Thanksgiving lessons include Native American views

More US schools are rethinking traditional Thanksgiving lessons that focus on the English settlers but teach little about Native Americans.

Students are now learning a more complex lesson that includes conflict, injustice and a new focus on the people who lived on the land for hundreds of years before European settlers arrived and named it New England.

The updated lessons include more about the Wampanoag people, the Native Americans who attended the 1621 feast.

Students still learn about the 1621 feast, but many are also learning that peace between the Pilgrims and Native Americans was always uneasy and later splintered into years of conflict.

On Cape Cod, language arts teacher Susannah Remillard long found that her sixth grade students had been taught far more about the Pilgrims than the Wampanoag people.

Now she's trying to balance the narrative.

She asks students to rewrite the Thanksgiving story using historical records, and then she asks them to write a poem from the perspective of a person from that time, half settlers and half Wampanoag.

In other schools, students as young as kindergarten are now being taught that harvest feasts have been part of Wampanoag life since long before 1621, and that thanksgiving is a daily part of life for many tribes.

They're also being taught that the Pilgrims and Wampanoag were not friends and were simply uneasy allies, and that it's important to "unlearn" false notions around the feast.

Advocates for native education applaud the recent wave of action, but they also warn that there's much to improve.

They say that progress has been slow and spotty, and that many schools still teach outdated and insensitive lessons.

Montana in 1999 was among the first to require schools to teach tribal histories and is now joined by Washington, Oregon and others.

Even in states where it isn't mandatory, however, classrooms are becoming more inclusive.

After national protests over killings of Black people by police, the Massachusetts town of Arlington's history department created a committee to examine race, which led to discussions about expanding and correcting teachings about African Americans, Native Americans and other groups too often left out.

In recent guidance, the nearby Brookline school district urged teachers to incorporate native perspectives even on topics not necessarily specific to Indigenous people.

It encourages lessons, for example, on the coronavirus' impact on Native Americans, and on Neilson Powless, who recently became the first Native American in the Tour de France.

Although schools say parents have mostly embraced the changes, they acknowledge it can be polarizing.

Prominent lawmakers have resisted efforts to rethink Thanksgiving, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican who last week blasted "revisionist charlatans of the radical left."

School officials say they aren't changing history, but adding parts that have been left out.

Standard social studies textbooks have included little about Native Americans, and alternatives were long elusive.

Teachers say that's changing, thanks to native scholars who have authored children's books, lesson plans and other materials.

In Massachusetts this year, every public school is getting copies of a new state history book co-written by a Wampanoag author and historian.

The book was published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival, but it notably begins thousands of years earlier, with the history of the Wampanoag people.

Many schools are also adding lessons on native cultures through the year, including around Columbus Day, which some districts now mark as Indigenous Peoples Day.

More are also looking for ways to bring Indigenous voices directly into the classroom.