By Catherine O'Neill Grace, Margaret M. Bruchac
A nonfiction book that takes the school Thanksgiving story apart and rebuilds it from the record, illustrated with photographs of a real harvest reenactment staged with Wampanoag people.
There were no black hats. No buckles, no log cabin, no long table, no pumpkin pie, and nobody there called it Thanksgiving. That's roughly where the book starts, and it spends the rest of its forty-eight pages replacing the familiar picture with what the historical record actually supports. There are five short chapters: who the Wampanoag were and are, what the English arrived into, how the diplomacy between the leader Ousamequin and the colony really worked, what happened over three days in the autumn of 1621, and — the one that does the most work — how the story taught in schools got built, much later, by people who wanted it. In October 2000, Plimoth Plantation staged an accurate reenactment of that harvest gathering with members of the Wampanoag community taking part, and the photographs here are of that day. So they aren't paintings of what someone imagined. They're photographs of Wampanoag people, in the right clothes, doing the right things, in the right place.
Most corrections to the Thanksgiving story show up as an argument, and a nine-year-old can shrug off an argument. This one shows up as evidence. The photographs are of real Wampanoag people at a real reenactment their own community helped stage, so a child holding them up against the construction-paper version in their memory may do a lot of the work without being told what to think. The last chapter is the one that can change how a child reads everything else: it shows the pageant being invented, decades after the fact, by Americans who wanted a founding story. A child who has watched one famous story get assembled in front of them may start wondering who assembled the rest.