Daniel Rubin: Giving thanks as a Native American lifestyle

Historians are not certain whether the holiday meal we eat today can be traced back to a harvest feast Pilgrims and Indians shared in 1621, let alone whether turkey was involved.

"I find it doubtful," says Drew Isenberg, a Temple historian who specializes in American Indian history. "I wouldn't be surprised if it was an imagined-memory exercise."

Is it possible that the settlers and the natives actually sat down together at Plimoth Plantation?

"Yeah," replies Susan Klepp, a professor of colonial history at Temple. "When they weren't fighting each other."

One document offers the best evidence of a first Thanksgiving. An English settler named Edward Winslow wrote to a friend in December 1621 of a three-day feast attended by 52 colonists and 90 members of the Wampanoag nation.

The letter mentions five deer and countless fowl, but no Detroit Lions, who did not become part of the tradition for 313 years.

Educators at the Massachusetts plantation say the Wampanoags were likely to give thanks every day, which leads us to the subject of this holiday column: Cherie Dancing Sun of Elizabethtown, Pa.

On Thursday, she will do what she normally does on this day of the week - drive 332 miles round-trip to minister to the American Indian population incarcerated at the state's Laurel Highlands prison.

"To me, it's not one day," she says, "as much as it's the lifestyle of giving thanks."

Thursday also is her 52d birthday. She'll spend the morning in the minimum-security prison, where she typically gathers about 35 inmates who practice the culture of their ancestors. She sets a calming mood with a purification ceremony called a smudging.

In a shell, they burn sage, cedar, or sweet grass, letting the smoke wash over their bodies. "It gets rid of any negativity or anything that is upsetting them," she says. "It just puts you in a better state of mind."

Then she asks each man to talk about something that makes him feel he has value.

I met Cherie (Cher-EE) one day last week at the Wiley Christian Retirement Community in Marlton, where she spent two hours sharing her story. She'd brought a trunk full of Navajo items: turquoise and squash-blossom necklaces, winter moccasins, a mutton-bone awl, a Western dream catcher.