The First Thanksgiving Analysis

Thanksgiving. What comes to mind? Delicious turkey, family, and the beautiful colors of the fall. Those may be the images to some. As a little kid, I remember reading a short story of the First Thanksgiving. The pages depicted a story of pilgrims who traveled from a far away land and voyaged to America, in which they called home. They were met with a man named Squanto, a Native American man indigenous to the area, who helps them survive in their new environment by showing them how to build houses and harvest food. At the end of the book, they have a huge feast celebrating their friendship. As a Native American, I dream of the day this type of fellowship lives between these two groups of people. In a quote from author Benjamin Chavis, he says, …show more content…
The big question is why? With such a triumphant battle, why was I barely learning about this in high school? A great quote by author Lezlie McCoy sums up the answer to this equation. “ A child's perspective of Native America is often developed out of media portrayals and classroom role playing. The conception of such early exposure is both inaccurate and potentially damaging to others.” This situation only touches the surface of the many untold or most commonly unheard stories about Native American history and other oppressed races for example, African Americans. “When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure — the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate” (Alexander). This quote from an author who wrote the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” I think it means that as a society, we have created an unwritten set of statuses for each race or ethnic group, with some being toward the bottom of the pyramid and few being at the very top.
In conclusion, once we start acknowledging the past of this country, we can start rebuilding our relationships with the indigenous people who still inhabit this land with their tribes, reservations, and nations. However, our government has made an effort to recognize its mistakes. For example, by recognizing Native American tribes as sovereign nations. This process of reconstruction is still not finished and will not be until every textbook is change, every stereotype is diminished, and every grave of our ancestors is kept