Anonymous wrote:Any ideas for a book on the origin of Thanksgiving that doesnt contain problematic images/words/themes of the native Americans? (Or of the Pilgrims, I guess, but that seems to be less pervasive.)
Thanks!
One of the PPs here, and I'd actually sort of disagree with the bolded. There is as much fake stuff written about the Separatists/other colonists whom we now call Pilgrims as of the American Indians. We just don't consider it problematic that we misrepresent them regularly (as another PP mentioned, most of what you learned in elementary school about Thanksgiving was fake). To really get at their motives and stuff, you have to get into Puritan theology, which has been grossly misrepresented in American culture since Nathaniel the era of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I'm NOT saying it's as bad as what literature has done to the American Indians, but the everyone-in-tall-black-hats who came here for individual self-expression in religion narrative isn't doing readers any favors either, because it's just not true.