Teachers Emphasize the Indians' Side
Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.
He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.
Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But"what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."
Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme."I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization."He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving."
Even American Indians are divided on how to approach a holiday that some believe symbolizes the start of a hostile takeover of their lands.