a sour taste in liberal mouths in advance of tomorrow's holiday. What an asshole!

    ReplyDelete
  7. "We'd also like to know what adults are told about the problems of needs of Native American peoples today. But that's a topic which is almost never discussed within our blue tribe press."

    Assuming Somerby is referring to the mainstream press and not Mother Jones, how has he never encountered this ongoing special section of the NY Times, which discusses Native American problems and needs as well as events and culture:

    https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/native-americans

    ReplyDelete
  8. "In fact, no one cares a whole lot about that—about the interests and the needs of the Native American kids who are being born today. "

    Somerby speaks only for himself. He clearly does not care, since he obviously does not follow any news about Native Americans and resents it when the paper does talk about their obvious involvement in Thanksgiving.

    ReplyDelete
  9. "For the record, the world is substantially worse than than "screwed-up."

    I think Somerby could benefit by reading one of those trivia articles, like the ones that appear regularly about how to deal with depression.

    There are certainly some respects in which the world is screwed up, but there are also major signs of hope and things to be grateful for. Someone who cannot see both is going to have a hard life.

    Somerby is speaking here to liberals, who just won some major victories in the recent midterm election. Here is the West, we have had far fewer wildfires than usual. Covid is killing fewer people and for many has become no more than a cold-like nuisance, not a death threat. Normal activities, such as The World Cup, have returned. People celebrate with family and friends, not via Zoom. Streaming is better than ever. Inflation is declining. And Trump is finally being shunned by some Republicans.

    Republicans attract voters by heightening fear, because fear is what dominates and motivates conservatives. It may be a viable tactic to make this blog into another Fox outrage machine, evoking fear by focusing on the negative, even if that negative is Somerby's own conservative foolery. But what a downer Somerby is on the day before a holiday that emphasizes relationship and positivity in people's lives.

    Most of us do not need a newspaper column to tell us how to find joy in our lives. But why is Somerby so intent on taking that from us? Today he shits on Indian hopes and wants the news to remind Native Americans that they are always and forever losers, beneath the white man's thumb. Aside from being less true than ever, what is the value in doing that?

    Tomorrow, I expect a blog essay about how women are always and ever going to be consigned to the kitchen, cooking those turkeys while the menfolk watch football on TV and the kids run wild like white colonial intruders bent on stealing a continent. But he won't dare. The way he feels about women, and vice versa, he won't want to make us any madder. Angry women change history.

    ReplyDelete
  10. "Around the world, we humans are strongly inclined to cling to the nightmares of the past. "

    Recognizing that Native Americans have both a past and a present stake in this holiday is not "clinging to the nightmares of the past." That formulation is offensive.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "Our own blue tribe is full of standard stories designed to tell ourselves that We Are The Very Good People and The Others Are Very Bad."

    In truth, it does seem bad to me to treat the participation of Native Americans in Thanksgiving as if it were wrong, as Somerby insists on doing.

    If I were Somerby, I would now insist that Somerby is a good decent person, even though I know nothing much about him, except what he writes here. What he writes today is not good and decent. But pointing out his mistakes does not make me good or decent either, so this insistence that when liberal pursue issues important to them, they are just virtue signaling, strikes me as ridiculous. Behavior can be good or bad, not people, who are what they are without making such a gross judgmental generalization about them. My worth doesn't rise or fall based on whether I think Native Americans should be included in modern Thanksgiving rituals.when we review the things we are grateful for. Why is it something for Somerby to mock that liberals want Native Americans, like all people, to be treated fairly and helped when they need help?

    If anyone is cling to past enmities, it seems to be Somerby, who wants to remind Indians that they will never ever win and everyone knows it. That is exactly as harsh as it sounds, and that is what Somerby said today. And that isn't how good decent people talk, in my neighborhood.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is a good reminder that to bigoted people, their bigoted beliefs seem like common sense, things that everyone knows.

      Delete
    2. Somerby says that in some aspects of thinking, you are poorly served and thus poorly serve in those regards, in return.

      For this, you say he’s not a good or decent person.

      Congratulations. You’ve summed things up in a nutshell.

      Delete
    3. When you nibble around the edges of Somerby's vaguest statements, it suggests you have nothing substantive to say. Why not just keep quet then instead of writing these moronic comments that say nothing?

      I said Somerby has no idea who is good and decent or not and that he throws those words around a lot. I think he is not good or decent because he today displays a bunch of bigotry toward Native Americans. I expect more of the people who I call "good" and "decent."

      Delete
    4. Is this commenter not aware that this is incoherent?

      "in some aspects of thinking, you are poorly served and thus poorly serve in those regards, in return"

      Regardless, one can puzzle out the sentiment from context, yet one is still left with nothing - sort of a nebulous tautology.

      Also what's with the strangely bitter sarcasm at the end? I assume this must be a right winger, no one else carries such a chip on their shoulder.

      Would it not serve you to take Somerby's (obnoxious) advice and cheer up?

      The brutality you dish out most be borne from the brutality you have suffered in your life, I hope you find peace some day.

      Delete
  12. "Variants of this tribal self-flattery can be seen on a daily basis."

    Ironically, Native Americans are the only people in our country who do form tribes. Doesn't that make Somerby's sophistry a prime example of cultural appropriation? But if Somerby doesn't mind "borrowing" from Robert Frost and Bob Dylan, why should he mind taking more from the Indians? Today he says it is all his anyway due to past brutal wars. Possession is 9/10th of the law. Finders keepers. Etc etc etc. Who do Tom Petty's heirs think they are anyway?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonhmouse 12:51pm, Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Paul Pelosi, won’t give some native tribes their land back.

      I know it’s just a blog, but can you get real for once?

      Delete
    2. What part of that recent Supreme Court decision, giving back Cherokee land spanning half of OK, with a majority opinion by Gorsuch, did you not understand?

      Delete
    3. Are you aware that the Cherokees also won the right to have a representative in the House? The court has instructed the House to implement that. That was theirs by treaty and the Supreme Court upheld the treaty rights.

      Delete
    4. Cecelia obviously didn't understand what the comment @12:51 was about.

      Delete
    5. The ancestral lands of the Cherokee people are in North and South Carolina. When the Democrats were still the party of racists, long before the civil rights era, Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokees to migrate to Oklahoma.

      Delete
    6. This is a debt owed by all of us.

      Delete
  13. Uh oh. Must flee before I'm pulled across the event horizon into the inesapable horror within.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Yesterday Somerby said he would talk about a holiday's dark script today. That isn't exactly what he has been saying today. Tomorrow's tease is: "Friday: Who took part in that cultural genocide? Also, what are children being told about that slightly earlier year?"

    Nothing about poor Mrs. E again.

    ReplyDelete
  15. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  16. "The good, decent people of that (very small) Massachusetts tribe aren't ever going to get their entire ancestral land back!"

    This is how Somerby's logic works. He thinks that inserting the word "entire" changes the nature of the discussion. He says that Wampanoag tribe is very small. Never mind that it was bigger before the genocidal massacre by the colonists back in the 1600s. Being small, and having been genocided, they don't deserve to have their lands returned to them, and they shouldn't want them back, nor should tribal blue liberals encourage them to think they should regain them, because everyone knows that isn't going to happen. And that's where relations with Native Americans rest, since any liberal who wants to discuss this situation in the newspaper accounts of past Thanksgivings, is just stirring up trouble and doing their using liberal virtue signaling by allying with hopeless causes, such as the idea that the US would honor treaties with Indians or make restitution for past genocidal acts. Let the dead bury their dead, amirite?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What are you trying to say exactly? The word "entire" was taken from the article he was discussing.

      Delete
    2. It seems mean-spirited to focus on that word when progress is being made by many tribes across the country.

      Delete
    3. That was his point. The fatuousness of the journalist using that word.

      Delete
    4. And my point is that they are entitled to their aspirations and it isn’t for Somerby to say the won’t ever happen, everyone knows. That’s beyond crass.

      Delete
    5. Okay. I didn't know you felt that it was possible they would regain control of their entire ancestral land.

      Delete
    6. Why shouldn’t they be allowed the dignity of working toward it? Native Americans have treaty rights. These are promises made by our govt.

      The IRA and Sinn Fein have been working toward the same goal in Ireland. Shall we joke about them and their intentions? Would Somerby say that it should all be bygones when the Irish trouble precedes the colonies in New England?

      As Somerby frequently says, anything is possible — but it isn’t for him to tell anyone else when to stop caring about their ancestral lands, or that if they can’t get them all back, they shouldn’t try to get anything owed them by treaty. Or shouldn’t mention what was taken by force and genocide.

      Delete
    7. Yes, I didn't know you felt regaining control of their entire ancestral land was a possibility. I didn't even know it was a political goal of the native Americans in question or something they even think, as you do, is possible. Is it?

      Delete
    8. That’s why articles in the newspaper are important. Why would they take lawsuits to the Supreme Court if they didn’t want their land back?

      Delete
    9. The issue is their entire land. They don't have a lawsuit with the Supreme Court that involves the return of the entirety of their land. There's no indication from anyone but the journalist that this is something they have considered or even think is possible. That's why Somerby called it out. Right?

      Delete
    10. ""We don't have any issues with people sitting down with their family and giving thanks," Kisha James—who is an enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) and is also Oglala Lakota—told BBC. "What we do object to is the Thanksgiving mythology."

      In a Thursday speech, James—whose grandfather founded the National Day of Mourning in 1970—challenged the lies of "mythmakers" and history books, instead highlighting "genocide, the theft of our lands, the destruction of our traditional ways of life, slavery, starvation, and never-ending oppression."

      "When people celebrate the myth of Thanksgiving, they are not only erasing our genocide but also celebrating it. We did not simply fade into the background as the Thanksgiving myth says. We have survived and flourished. We have persevered," she declared."

      But Somerby says Indians should just get over it. Whatta guy!

      Delete
    11. He didn't say they should just get over it. Why just make up and tell a lie?

      Delete
    12. No wonder you're so confused. You're a liar.

      Delete