Thanksgiving and the American State Church

Not the original photo (source)

I fear that, somewhere near Albany, New York, a TV station still has news footage of seven-year-old me wearing fake Native American war paint. I’d made a war bonnet from construction paper and an old terry-cloth headband, and wore it to the second grade Thanksgiving reenactment at Howe Elementary School, in Schenectady. I was the only student there representing the Native American side.

Every year, countless American grade schoolers make black conical “Puritan” hats out of construction paper and craft glue and replay the “first Thanksgiving” in mid-November. These performances are crinkum-crankum, and for good reason. The first Thanksgiving is part of American state religion, and reenacting it serves exactly the same purpose as children’s Nativity pageants on Christmas Eve: it forces us to verbally commit ourselves to the faith and morality represented.

Except, that faith isn’t equally represented. In every grade-school Thanksgiving pageant I remember, nearly everybody dressed as English Pilgrims. The uniformly somber men’s costumes, with buckles on their hats and shoes, while women bundled their hair into off-white bonnets and carried fall flowers against their pinafores. Nearly every year, the Wampanoag Indians were verbally acknowledged, but not present.

In 1982, in consultation with my parents, I decided somebody needed to represent the Indians. We didn’t really know what that meant. Thanksgiving history usually focuses on Pilgrims surviving a tumultuous winter, then learning (in passive voice) to plant maize and hunt wild turkey. In seasonal art, the Wampanoag are usually represented by one or two shirtless Brown men with feathers in their hair; the art emphasizes White people and their massive chuckwagon spread.

My parents are generally conservative, never-Trump Republicans, but they’ve always had a soft spot for Native American history. In the 1980s, though, their idea of Native Americans wasn’t differentiated by nations and regions; they believed a broad pan-American indigenous myth that mostly resembles Plains Indians. So that was our pattern, and I attended that year’s Thanksgiving pageant dressed as a White boy’s homemade idea of a Ponca warrior.

Forty years later, I struggle with this. By any reasonable standard, this was cultural appropriation: I, a White person, took it upon myself to tell the BIPOC story. But if I didn’t, who would? There was literally nobody else willing to speak that truth, that the Wampanoag existed and participated in that pageant. Without my clumsy, stereotyped mannequin, the Native American voice would’ve been completely excluded from that American myth.

A common clip art of the First Thanksgiving, with benevolent
Englishmen and highly stereotyped Native Americans

Our Thanksgiving pageant was considered newsworthy, and broadcast on regional TV, because our class partnered with the Special Education classroom down the hall. We were deemed a beacon of inclusiveness. Though both classrooms were entirely White (with an asterisk: several Jewish students), regional media wanted to praise our efforts. Camera crews, helmed by a pretty young human interest journalist, captured the whole event.

Because I was a kid, and this happened forty years ago, I don’t remember the event itself at all. My one clear memory is watching the news from Albany that evening to see our story. At one key moment, the camera zoomed in on me, the only Pretendian in the room, with my brightly colored acrylic “warpaint” and my war bonnet held together with hot glue. The journalist didn’t say anything. My presence was sufficient.

My family and I felt pretty good about that. Somebody, however feebly, stood up for the Native American presence at an important White mythological event. Forty years later, I can only remember that moment with a combination of pride and cringe. A White kid, amid forty other White kids, dressed as a Plains Indian in a Massachusetts harvest festival? The cheek of it! But… but it matters that somebody said it.

By today’s standards, that tin-earred display of cultural goulash was wildly inappropriate. But I also stood in the assembly to remind everyone, in this moment of American state church, that our mythology needed to be broader than it is. We not only preached that counter-myth to two second-grade classrooms, but with media assistance, our message carried regionally: Native Americans were there, and deserve representation.

I wouldn’t do that again, certainly. And if I had kids, I’d think long and hard before encouraging them to do likewise. But for all its ham-handed stereotyping and cultural appropriation, I also wouldn’t undo that event. Somebody needed to say it. Somebody needed to remind the American state church that its mythology has excluded too many people for too long. Maybe I was a clumsy, childlike prophet, but at least I said it.