Search: "indian"

Now looking at collocates associated with the search term “indian”, the word “school” has the greatest frequency but a relatively low Stat value. This is understandable because Native American boarding schools were extremely common during this time period, so newspapers would likely report on Thanksgiving celebrations at these schools. Interestingly, the contexts also illustrate that these Native American boarding schools would play Thanksgiving football games. This is an interesting intersection and the idea of whether there is an increase of football related terminology as time passes will be explored in a later section.

Also interesting, pottery has the highest Stat but a low frequency. The contexts reveal that along with baskets, there were advertisements for Native American goods. It is unclear whether these were authentic and made by indigenous people. However, forgery of indigenous goods was so rampant and widespread, it led to the creation of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 that made it illegal to sell any art or craft falsely claiming it was produced by a Native American tribe. Keeping this in mind, it is possible that these are early examples of forgery and attempts to profit off of indigenous people.

Other findings:

• The word “war” is found in context with the various Native American wars that were happenings at the time.
• The word “pudding” refers to a type of pudding that was prepared for Thanksgiving meals and is in the context of recipes or whether it will be served at events.
• The word “corn” is used in the context of the “first contact” in which Native Americans taught the pilgrims how to plant corn.
• Interestingly, the word “chief” is mostly used in context with the First Thanksgiving where Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag Tribe is explicitly mentioned. 

Looking at the clusters lend interesting insight into other news at the time of publication:

• 171 instances of Indian school
• 91 instances of Indian summer
  • This is an old phrase used to describe unseasonably warm weather in the season of fall. As such, it was mentioned when it was going to be an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving.
• 36: Indian affairs
  • Used in the context of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
• 12: Indian Mutiny
• 10: Indian question

The latter cluster is referencing what the United States, and other governments, should “do” with indigenous populations. Often, these conversations focused on assimilation (often seen as how “civilize” native populations) and eradication of indigenous traditions. Even though it is only mentioned 10 times, it helps to frame how Thanksgiving was presented when other articles on the same page dealt with this topic that often promoted genocidal acts.

Additionally, the phrase “Indian mutiny” was particularly strikingly and upon examination of the contexts, there was a repetition of an extremely similar phrase in 8 different files with locations and dates ranging from:

“1859, May I—Thanksgivingl [sic]—Thanksgiving for suppression of Indian mutiny”

This is significant because in this case, thanksgiving is not referred to as the holiday, but actually the act of giving thanks. Overall, this is extremely telling about the widespread, nearly consistent sentiment toward Native Americans throughout the United States at the time.

Next Page: Text Analysis Part 3