Today is Friday, but it’s also the day before Thanksgiving weekend. So, double the celebration. But do you even know why you should be celebrating? Maybe you think you know what Thanksgiving is all about, but are you sure?

A while back I read an article about one teacher’s struggles with culturally responsive teaching when teaching about Native American culture for the first time with limited knowledge. The article, written by Jioanna Carjuzaa and Holly Hunts from Montana State University-Bozeman, was featured in Collected Essays on Teaching and Learning, a peer-reviewed journal focused on the teaching and learning practice and based here at the University of Windsor. In the article, Hunts recounts how her research on Native American culture revealed that many of the assumptions she had about the history of Thanksgiving in the United States – as a holiday commemorating the time “Indians” saved a group of pilgrims on the verge of starvation – were actually false. (Read this and other CELT articles here.)

So are you sure you know the history of Thanksgiving here in Canada? If not, you may want to take a look at what the scholars at KidzWorld can tell you about the real story of Canadian Thanksgiving.