Hey teacher friends, it is THANKSGIVING week. If you’re looking for a text to share with your kids about Thanksgiving, I suggest the prologue to There There by @thommyorange. I did this with my 11th graders earlier this year.

Skills you can target with this excerpt: narrative vs. counter narrative. How does Orange’s account of Thanksgiving differ from the traditional master narrative? How is this a function of whose voice is centered in the telling?

Imagery: the Indian head image pops up over and over again in this piece. You can even pair this with an article about Native appropriation. https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/public/amp/culture/2018/10/indigenous-peoples-day-cultural-appropriation. Over the summer I visited @SmithsonianNMAI and there’s an entire gallery of products with Native imagery.

You can select a few that are still used today - Land o Lakes Butter, Washington R*dskins, Cleveland Indians, Calumet Baking Powder. Show them to the kids and ask what they notice and wonder and connect it back to the article and the prologue.

You know what mine asked? “If the colonizers hated Indians so much that they wanted to kill them, why did they also admire them enough to put their images and names on everything?”

Ok that’s a question for the ages.

In addition to the article about Native appropriation, I paired this with the poetry of Joy Harjo, poet laureate of the United States. We used “Grace.” We also read a traditional text: Fox, Coyote and Whale, a more violent version of which is retold in Orange’s prologue.

From this story comes another head- a rolling head. “The rolling head became confused and drunk. It wanted more. More of anything. More of everything. And it just kept rolling.” My kids saw this as a metaphor for the colonizers.

Before you even begin this text, you COULD use @triciaebarvia’s suggestion of the line of critical consciousness. What is typically known about Natives (what’s above the line) and what isn’t as known (below the line)? Orange’s exploration of urban Indians is below the line.

Let’s say you want to focus on craft. The way Orange writes about place (Oakland) is masterful. “Some of us came to cities to escape the reservation... we stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay.”

The whole book is a masterpiece and was one of my favorite books I read this year. I have this quote printed and hung on a poster in my classroom. Really, it succinctly captures the whole concept of a master vs. counternarrative, whose voices are centered and the power that has.

If you need supplemental resources to build out any of these ideas, check out @Tolerance_org.

It occurs to me as I share this that I began my school year with this because I felt modern Native voices needed to be centered in my curriculum. I wanted those perspectives leading our year. So if you do this now PLEASE don’t just use Native voices in November. Keep going!