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Dan Wildcat, professor of American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, recently heard a student say:

"We don't celebrate Thanksgiving Day because that's not our holiday."

Though surprising to many who have been raised on the image of the original Thanksgiving as a harmonious feast shared by native and immigrant Americans, Wildcat understood the student's sentiment.

A Euchee member of the Muscogee Nation, Wildcat's ancestors came to Oklahoma from Georgia with the Creeks on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. Growing up in Coffeyville, then steeping himself in Western philosophy while attending college and graduate school, Wildcat has learned how to understand the interplay of indigenous and Western traditions.

His recent book, "Power & Place: Indian Education in America," co-authored with Vine Deloria Jr., addresses the philosophical similarities and divergences between Western and native world views.

"Giving thanks is the preeminent feature of American Indian traditions," Wildcat said.

But many American Indians see two problems with the Thanksgiving Day holiday: historical accuracy and an indigenous understanding of giving thanks that varies from the Western view.

"First, I think the nearly fictitious account of the first Thanksgiving between the pilgrims and the indigenous Wampanoag people in 1621 explains part of the problem," he said.

Too often, the first Thanksgiving has been "sanitized," removing the context of conflict between "colonists and indigenous people during the early New England colonial period."

	See more of Greg Hurd's interview with Dan Wildcat on River City Weekly, shown at these times on Sunflower Cable Channel 6: 7:30 p.m. today 7:30 p.m. Friday 9 a.m. Saturday 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Different world views

Wildcat also struggles with a Western view of giving thanks.

Rather than being linked to one particular day of the year, Wildcat said, "Every day is a thanksgiving day where I live. I have come to understand this through experience."

The Western view, Wildcat said, encourages rationalistic expressions of thanksgiving that rely on "abstract philosophies or theologies" while moving away from "the power of the experience itself."

An indigenous approach to thanksgiving, Wildcat said, is one of active participation through attentiveness to the world around us. What comes out of that attentiveness "absolutely includes that sense of the sacred that surrounds us."

We do not have the power to change past history, but we do have the power to acknowledge what happened between our cultures," Wildcat said. "A formal public apology from the president for the whole history of injustice and mistreatment perpetrated by the U.S. government, that apology would go a great distance in bringing peoples together."

More realistic celebration of other U.S. holidays, such as Columbus Day, could also help improve mutual understanding.