Thanksgiving Dolls

With the "Turkey Day" holiday coming up, this blog will be featuring dolls with a Thanksgiving theme. First a little history. Although it was traditional in many cultures to hold a feast of Thanksgiving after a successful harvest, the celebration that would eventually become the national holiday in the United States was held in 1621 by the Pilgrims at the Plymouth Colony. The feast was attended by both Pilgrims and Native Americans from the Wampanoag nation. Although various presidential proclamations declared a day of Thanksgiving, it was the October 3, 1863, declaration by President Abraham Lincoln that established "a day of Thanksgiving and Praise" on last Thursday of November.

The picture of friendly Indians sharing the Thanksgiving feast with the Pilgrims is a familiar image in our country, but sadly the true story is grimmer. The Pilgrims settled in lands left empty when a plague brought by European settlers wiped out the resident Patuxet Indians. Squanto, the Native American celebrated as the Pilgrim's helpmate, teaching them how to plant crops and fish, learned English after he was kidnapped and taken to Europe as a slave; upon finally winning his freedom, he returned to his homeland only to discover that his Patuxet tribe had been exterminated by disease, making him the last surviving Patuxet (Squanto himself died in 1622 from fever). Tensions between the European settlers and the indigenous people, mainly over trade and land, finally exploded in 1675 in a three-year armed conflict known as King Philip's War. The war resulted significant deaths on both sides, but the Indians suffered the greatest losses, thousands being killed, exiled, or enslaved. The Wampanoag tribe, originally the Pilgrim's ally, was nearly exterminated.

Still, the image of the Indian is as much a part of the Thanksgiving panoply as Pilgrims and turkeys. In accordance with this tradition, member Elaine Jackson shares these two handmade cloth Indian dolls.  The dolls were produced by the WPA Michigan Toy Project in 1939.   The WPA, initially the Works Progress Administration, later changed to the Work Projects Administration, was created by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of the New Deal to provide employment to artists and craftsmen during the Depression.  Under the WPA, thousands of dolls were produced to be used in schools as educational aids.  The dolls included people in ethnic and foreign costumes, as well as historical figures.  Of oil painted cloth, the dolls were made from an Edith Flack Ackley cloth doll pattern.  Ackley, a writer and doll artist, published patterns for dolls and their clothing. The dolls are 11 inches tall, not including their feather headdresses, and are unmarked.