We’ve all heard the story of the first Thanksgiving. The plight of pilgrims traveling from England to establish Plymouth colony in the new world. How they survived a brutal winter and then celebrated a successful harvest with Native Americans the following fall in what would become known as the first Thanksgiving. Holding this feel-good story up while failing to thoroughly teach the Native perspective only serves to overshadow the ongoing massacre of Native American people in the colonization of the Americas and establishment of this country.

No, I’m not suggesting we do away with the Thanksgiving holiday. For so many, the holiday isn’t even about honoring some colonial myth. It’s about taking note of the good in our lives and making time to gather with friends and family, giving thanks while sharing the bounty of a good meal. Gratitude is important. It’s important not only for our individual happiness but also for collective aspirations to create meaningful spaces in our community.

What I am suggesting is that we celebrate Thanksgiving with more honesty. Consider other points of view, both from our history and today. We can talk about the colonizer’s journey to the so-called “New World,” but conversations and school lesson plans should also honestly depict the people who were here when Pilgrims arrived and their challenges in the face of these European strangers.

The Smithsonian and the National Museum of the American Indian hopes to help provide educators resources to do just that. Their national education initiative launched in February 2018 aims to bolster how Native American history is taught in schools — like the fact that Indians weren’t even really invited to that first Thanksgiving feast. The Wampanoag tribe describe that famous feast as sending tribe members to keep an eye on and negotiate with the Pilgrims, not to welcome them or celebrate with them.

Many worry that teaching our history honestly somehow serves to only make white children feel badly about themselves. But honesty isn’t about prompting shame or assessing guilt, and it’s totally OK to feel bad about how Native Americans were eliminated in the process. According to Laurie Renee Santos, cognitive scientist and podcast host of “The Happiness Lab,” the science shows that being honest about our negative emotions is important for our overall happiness. That’s right: It’s actually better for our mental health if we’re honest about how the not-so-fun parts of life make us feel.

It may sound counterintuitive, but you can mourn atrocity while also feeling gratitude for the life you’ve built in its wake. It reminds me of when I was a kid and how I thought that if I loved my stepmom, and all the things she brought to my life, that somehow meant I was happy that my mother was gone. Of course that was not the case, and as an adult I know that both emotions can exist at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive. That emotional contradiction applies here as well.

The truth of America’s beginning can also hold space for conflicting emotions. We can honor Native American lives lost and take responsibility for our ancestors’ ignorance and greed while also feeling grateful to live in these United States. Our children are worthy of our honesty, and they should be trusted with every perspective that contributes to the historic narrative.

We already sufficiently teach the hope and triumph of Europeans in this new-to-them world, but we’ve negated the tragedy and loss that they inflicted. Explorers laid claim to land that already belonged to thriving Native communities. We cannot erase what any of our ancestors did, but we can acknowledge it. The narrative is much more complex than what we admit. This isn’t like some magical Santa Claus yarn we’re spinning. The story of the first Thanksgiving is rooted in history, and we have a responsibility to do it justice.

Check out Bonnie’s weekly YouTube videos at https://www.youtube.com/bonniejeanfeldkamp.