Lies My Teacher Told Me (Chapter 3)

Lies My Teacher Told Me (Chapter 3)

The first two pages of this chapter already grabbed my attention; I wondered, why do most of us consider white people who came to America "settlers" and Indians "the indigenous"? Indians obviously settled too, but our stereotypical categorization makes us think and memorize this way. The word "settle" is hard to define. So this chapter is about Thanksgiving; what I think of when I hear this term is pretty much the same as everyone else, a roasted turkey with gravy sauce on top, served with mashed potato. This term always reminds me of a feast, or something joyful. Basically, I did not know much about the historical background of Thanksgiving, but at least I believed its origin was the celebration of harvest. This chapter overturned my prior impression.

I had the same reaction as the Loewen's students when I read the word "plague". It is shocking to know that the Europeans suffered the plague and brought diseases to the Americas which caused the Indians to suffer too. Since the plague was considered a punishment by God for human sins, everyone in that medieval time had presumably sickened for repetitive epidemics. If I were one of them, I would question, "what did we do to deserve THIS?" But they were helpless because their religion even provides no solution. This is a long history of epidemics in the early seventeenth century and is something textbook authors determined to include just recently. It does not make any sense.

Another interesting point the author brings up is how textbook authors do not urge students to question, think, share ideas with other individuals, and come to their own conclusions. What they do is simply presenting facts, including some "lies" according to this book, and forcibly put into students' memories. This is why, although unreasonable, they decide to conceal vices of Wilson or Columbus, and disastrous plagues or Pilgrims' hijacking hypothesis from this chapter. This method of picking one statement or reason and presenting it as a fact would deprive the ability of critical thinking from students.

It took very long to get to the explanation of the first Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims were not friendly to Native Americans at all; they were rather harmful to the indigenous. So how was this tradition even created? The wire-puller was Abraham Lincoln. He proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday in order to enhance the patriotism during the Civil War. I had never imagined that Pilgrim settlement and Civil War had a connection and that the Pilgrims had nothing to do with this tradition. We have found another embarrassing holiday that we have been celebrating for years without knowing its root, following the last chapter about Columbus.