The Irony of Thanksgiving

Lily (C)

11/7/18

Reading #5

1. Explore the irony of the discussion about Thanksgiving.

Junior is not sure why his family and the other people on the reservation still celebrate Thanksgiving. As he said “Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during that first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.”(Alexie 101) . It was a holiday that was short lived for the Native Americans and it ending in disaster. All of Juniors family seems to know this but as Juniors dad said “we should give thanks they didn't kill all of us”(Alexie 102) because it is almost outrages for them to be thankful when foreigners came and started killing them. Also the reason they are living on a reservation is because way back when, Pilgrims came and decided the land was theirs and then later putting Native Americans into small spaces of land so they could take everything else. For Junior, he is think that the Indians would have been better off without the others “discovering” America. Thanksgiving is ironic for them because what do they have to be thankful for, a feast that turned out to be the end of the lives the Native Americans had lead for hundreds of years?