As you may recall, Thanksgiving became the site of considerable local controversy last fall. We were caught up in the periphery because Gemstone's family was in the thick of it. This year there was little controversy -- but the bad news is that that was basically because Gemstone's family (and that of Tall Tree) pulled their kids from HTSW and sent them to Hippie School, instead. The traditional feast went on as usual, and was, depressingly enough, covered in the local paper in their usual aren't-our-schools-great tone. (Yes, the same one.)
Last year, Squiss didn't bring home much information about Thanksgiving from school. This year, a week or two before, she started drawing all sorts of pictures of happy Pilgrim and Indian pairs. That's the version she was learning about, which is unsurprising if not inspiring (to put it mildly). But it's also a way of drawing herself and one of her best friends: She's quite aware that Gemstone is of Native heritage, and she knows that she herself is European American. But nonetheless the pictures of happy Pilgrims and Indians (including one where a Native American girl greets a Pilgrim ship) is . . . complicated. And it's probably worth noting that she was initially quite shocked when I told her that Gemstone's grandmother was a Native American; she couldn't believe that she had lived all that time since the Pilgrims. (This, despite having met a schoolmate's Native grandparents -- I can't remember what tribe -- last Thanksgiving, when they came around to various classes to show the kids some instruments and other things.)
Unintentionally, I made it even more complicated the other night. We've had a number of conversations -- starting a year ago -- about how the Pilgrims were Not Nice to the Native Americans: how they took their land, and tricked them, and gave them diseases, and how lots of Native Americans died. So that's all backdrop. Last night, we started talking more about Pilgrims. I can't remember the full sequence. It started with Squiss talking about a book about a Pilgrim girl called Remember (oh, the irony!) they've been reading at school. At some point she mentioned how much Gemstone dislikes Pilgrims -- "Felicity, who's a Pilgrim, isn't even on her LIST of her favorite American Girl dolls!" -- and we talked a bit about why. Then, I told her that one of her ancestors was a Pilgrim on her maternal grandmother's side. (Family legend has it that he taught Hebrew to William Bradford.) (This came about because the story about Remember is a time-travel story, and Remember is the children's great-great-great-...grandmother.)
Suddenly, and abruptly, she put the pieces together: Her great-great-great-...grandfather was one of the Pilgrims Gemstone hates, and Gemstone's grandmother was a Native American, which means that . . . Squiss's family (and so possibly Squiss herself?) did Really Bad Things to Gemstone's family. She was in my lap, curled in a ball, in tears, before I could quite see it all coming. "Are you feeling sad?" I asked at one point. "It's . . . complicated!!" she sobbed into my chest.
Indeed.
It's hard to explain that the fact that her heritage and Gemstone's have a long history of enmity. It's even harder to explain that her ancestors sought to exterminate Native American peoples who may or may not have any direct connection to Gemstone.* But what's the most difficult to explain is that her ancestors' crimes aren't hers, personally. Should she work for a more just world? Yes. Should she, perhaps, feel guilty about having been born into a ruling class? Yes, but only so much as it fuels that work for a more just world. Am I going to tell my child that she should be feeling blood guilt? No way.
In fact, I argued to her the other night that her friendship with Gemstone is part of what makes me believe that we're moving, if very slowly, toward that more just world. (In Montessori parlance and therefore ours, it becomes " a friendship world.") "And you know how I know this?" I asked. "I know this because I'm Jewish, and you know about Hitler, but I have friends who are German, and they think that what Hitler and the Nazis did was bad." "Like Opi?" she quavered, invoking M. l'O's father. "Like Opi," I averred.
We cuddled some more, and then we stopped and moved on with the rest of the evening. (Tricksy was playing with a truck at my feet this whole time, apparently unmoved by her sister's existential crisis.) And moving on was good, because it's one thing to help your six-year-old understand that she isn't, personally, guilty for the wrongs done by her ancestors, and that her friendship with Gemstone is part of what gives me (at least) hope for the future.
It's another to try and help a six-year-old reconcile the fact that her own family's history is as complicated as this country's is as a whole. On one side, Squiss's great-great-grandparents include Russian Jews who fled the programs in the early twentieth century. On the other side, she has a great-grandfather who died while serving as a doctor in the German army during World War 2; while we don't know much about how he felt about the Nazi party -- or even if he was a member -- in one picture from around the time of his marriage, he's wearing an armband with a swastika on it.
Squiss identifies as Jewish, and she knows that Opi (that great-grandfather's son) is German and that Opi's mother and her family didn't like Hitler and what Hitler represented.** She doesn't know about her great-grandfather, and we're deliberately not telling her or Tricksy until they're older. Because that's a lot to handle. We've backed into things like the Holocaust accidentally (thanks, Sound of Music!) because, well, kids ask questions. And I'm not sure how we'll tell our family's story when we need to.
But here's one way to think about it. In southern France in 1968, when M. l'O's father and mother got married (born in 1943 and 1945, respectively), her aunts and uncles celebrated the marriage jokingly as a triumph over the history of French-German enmity. When, 32 years later, their son -- the grandson of that guy who served in Hitler's army -- married the great-granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on the coast of Connecticut, you could say that that kind of healing continued. Such personal healing is always partial, because real change has to be systemic and structural as well as individual, but it's still a good way to tell the story to a child. Just as talking about her friendship with Gemstone -- and the reasons for Gemstone's feelings about Pilgrims -- is a good way to tell the story of Thanksgiving, in all its complexity.
Because she has to know the history, but she also has to have hope.
* While we don't have any family legends about my ancestors fighting Native Americans, swindling them out of land, or trading blankets (smallpox-infested or otherwise), we were there for all of it. This particular ancestor was a relatively early settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and I have a great-great-grandmother who crossed the country to California on a wagon train in the nineteenth century. Another great-great-grandmother -- familial legend has it -- as the first white child born in a California gold-mining town. In another branch, we were fairly early settlers of the upper midwest. That can't be a terribly unusual story for a random WASP family, but it's striking nonetheless how culpable it makes us.
** That great-grandmother's story is fairly extraordinary: With her infant son, she fled west to Hamburg in front of the advancing Russian army, to the safety of her sister and her sister's husband. By the time Squiss and Tricksy's Opi was 11, she made her way to the midwestern U.S., having found a job at an art museum and ultimately working her way up to a position as curator of paintings. She remarried around 1960, to a secularized Jew of Hungarian descent. She's still alive; my daughters' only remaining living great-grandparent.
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