Column: Not all Native Americans happy about Thanksgiving

Dennis Zotigh, a cultural specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian, won’t be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday the way most of us are going to. Neither will plenty of other Native Americans.

Surprised? Then you’re way too close to the papier mache, elementary school version of the Thanksgiving feast, presented as a Disneyesque love fest between the Pilgrims and the Indians.

Lots of the country’s 5.2 million American Indians don’t see it that way at all.

“It makes me really mad — the Thanksgiving myth and what happens on Friday,” said Zotigh, who is a Kiowa, Santee Dakota and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo Indian. He thinks the holiday, filled with stereotypes about Native Americans, damages Indians and non-Indians.

“There are so many things wrong with the happy celebration that takes place in elementary schools and its association to American Indian culture; compromised integrity, stereotyping, and cultural misappropriation are three examples,” Zotigh wrote on the Smithsonian museum’s blog.

Think about it: Thanksgiving winds up being a pretty grim day in Native American history. After the Indians helped the ragged colonists survive and introduced them to their tradition of a harvest feast, what did the colonists do in response? Nearly destroyed a civilization.