Thanksgiving and Native cultures

Cross-posted (and edited slightly) from my class weblog http://www.comm207fall06.blogspot.com where I am commenting on newspaper stories for students in my copyediting class. These stories, both of which ran during the Thanksgiving holiday, also tell something about how Thanksgiving is approached in some Native cultures.

Here's a Thanksgiving special for you -- two Associated Press stories with a holiday theme. The first moved on the AP wire a couple of days before the holiday, and the second was in The Anchorage Daily News today.

In California, AP correspondent Ana Beatriz Cholo put a fresh lede on a fairly standard Thanksgiving story on how teachers handle the traditional story of Pilgrims and Indians joining in what sometimes we call the "first Thanksgiving" in 1621. Basically, she picks up on a teacher's imaginative way of getting it across to his third-graders, and leads with it.

Cholo's lede:

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.

He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.

Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."

By telling the story the way she does, without explaining why Morgan snatches up the kids' belongings, Cholo lets us as readers experience it the way they did.

It's pretty effective. But the history of U.S. relations with Native Americans is controversial, and Cholo balances it with a statement from another side of the issue:

Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.

"I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. "He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving."

Notice that Cholo does not comment on this statement. Instead, she allows readers to decide for themselves whether Morgan is teaching hatred. Cholo goes on to quote other people whose views mirror the often subtle complexity of the issue.

Even American Indians are divided on how to approach a holiday that some believe symbolizes the start of a hostile takeover of their lands.

Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O'odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.

"If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive," he said. "They can learn about the truths when they grow up. Caring, sharing and giving - that is what was originally intended."

Adam McMullin, a member of the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma and a spokesman for the National Congress of American Indians, said schoolchildren should get an accurate historical account.

"You can't just throw an Indian costume on a child," he said. "That stuff is not taken lightly. That's where educators need to be very careful."

And this:

Laverne Villalobos, a member of the Omaha tribe in Nebraska who now lives in the coastal town of Pacifica near San Francisco, considers Thanksgiving a day of mourning.

She went before the school board last week and asked for a ban on Thanksgiving re-enactments and students dressing up as Indians. She also complained about November's lunch menu that pictured a caricature of an Indian boy.

The mother of four said the traditional Thanksgiving celebrations in schools instill "a false sense of what really happened before and after the feast. It wasn't all warm and fuzzy."

After she complained, it was decided that pupils at her children's school will not wear Indian costumes this year.

Cholo ends her story with a quote from a historian and gets back to Morgan, the third-grade teacher in Long Beach:

James Loewen, a former history professor at the University of Vermont and author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong," said that during the first Thanksgiving, the Wampanoag Indians and the pilgrims had been living in relative peace, even though the tribe suspected the settlers of robbing Indian graves to steal food buried with the dead.

"Relations were strained, but yet the holiday worked. Folks got along. After that, bad things happened," Loewen said, referring to the bloody warfare that broke out later during the 17th century.

Morgan, a teacher for more than 35 years, said that after conducting his own research, he changed his approach to teaching about Thanksgiving. He tells teachers at his school this is a good way to nurture critical thinking, but he acknowledged not all are receptive: "It's kind of an uphill struggle."

So in the end, Cholo's story is balanced. That's important. But what sets it apart from the others is a creative lede that draws readers in and helps us feel what the kids in Morgan's class -- and some American Indians -- feel about the first Thanksgiving.

The other story is also about Indians. More accurately, it's about Alaska Natives and what some of them eat for Thanksgiving. It was in today's Anchorage Daily News, and I suspect it's just as much a holiday staple as turkey and cranberry sauce ... or "Eskimo ice cream" made of seal fat and blueberries, as the case may be. The story, by AP staff writer Rachel D'Oro, begins with a good narrative lede:

David Smith was newly arrived to the North Slope village of Nuiqsut when the former upstate New Yorker cooked up a couple of turkeys and vat of chili for the Eskimo community's annual Thanksgiving dinner.

He was completely unprepared for another dish on the menu last year: hundreds of pounds of gleaming red whale meat.

"I thought we were going to have a feast. I never assumed it would be a feast of whale meat," said Smith, 76, the village's city administrator who is originally from Fillmore, N.Y. With four bowhead whales landed this year, he can only imagine what today has in store for people gathering at the village school.

"It's going to be a huge celebration," he said.

It takes D'Oro right into her nut graf -- which, like so many, is actually a couple of grafs long:

The same could be said for other Thanksgiving festivities planned in Alaska Native villages around the state. For many the holiday is a welcome boost in the dark, frozen season, which has plunged Nuiqsut to lows of 25 degrees below zero.

Tables at public and private dinners alike will be set with store-bought turkey and all the trimmings alongside delicacies made from subsistence foods, like caribou stew, moose roast and seal oil. For dessert, there might be frybread or akutaq, whipped fat mixed with sugar and berries and sometimes greens or fish. Even in urban areas, Natives might gather in groups to observe the holiday with Western and Native fare.

The rest of the story hangs nicely off that lede. It consists of brief descriptions of what people are eating today in different American Indian and Eskimo villages across Alaska. Some tell a lot about traditional subsistence patterns and Native cultures:

In Nuiqsut each bowhead caught is divided into thirds, to be distributed at Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations, as well as a traditional blanket toss in June. Each event gives residents and visitors a chance to sample the bowhead, a species that can measure 50 feet or more and weigh up to 100 tons. Edible parts include the meat, tongue and muktuk, the blubber and skin.

Whaling crews and other residents of the Inupiat Eskimo community have spent weeks cutting up portions for the Thanksgiving feast, the first round in the whale-sharing cycle. As with the other events, it is a time to reflect on the bounty brought by the bowhead to the community of 400, said Lampe, 39, who has lived in the village most of his life.

"It's about respecting nature," he said. "It's reminding people and crews that we live in a unique land and for a creature this size to give itself to the community is a real honor."

Some effective, although admittedly unexciting, photojournalism accompanies the ADN's story. At an Alaska Native dinner in Anchorage, AP photographer Al Grillo shot pictures featuring people loading their plates with whale blubber and caribou alongside the turkey and mashed potatoes. The pictures do tell a story.