Yet, because Thanksgiving has been relegated to the status of “just a child’s story,” Americans continue on with the culturally stale holiday status quo.

Part of the problem has been generations of traditional K-12 history textbooks that have white-wash everything in order to keep content “classroom safe.” This has done nothing but result in a nation full of people who think our history is irrelevant and boring.

I, too, was one of those Americans who loathed history study. (Thankfully a lucky set of circumstances caught my interest and I discovered for myself how amazing history is to learn.)

The saddest part of the Thanksgiving holiday status quo to me is our prevailing belief that Native Peoples are honored by this annual “remembrance.” Yet no grand scale social efforts have ever been made to improve relationships with our Native Peoples during this holiday.

Perhaps it is because Native Peoples are still pretty upset with us, and we don’t want to touch that.

OK. That’s understandable.

But, as in any relationship, constructive criticism is valuable, and very beneficial when received. For example, one of the most important complaints coming out of Indian country to America is that we are asleep to our history.

(Yep, guilty, as charged.)

How can Native Peoples help us understand their stance and participate in developing good relationships when we have only a superficial understanding of how they ended up as they did? How will we ever create goodwill if we aren’t willing to learn about them, and explore our controversial (and therefore interesting!) history?

I hope above all that the historical Thanksgiving holiday ideas that we are presenting, and the push for creating awareness of American Indian issues, will somehow, someway, change hearts and minds on a grand scale. It would be beyond gratifying to actually turn our “All-American” holiday into something sincerely all-American.

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Written by Carrie Franzwa, author of …Historical Thanksgiving Dinner Ideas and Our Native American Neighbors